Source: Borrowed
Hardcover, 352 pgs.
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A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum was our August book club pick at work, and even though I had to miss the meeting for another meeting, I’m so glad I read this one. Deya is a high-school student in Brooklyn, N.Y., and her traditional Arab family from Palestine has her meeting with suitors before graduation, despite her hopes for a college education. To preserve their culture in which women are the silent backbone of the family, young women are married to men in their teens to have children and raise the next generation. Like her mother, Isra, Deya is expected to marry someone she barely knows and to start a family.

“A woman is no man,” is an oft repeated refrain from Deya’s grandmother. Told in alternating chapters by Isra and Deya, the narrative is threaded with the past of the grandmother, Fareeda, who also married young but was fortunate enough to flee Palestine after being evacuated to a refugee camp. Her strength is in her faith, but she also is the backbone of her family and the driving force behind their move to America. While both Deya and Isra see the move to America as a gateway to freedom and more opportunities, Fareeda sees it as something that must be guarded against because it will destroy their Arab culture. However, it is clear that Fareeda’s and Isra’s view of their culture stems from similarly abusive relationships with their fathers, and now husbands.

“…yet something about them seemed so American. What was it? Deya thought it was they way they spoke — their voices loud, or at least louder than hers. It was the way they stood confidently on the train, not apologizing for taking up the space.” (pg. 107)

The tension in this book is broken wide open by a family secret. For her entire life, Deya has been told her parents died in a car accident, but the truth will set them free in many ways, allowing a granddaughter and grandmother to bond, a daughter to understand her deceased mother better, and a daughter to have hope that her own hard-line mother may change.

Peeling back these layers chapter by chapter will slow the pace, but Rum’s narrative is this way to demonstrate the repetitive cultural oppression these women experience every day. As a modern reader outside the Palestinian culture, it will seem repetitive and unnecessary, but I would argue it is with purpose that Rum adopts this slower progression. We need to feel that pressure, that weight of oppression and constant restriction to understand how hard it would be to break free from it even as an American immigrant.

A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum is an emotional roller coast, and it will have readers shouting at these women to take advantage of their freedom and run away. But when you leave all that you know, it leaves you bare to the harsh realities of being alone in an unfamiliar world. Which is better? Sticking with the devil you know, or striking out into the unknown? Rum has created a multi-layered story that looks at the oppressive nature of the Arab community and religious expectations and the lure of freedom with consequences.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Author:

The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has a Masters of Arts in American and British Literature as well as undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and English Composition and teaches undergraduate courses in North Carolina, where she lives with her two children. Etaf also runs the Instagram account @booksandbeans.