A Woman is No Man
Etaf Rum’s A Woman is No Man (2019) reveals the harsh realities facing Palestinian-American women. Set primarily in Brooklyn, New York from the 1990s through the late aughts, Rum’s novel emphasizes the unique challenges of individuals living between wildly different cultures. Fareeda, Isra, and Deya are three generations of women struggling to survive the limited sphere available to traditional Arab women, even ones living in Brooklyn, while navigating the identity conflicts inherent to emigrating from the old world and settling in the West. The psychological realism at the heart of Rum’s novel thrusts the reader into the inner lives of these women and makes their experiences that much more powerful.
The story opens with a first-person narrator introducing the reader to her Brooklyn neighborhood, but the narrative promptly jumps to Palestine twenty-or-so years before. There is an anonymity to this “I” who opens Rum’s novel, which implies a universality to her story, even as she tells the reader, “You’ve never heard this story before. No matter how many books you’ve read, how many tales you know, believe me: no one has ever told you a story like this one” (1). Following the brief introduction, the reader meets Isra in her native Palestine as she approaches the end of childhood and a traditional arranged marriage. Rum’s description of Palestine, and Isra’s home, is beautiful and rich; later descriptions of Palestinian refugee camps are equally severe and brutal. By the crafting her novel so, Rum solidly identifies the old country of Palestine and its stringent cultural rules as the story’s wellspring. Yet from the outset, with the “I” of the introduction, a tension exists between the confines of Palestinian womanhood and the reminder that this is a story and through it the teller gains voice and power.
A Woman is No Man hops between the experiences of three generations of women, weaving their family story over years and perspectives. Isra is the middle generation, Fareeda her mother-in-law, Deya her first-born. All three occupy a liminality as they live in Brooklyn but do not identify as American (as they remind themselves and each other throughout the story). Rum’s characters eloquently occupy that liminal space between cultures: “She was a soul torn down the middle, broken in two. Straddled and limited. Here or there, it didn’t matter. She didn’t belong” (107). In fact, it is through the tension of that blended cultural space that the storyteller seems to find her voice and share her family’s story.
So much of the novel’s conflict balances on the question of a woman’s agency in her life and that of an immigrant in a new land. The traditional Palestinian woman, as depicted in Rum’s novel, holds little power outside her household sphere; younger women have even less control as they must demure to older generation women when living in multi-generational homes. An American woman, on the other hand, has the American legal and educational systems to support her in addition to liberal cultural notions about romance, independence and self-determination. Clinging to traditional cultural norms (arranged marriage and a husband/father’s right to beat his wife, for example) Rum’s Palestinian-American community navigates the challenge of identity as the characters attempt to live amidst two starkly different cultures. Fareeda, Isra and Deya must maneuver their lives determined by traditional Arab culture—whether perpetuating it, grappling with it, or seeking to escape it—in a Brooklyn townhouse alongside one another.
Books play an important role in the lives of both Isra and her daughter Deya. A Woman is No Man highlights literacy and literature’s ability to open a world of ideas otherwise not available to readers. Books become a respite for the stiflingly limited and physically brutal life Isra finds herself living; they also act as a scapegoat for Fareeda in her strained relationship with her increasingly Americanized daughter, Sarah (Isra’s sister-in-law). The act of reading A Woman is No Man provides a similar experience for its western readers as the western classics do for Rum’s characters; the book exposes a hidden world punctuated by unfamiliar ideas that challenge the reader to rethink cultural values previously unconsidered.
I read A Woman is No Man in less than two days. Rum’s prose are fluid and her characters dynamic. The mysterious and veiled tragedy of Deya’s parents’ lives (and deaths) provides suspense enough to propel the reader through Fareeda, Isra and Deya’s perspectives. Even in its conclusion, Rum toys with the way to tell a story, and the power storytelling provides the teller. Needless to say, I highly recommend this book. It’s characters will certainly stay with me for a long time, as will their struggles and triumphs.
As Rum’s characters find, so too will Rum’s reader; stories have the power to bridge cultures. By reading diverse narratives we access experiences and perspectives wildly different from our own, but equally as human. Here lies part of fiction’s miraculous power: to transport readers across cultures and backgrounds and distill the fundamental humanity shared by us all. I believe that accepting commonality—in addition to recognizing difference—is essential as we exist in an increasingly global world comprised of blended cultures. Etaf Rum’s A Woman is No Man certainly guides its readers one step closer to that goal.
A Few Great Passages:
“[S]he imagined her life was just another story, with plot and rising tension and conflict, all building to a happy resolution, one she just couldn’t yet see. She did this often. It was more bearable to pretend her life was fiction than to accept her reality for what it was: limited. In fiction, the possibilities of her life were endless. In fiction, she was in control” (26).
“Books were her only reliable source of comfort, her only hope. They told the truth in a way the world never seemed to” (38).
“‘Books were my armor. Everything I’d ever learned growing up, all my thoughts, dreams, goals, experiences, it all came from the books I read. It was like I went around collecting knowledge, plucking it from pages and storing it up, waiting for a chance to use it’” (174).
“Something inside her shifted, as if her whole life she \had been looking in the wrong direction, not seeing the precise moment that turned everything upside down. She saw the chain of shame passed from one woman to the next so clearly now, saw her place in the cycle so vividly. She sighed. It was cruel, this life. But a woman could only do so much” (281).
Bibliography:
Rum, Etaf. A Woman is No Man. HarperCollins Books: New York, 2019.
