AWoman Is No Man By Etaf Rum – A Critical Review presents an intriguing critical review of the fictional literary novel by Etaf Rum. The novel presents the heartbreaking stories of three Palestinian women. It comes recommended.
It’s time you grew up and learned this now: A Woman Is No Man.
Book Description:
Book Title: A Woman Is No Man
Author: Etaf Rum
Published By: Harper
An imprint of Harpercollinspublishers
Year Of Publication: 2019
Genre: Fiction
⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
“I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later when I opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me.
Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly.
Where I come from, we’ve learned to conceal our condition. We’ve been taught to silence ourselves, that our silence will save us.
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.
Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of, dangerous, the ultimate shame.”
A Woman Is No Man By Etaf Rum – A Critical Review
This is a heartbreaking story of three generations of Palestinian-American women in one family, who have been oppressed by their culture – a culture that places no value whatsoever on women.
A culture that treats males as rightful beings and females as second-class citizens or necessary evils at worse, and breeding stock or domestic slaves at worst.
Primarily told in two time periods from three different perspectives, we mostly get to read Eighteen-year-old Deya’s point of view, and that of her mother, Isra.
We also occasionally get to see Fareeda’s point of view, Deya’s grandmother and Isra’s mother-in-law.
A Woman is No Man is set in two different locations. Palestine, where Isra was born and raised, and Brooklyn, where Isra moved to after her marriage to her Palestinian-American husband Adam, in the early 1990s.
At Seventeen, Isra had received so many marriage proposals, which her father had turned down, waiting for this Palestinian American family to come for her.
Isra is expected to get pregnant and produce sons immediately. After four daughters, she is regarded as a failure.
In Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Deya is starting to meet with suitors.
Though she doesn’t want to get married yet, her grandparents give her no right of choice.
Deya dreams of college and loves to read.
But Fareeda is adamant that she get married.
After all, why should she waste her time reading and learning, when their culture has already predetermined that the only cards in her future are to be a wife and a mother?
History is repeating itself: Her mother would rather have gone to school instead of marrying Adam.
And what’s more, there’s a cloud of mystery in the story. Deya and her siblings have been raised by her father’s parents since she was eight, her parents having been supposedly killed in an auto accident, an event that has always been shrouded in mystery.
A Woman Is No Man By Etaf Rum – A Critical Review
Fareeda is the typical Mother-in-law from hell. As a fourteen-year-old, she married Khaleed a stranger while living in the al-Amari refugee camp and later moved to America with her husband.
Fareeda has a sense that the injustices towards women are wrong.
However, she accepts it as the way things are, the way things have always been.
Following the dogma of traditions that have also hurt her in the past, when she was at the receiving end of it.
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Etaf Rum referred to this story as the dark side of her Arab/Muslim culture. Yet, the events in this transcend culture.
Some variations of this story have and will continue to play out in some communities. The story goes through the lives of these unique women in a way that makes it relatable, whether you are Arabic or not. I felt connected to each character in so many different ways.
For all of his Ego, and Male chauvinistic or should I say misogynistic ways, I pitied Adam. Everything was set against him right from his birth. The culture placed so much pressure on him too. At the end of the day, patriarchy won. Not Adam. Not his mother Fareeda. And not Isra.
Etaf tackles so many heavy themes in A Woman Is No Man, such as Patriarchy, toxic and repressive cultures, domestic abuse, post-partum depression.
A Woman Is No Man By Etaf Rum – A Critical Review
One notion that permeates the novel throughout is the concept of reading not only as a source of learning and entertainment but also as a source of comfort, company and hope. Isra would pass on her love of books to her daughter Deya, both of them sneaking out to read.
I finished reading A Woman is No Man, looked at my cartoons of books and realized how lucky I truly am, that no one tried to stop me from reading. I’m thankful that instead of stopping me from reading.
I had a grandmother who bought me storybooks out of the little she had, and a father who introduced me to the literary joys of the works of John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe were/are.
This was such an emotionally draining story, but I think it is a story that needed to be told. If nothing at all, this book is a necessary addition to the conversation about how women are sometimes the greatest enforcers of patriarchy.
In this story, women were not only oppressed by men alone and regarded as less worthy and valueless by men alone but by women themselves, due to the relentless indoctrination of those around them.
It was as though, the women didn’t want other women to break through the circle of abuse and oppression.
I enjoyed A Woman is No Man. Infact, I savoured it. I read it slowly and reflected throughout. The writing is precise, beautiful and engaging. Engaging.
Growing up with my maternal grandmother as a child of divorced parents, I received mixed messages about the roles of women or rather what the place of a woman in society is, but mostly, my biggest takeaways were that I was to be educated at all costs, I needed to be fierce, strong, resourceful and most importantly, independent.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what it would have been like to be taught the exact opposite of these values, to be taught that I was of no value, day in, day out, like a doctor’s prescription.
Have you read A Woman Is No Man? What did you think of it? Please share your thoughts with me.
A Woman Is No Man By Etaf Rum – A Critical Review
