KOCHI: “I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York.” This is the beginning of Etaf Rum’s much-celebrated debut novel A Woman Is No Man. Rum, a Palestinian American writer lay bare the lives of Arab women in the land of dreams, shackled to their homes, to the men. A lifetime of sufferings from two fronts — the violence and humiliation after the Israeli occupation of their home and the systematic, age-old patriarchy that devours their lives. The novel starts with Isra, a 17-year old from Birzeit in West Bank. She’s preparing for some special guests who are coming to arrange their son Adam’s marriage.
Isra dreams of a life filled with romance and laughter in the US, where Adam and his family are settled. But her mother’s warning comes early on “There is nothing out there for a woman but her bayt wa dar, her house and home. Marriage, motherhood — that is a woman’s only worth.” The story unfolds in New York, the life of three women unfolds on the pages; Fareeda, the mother-in-law, a powerful upholder of patriarchy; Isra, the mother, a silent sufferer; and Deya, the daughter, a teenager who gradually breaks free of the shackles.
Three women who are shut in their houses and the men who come and goes as they please. Rum’s Palestine is beautiful and vibrant, the following refuge camps rusty and brutal, and Brooklyn is concrete, a prison, and an opportunity. Rum, in her work, manages to find a balance while depicting the brutal lives of these Arab women. The novel never seems like fodder for blatant Islamaphobia, but it narrates the cul ture that battles against women and Islam that says “Heaven lies under the mother’s feet.” An Islamic scholar explains to Deya, “When we accept that heaven lies underneath the feet of a woman, we are more respectful of women everywhere.
That is how we are told to treat the women in Quran.” Completely in contrast to Fareeda’s principle, who advises her daughter-inlaw to hide shame, the marks that her husbands beat her, brutally, without remorse. She, the protector of her culture, reinforces this later to her granddaughter “If every woman refused to get married after a woman died at the hands of her husband, then no one would ever get married.” Her parents also grew up in refugee camps in Palestine before immigrating to the US.
The traditional family arranged her marriage when she was 19. Even as a new mother, she strived to finish her college education. The story is personal to her, some she experiences, some she has seen everywhere in the community that is trying to hold on to their culture and customs in memory of their lost country and to tide over the sense of alienation in their strange new lives.