I saw myself anew as the daughter of immigrants.Įssentially, A Woman Is No Man ponders a woman’s worth. I saw my dad as a refugee and immigrant in this telling of other refugees and immigrants. Through my reading, Isra, Deya, and the rest became not just “other” and “them,” but image bearers of their creator. As a Christian, I found it valuable to learn about conservative Muslims.
This book increased my empathy for those affected by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories-their humiliation and misery was made real to me. In my own reading, I aim for at least one book that reflects diversity per month, as I find this way of consuming words and story opens my eyes and hearts to other worlds, cultures, and perspectives. That books and reading would be a portal to possibility is no surprise Rum’s Instagram account, is a favorite of thousands of book lovers. Deya also finds courage and freedom in the pages of books, most of them smuggled into her grandparents’ strict home. Though Isra dies when Deya is a little girl, she remembers her mother reading to her. Yet there is also a strand of hope woven throughout. Domestic violence is a dark thread stitched into this novel, and I cringed at some of the brutal scenes. The men in the novel, chiefly Adam, are portrayed as products of their patriarchal upbringing, yet each makes terrible choices all his own. Isra grows more despondent with the birth of each of her four daughters, unable to snap the “chains of shame” that shackle women in her culture. Rum, the daughter of immigrants and herself once given in such a marriage, artfully braids the stories of three women: the vulnerable Isra her domineering mother-in-law, Fareeda and Deya, Isra’s daughter who, in 2008, chafes at the constraints of her harsh cultural confines.Īll three women are told that marriage and motherhood are a “woman’s only worth.” The birth of a daughter is cause for acute disappointment and even anger, not celebration. In 1990, Isra, a teenage Palestinian girl living in the West Bank, is given to Adam, an immigrant to Brooklyn, New York, in an arranged marriage. In Palestinian American Etaf Rum’s debut novel, a third layer is added: How men broken by war sometimes take out their troubles on the women in their lives.
I knew this all my life, growing up with a dad who had immigrated to Canada from wartime Germany (and before that, Stalin’s Ukraine).
Add to this the trauma of displacement and war, and the immigrant’s life becomes more harrowing. To be a newcomer in a strange land is hard, complicated, and confusing.
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