A woman is no man A novel

Etaf Rum

eAudio - 2019

Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of Arab culture in this powerful debut-a heart-wrenching story of love, intrigue, courage, and betrayal that will resonate with women from all backgrounds, giving voice to the silenced and agency to the oppressed. "Where I come from, we've learned to silence ourselves. We've been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of-dangerous, the ultimate shame." Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naï...ve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children-four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra's oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda's insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can't help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family-knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. It is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.

Saved in:
Subjects
Published
[United States] : HarperAudio 2019.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Etaf Rum (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Other Authors
Ariana Delawari, 1980- (narrator), Dahlia Salem, Susan Nezami
Edition
Unabridged
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 audio file (10hr., 14 min.)) : digital
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780062897510
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

In A hushed bedroom, a woman smears foundation over the bruises on her daughter-in-law's face, layer after silencing layer. "There are things in this life no one should see," she tells the young woman her son has beaten. "When I was your age, I never let anyone see my shame." Etaf Rum's debut novel is a dauntless exploration of the pathology of silence, an attempt to unsnarl the dark knot of history, culture, fear and trauma that can render conservative Arab-American women so visibly invisible. "Where I come from," her narrator begins, "we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard-of, dangerous, the ultimate shame. But you have seen us." From a refugee camp near Ramallah to a Brooklyn rowhouse, "A Woman Is No Man" follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the claustrophobic expectations that continue to shape their lives. In the spring of 1990, Isra Hadid accepts a marriage proposal that will take her to America, her heart full of fairy-tale hopes. Eighteen years later, her eldest daughter, Deya Ra'ad, longs for college but reluctantly considers potential husbands at the urging of her grandmother Fareeda. When an anonymous note lures Deya to a Manhattan bookshop, the story she knows about her family is violently rewritten. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, born and raised in Brooklyn, Rum is keenly aware of the risks of exposing her community to the scrutiny of narrative. It's a devil's bargain: Speak and add inadvertent fuel to the ever-smoldering fire of antiArabism - or don't speak and add another layer of silence. "I knew that as long as I stayed away from controversial topics like arranged marriages and domestic abuse, no one would criticize me or call me a traitor. No one would shun me. No one would try to hurt me," Rum has explained. "Perhaps these fears are why there aren't many Arab-American women on bookshelves; why, whenever I search for our stories in bookstores and libraries, I cannot find them." There's a burden that comes with being among the first of your kind; the potential for misinterpretation is too great to leave much to chance. What emerges is a story as didactic as it is brave. "A Woman Is No Man" is both a love letter to storytelling and a careful object lesson in its power. Timorous Isra's heroine is Scheherazade, the bewitching taleteller of "The Thousand and One Nights." "No one asks Scheherazade to marry the king," she marvels. "She volunteers on behalf of all women to save the daughters of Muslims everywhere. For 1,001 nights, Scheherazade's stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon." Of Rum's three women, it is implacable Fareeda - enforcer of norms, keeper of secrets - whose voice proves the most revelatory. Her marriage at 14 to a stranger in the dust of the al-Am'ari refugee camp has "made a warrior out of her," yet she fights to uphold a system where "the shame of her gender was engraved on her bones." It's a startling portrait of the mechanics of complicity, of the intergenerational pathology of silence. "It took more than one woman to do things differently," Fareeda reflects, wearily. "It took a world of them." Across the globe, a bold new generation of Arab women are putting that defeatism to the test by sharing their stories. The triumph of Rum's novel is that she refuses to measure her women against anything but their own hearts and histories. "It's hard to belong anywhere, truly belong, if we don't belong to ourselves first," Deya is told. Distinctly, defiantly and earnestly, "A Woman Is No Man" belongs to itself. BEEJAY silcox is an Australian writer and critic based in Cairo.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]