A Woman Is No Man

“Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life.” 

Isra dares to hope for love in her marriage, a hope her mother quashes immediately. Any false notions of love will only lead to disappointment, and Isra’s mother sees her role as preparing her daughter for the unpleasant reality of marriage, a reality in which the most important thing is sabr (patience).

“It doesn’t matter where you live as long as your home is yours. Free of occupation and blood.” 

As Isra ponders her new life as a wife, about to move to America, she tries to comfort herself with her father’s advice. Adam and his family have a home, work, and stability. Perhaps, she thinks, America will be better than the forced poverty she and her family endure in Palestine. She discovers that, for women in her culture at least, America is no different than her place of birth.

“She would be in America, the land of the free, where perhaps she could have the love she had always dreamed of, could lead a better life than her mother’s.” 

The great promise of America—a better life—has long lured immigrants. For some, that promise bears fruit; for others, the promise is an empty one. Isra hopes for freedom, respect, and, above all, love, and she prays that America will provide those, not only for her, but for her children. In some respects, Isra’s life is better there. She has a roof over her head, and she never wants for food, but the important thing—love—eludes her. She soon realizes that some aspects of a woman’s life never change no matter how many miles she travels.

“It was much 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.” 

Rum encapsulates the allure of literature, especially to those who live unhappy lives. When Deya suggests to Fareeda that she wants to attend college before marriage, Fareeda tells her “no one wants to marry a college girl” (26). Deya, an avid reader, envisions her life as a novel in which she plots all the outcomes, including the happy ending.

“She was neither Arab nor American. She belonged nowhere. She didn’t know who she was.” 

Deya struggles with an identity crisis. She straddles two cultures but is expected to favor one over the other. She finds this expectation unfair and unrealistic. How, she wonders, can she be raised in America and yet be expected to be fully Arab, versed in all the cultural rituals? The question of cultural allegiance is one so many second-generation Americans struggle with as they adapt to the new and preserve the old at the same time.

“I don’t believe in happiness.” 

As Deya sits with Nasser for the first time, he asks her what would make her happy. Her nihilistic response suggests to him a guarded façade, a self-defense mechanism to protect herself from emotional damage. Deya’s answer may be overly flip, but the death of her parents and knowledge of their unhappy marriage give her feelings a certain justification.

“But we could live here for the rest of our lives and never be Americans. […] All they’ll see is an outcast, someone who doesn’t belong.”

Echoing the sentiment of many displaced immigrants, Adam tells Isra not to wear the hijab. To her, it represents devotion, goodness, and modesty, but to the outside world, the non-Muslim world, it will only mark her as an outsider. The paradox of America is that it purports to welcome all people, but immigrants have often not been welcomed. In a desperate bid to fit in, Adam is willing to abandon aspects of his culture that he deems too foreign for mainstream America.

“But she had learned about love through books, knew enough of it to recognize its absence in her life.” 

Like her mother, Deya learns about the outside world through books, but her notion of love conflicts with her reality. In that sense, books are dangerous. They give her a glimpse into a world where daughters are valued as much as sons, where marriage is a mutual arrangement, and where parents treat each other with respect. Deya understands that this world she reads about does in fact exist, and she wonders why she can’t have it.

“She would give him herself if it meant he’d give her his love.”

Desperate to please her new husband, Isra makes a deal with herself. She will willingly submit to his sexual demands if he repays her with his love. The mentality of submission makes this fallacious argument all the time: Submit and placate, and happiness will be the reward. In fact, however, the opposite is often true. Submission only invites further abuse.

“‘Learn this now, dear. If you live your life waiting for a man’s love, you’ll be disappointed.”

In one of her endless lectures to Isra, Fareeda counsels her daughter-in-law to forget about love. Women, she argues, are not entitled to it and shouldn’t expect it. Victims of cultural subjugation often see no choice but to endure, and that is how the system perpetuates itself. Fareeda considers her advice tough love. Better for Isra to accept her fate than to suffer needlessly waiting for something that will never come. 

“But after thinking about it more, she had realized that most of the rules Fareeda held highest weren’t based on religion at all, only Arab propriety.” 

Deya’s Islamic studies teacher talks about the true meaning of Islam—“submission to God” (83)—but she realizes that Fareeda’s household is Islamic in name only. Like so many people who profess to be religious but ignore their religion’s basic tenets, Fareeda doesn’t practice “peace, purity, and kindness” (83). Seeing her grandmother’s religious hypocrisy pushes Deya further away from the traditions Fareeda values.

“Was this happiness she felt? She thought it must be.” 

When Isra announces she is pregnant for the first time, Fareeda is overjoyed. She has waited for this moment, for Isra to deliver (potentially) a grandson. Isra cannot share her joy, however. She must be content to see it in someone else. Isra is so bereft of happiness, she must observe the physical clues in Fareeda’s face to try to understand what happiness is. 

“Don’t worry about that. With food stamps and Medicaid, you can have as many children as you want.” 

When Isra questions whether she and Adam will have the financial resources to raise a child, Fareeda gives voice to one of the most persistent anti-immigrant arguments out there: Immigrants come to America not to work but to leach off the system. It is largely a bogus argument, and for Fareeda to make this suggestion comes as a surprise. In many ways, Fareeda is a contradiction. She upholds the strict social values of Arab culture, but she loves material wealth. Khaled and Adam work like dogs, but Fareeda suggests taking advantage of the social safety net. Perhaps Rum is suggesting that gaming the system is a particularly American vice.

“Listening to Sarah, Isra wondered if this was what it meant to be an American: having a voice.” 

Echoing the novel’s opening sentence, Isra observes Sarah speaking her mind and wishes she had the same courage. Scenes like this give Isra some small measure of hope that her original hopes about America might be more than a pipe dream. While Isra eventually finds her voice, it comes too late and at too great a price.

“Surely she was the victim of an oppressive culture, or the enforcer of a barbaric tradition.” 

As Deya rides the subway into Manhattan, she endures the hostile stares of the other passengers. She imagines what they must be thinking and what assumptions they must be making about her and her culture based solely on a single article of clothing. In the aftermath of 9/11, particularly in New York, a simple head scarf takes on a greater metaphorical significance. Fair or not, it evokes images of burning towers and people scattering in fear, as well as the sudden realization that America, for some, is not the shining beacon of freedom we’ve always been told. Eighteen-year-old Deya feels the weight of all of this in the stares of strangers.

“She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other.” 

In a rare moment of insight, Fareeda sees Khaled’s abusive behavior as an outgrowth of his own abuse; indeed, this perspective applies to all the men in her culture in similar circumstances. Seeing him this way allows her to, if not forgive, at least understand her husband. Acknowledging the generational nature of abusive behavior helps Fareeda to maintain her sanity in an otherwise unbearable situation.

“Fareeda had wanted a daughter-in-law she could show off to her friends, like a twenty-four-karat gold bangle.” 

Fareeda values social etiquette—the ability to entertain with style and grace. She laments the fact that Isra has none of these traits, that she is “dull as dishwater” (120). Fareeda has a materialistic side: She keeps gold trinkets under her mattress, she teems with joy when Adam gives her extra cash from the family deli, and she equates a suitable daughter-in-law with a gold bauble. While traditionalism and capitalism may not be mutually exclusive, Fareeda’s enthusiastic embrace of both is an interesting paradox.

“Even the Qu’ran said that girls were a blessing, a gift.” 

In a sign of Fareeda’s hypocrisy, she jokes about finding Adam a new wife if Isra cannot bear him a son. Despite what the Qu’ran says about girls, Fareeda refuses to see the value of a girl. This hypocrisy is confounding to Isra, who assumes the blame for bearing four daughters, and the pressure Fareeda (and the entire culture) puts on Isra affects how Isra treats her own daughters. She wants to love them but can’t help but see them as a disappointment.

“If she didn’t preserve their culture, their identity, then she would lose them. She knew this in her core.” 

When Fareeda and Khaled first come to America, their stay is supposed to be temporary, conditioned upon making enough money to return, but 15 years later, Fareeda fears that day will never come. She inoculates herself against this reality by upholding cultural traditions harshly and inflexibly. It’s the only way she knows how to prevent the loss of the most important part of her.

“Some days I envy you for leaving your family behind. At least you had the chance to start a new life. Do you know what I would’ve done for an opportunity like that?” 

Despite Adam’s abusive behavior and his absenteeism as a father, Isra cajoles a moment of honesty from him. Like Fareeda recognizing the pain in her own husband, Isra sees how, in some ways, Adam is no freer than she is. He is trapped between his duty as the firstborn son and his desire to be his own man and live his own dreams. That inner conflict is behind his anger, his alcoholism, and his physical violence.

“No one really knows anyone, daughter. Even after a lifetime.” 

One of Deya’s arguments against arranged marriage is the fear that she will be forced to marry someone she doesn’t know well enough. Fareeda’s answer is a powerful one, based on age and experience. She implies that not even years with another person are enough to truly “know” them. Perhaps an integral part of marriage is the very process of partners learning about each other. People change, and to assume that the person who says “I do” will be the same 20 years later is naïve.

“What terrified Isra most was not the force of his palm against her face. It was the voice inside her head telling her to be still—not the stillness itself, but the ease of it, how naturally it came to her.” 

The first time Adam slaps Isra, she is shocked, but less by the blow than by how she has come to expect it. She tries to please him every way she knows how and to meet his every expectation, but nothing seems enough. The assumption that he will eventually hit her has lain dormant in her subconscious since she married him. The seeds of that assumption are planted over the course of decades and generations, both in stories and in witnessed reality.

“There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary.” 

The theme of happiness runs through the narrative. Every character ponders it and questions what it means, and some ultimately disregard its importance. It is often the benchmark of a quality life, but Sarah challenges that notion. For her, happiness implies passivity and safety (something many people strive for), but a creative life, one worth living, requires risk and some degree of unhappiness. The idea of the tortured artist is a familiar one, but for Sarah, discontent is “at the root of everything beautiful” (176).