In no man’s land
“Iwas 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’d opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realised no one could hear me.”
So begins Etaf Rum’s new novel, A Woman Is No Man. With this “Call me Ishmael” moment, it seems we’re entering a close first-person narrative. But just as Melville famously bobs and weaves in and around first-and third-person narration, so Rum begins with a confessional, intimate first-person tale only to shift gears and gain some distance with an omniscient thirdperson voice. This omniscient third-person narrator is one who has access to three generations of women’s lives across two continents and through various cultural assumptions and more´ s.
This novel is a braided account of three women’s stories. We come to know a grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter — Fareeda, Isra, and Deya — as the narrative crisscrosses from 1990 to 2009 in Palestine and Brooklyn, NY. But whatever the year and whatever the setting, these women’s lives stay oppressively the same.
Much of the novel feels relentlessly claustrophobic and bleak, as these characters’ lives do. Rum shows readers the struggle and heartbreak of traditional Arab women’s lives. Mothers and daughters in this world have no standing and the ties that might bind them together are denied at every turn. As we learn again and again, “A daughter was only a temporary guest, quietly awaiting another man to scoop her away, along with all her financial burden”. The girls in the households of this novel have little reason to hope for anything more: “If her own family was willing to throw her away to the first man who asked, then why should she expect more from anyone else? She shouldn’t.”
Deya, as part of a new generation in Brooklyn, is briefly shown another way and, in the second half of the novel, we watch and wait to see whether she will gain the courage to step out of the life she seems fated to lead. As her aunt tells Deya, “You have the power to make your life whatever you want it to be, and in order to do that, you have to find the courage to stand up for yourself, even if you’re standing alone.”
This is a novel about a cultural perspective in which women have no voice and no way to tell their harrowing stories. The book’s opening first-person declamation leads us to believe we’re hearing the writer’s own voice, Deya’s voice, or some amalgamation of these two.
Rum’s narrative choices reflect her investment in the story she has fictionalised. In an opening note she reveals that the story is her own personal narrative. It is about women finding their voices and in it Rum has found a way to give shape and meaning to her own urgent story.