Book Review 2: A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum

Etaf Rum: A Woman is No Man

Genres: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Domestic Fiction, Feminist Literature, Palestinian Literature 

Reading Level: Adult 

Setting: 1990 Birzeit, Palestine (West Bank); 1990s-2009 Brooklyn, New York (USA) 

Published: 2019

Page Count: 337 (Paperback)

Content Warnings: Domestic Abuse, Murder, Suicide, Abortion 

Rating: ★★★★⋆ (4.5 out of 5)

What an absolutely, unashamedly brave novel. 

Etaf Rum’s A Woman is No Man is a multigenerational story of young Palestinian women navigating their culture and its expectations of them as well as their identities after relocating from their home country to Brooklyn, New York. We meet Fareeda, whose family leaves Palestine to get out of a refugee camp; Isra, who was born in Palestine but later moves to New York after marrying Fareeda’s son Adam; and finally Deya, who is Isra and Adam’s firstborn daughter, the first of the three women to be born in America. The novel touches on so many issues that are relevant both to Palestinian and Arab women specifically–such as the expectations to marry young, to bear sons, and to be submissive to their husbands–as well as those that can apply to all women regardless of what culture you were raised in–such as mental health, especially postpartum depression, domestic abuse, and maintaining one’s individual happiness and independence in relation to also being a wife and/or mother. 

This novel emotionally, with a raw sort of beauty, captures the complexities of a Palestinian woman’s identity, the way it blends with the need to keep their heritage and culture alive, to not sacrifice it in the name of assimilating into American culture and leaving Palestine behind entirely, but at the same time, the need to advocate for their own needs and desires and futures, and the internal struggle that can create. We see it first in Fareeda, who spent a large portion of her life in the West Bank of Palestine, where she suffered many hardships, including being married to an adult man as a teenager, being abused by him, the deaths of her firstborn twin daughters, as well as the violence of forcible occupation and relocation from her home village to a refugee camp. At first, from the perspectives of Isra and Deya, Fareeda may seem cruel and sometimes narrow-minded in her expectations of the women in her family. She demands they get married, produce sons not daughters, to tolerate it when Adam beats Isra. She reviles the thinking of her granddaughter Deya (as well as her own daughter Sarah,) when they express the desire to go to college instead of getting married. It is only after we see portions of the story told from Fareeda’s point of view do we start to understand her traditional mindset. She is a woman who was forced to flee her homeland to escape political violence and persecution; she did not come to America because she desired to live in the Western world. To Fareeda, the more she sees her own daughters and granddaughters embracing what she considers American ideals–from how they dress, to how they act, to their visions for their futures–the more she pushes back against it. It is because she is trying to keep their Palestinian heritage alive, as she never wanted to abandon it in the first place, but also because after seeing struggles so deeply traumatizing in Palestine, Fareeda cannot comprehend the weight of what Isra, Sarah, or Deya are experiencing living in America with the same gravity. Nothing compares to the hardship and brutality of occupation and living in refuge; she legitimately sees their life in America as an improvement that she provided to them by leaving Palestine. Perhaps, too, it is because she does not know any different. 

Rum perfectly captures the cyclical nature of domestic abuse in any household or society. Adam beats Isra because his father, Khaled, beat his mother Fareeda. Isra tolerates being abused because her father back home beat her as a child as well as her mother. The idea that a husband is allowed to use violence against his wife is so normalized, that we see how the members of this family accept the reality as just being part of their lives. Some readers may criticize Rum’s decision to center a story about Palestinians around abuse, to so honestly showcase the double standards that exist in Arab households when it comes to the treatment of women and girls to the treatment of its men and boys. Some may feel that this depiction stereotypes Arab families or demonizes them. However, I want to point out, that domestic abuse and misogynistic double standards are absolutely not unique just to Arab culture. Do white women not write novels about their experiences with being physically and/or sexually abused here in America? Was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us–a novel about a (white, American) woman who grew up in an abusive household ending up in an abusive marriage and deciding to break the abuse cycle–not a massive commercial success? Feminism is a topic that is relevant to the experiences of women and girls in all cultures and corners of the world. There is absolutely no reason to consider it brave when a white woman speaks up about it and then criticize it when a woman of color does the same. If we don’t consider a white woman’s story about abuse and survival to be a demonization of her culture, or as an excuse to vilify all American men, then there is no reason to act that way about a Palestinian woman discussing the same issues. Rum is brave enough to write a novel that challenges patriarchy in her own culture, and it is every bit as important as classic books like The Handmaid’s Tale (which is referenced in this novel), that challenge patriarchy in Western culture. 

Rum also side-steps pushing the idea that all Arab men are abusive, or that the ones in her story become abusive simply because they are Arab. Isra puts it best to Sarah in the novel when she tells her that there are no police in Palestine for women to call if they are being abused because Palestine is occupied by Israel, so they have no government, and no legal protections for their people under the law. Here, Rum is highlighting the way that occupation itself inherently enables internal oppression against women. If Israeli forces violently target all Palestinian–men, women, and children alike how can battered women ever possibly be expected to speak out for justice for themselves? How could there ever be fair trials and fair justice in cases of domestic violence when the only existing system of law-and-order perpetuates violence against their entire population. It opens the reader’s eyes just a bit to why Palestinian women, like Fareeda, may rather seek to protect their male abusers rather than come forward with allegations–because she grew up under the occupation, and if the women of Palestine started bringing forward allegations of violence against their own men, would their be fair justice, or just give the Israeli occupier an excuse and rallying cry to keep targeting and murdering Palestinian men. She also explores the concept that perhaps the reason some men in their culture become violent is because they themselves were violently traumatized by the treatment they faced at the hands of Israel. Rum also acknowledges that not all Palestinian men are abusive as well, with Nasser telling Deya during their meetings that not all men beat their wives just because that was how it was with her parents, and we have no reason to disbelieve this statement by Nasser. Characters like Isra and Fareeda’s repetitive statements that abuse is the reality of marriage aren't Rum’s insinuation that this is true. It is their way of accepting the reality of their specific situations by normalizing it. It is all very complex, and very well-demonstrated, issue that Rum is getting to the heart of in A Woman is No Man. 

The novel has also several forward-thinking female characters, such as Deya, Sarah, and even Isra was very progressive in her early mentality, before her abusive marriage wore down her spirit over time. Sarah’s character is one of the more complex in the book, the one whom some readers may have a more difficult time understanding the shift in her stance from the 90s chapters to the 2000s chapters. In the flashback chapters, Sarah is discouraged by her family and the rigid expectations that her mother Fareeda places on her. Ultimately, she runs away from home and turns her back on her family entirely after she loses her virginity to a high school boyfriend, and she is afraid of what might happen to her if her parents find out. However, in the chapters set during the present timeline, Sarah encourages Deya not to do what she did and run away. She encourages Deya to continue advocating for herself and what she believes in–he desires to go to college after high school instead of having Fareeda arrange a marriage for her–but at the same time, she encourages her to also do so whilst still being a member of their family and their community. Some readers may feel that this change in Sarah’s point of view doesn’t make sense given the context of her backstory, and by Sarah’s own admission that she benefited personally from the choice she made. I do agree that Rum could have utilized the chapters between Sarah and Deya to better explore Sarah’s change of heart and develop her stance more. The chapters as they are currently written between Sarah and Deya (towards the middle-end of the book) are very repetitive–a lot of Sarah telling Deya the same thing about not running away, Deya not agreeing and leaving when Sarah won’t tell her the truth about her parents’ deaths. I understand that Rum had to stall the big reveal of Adam’s murder of Isra and subsequent suicide until the end, these chapters leading up to it could have offered deeper characterization of Sarah instead of repeating the same sequences of dialogue. Even better, some could have been used to showcase Deya’s relationship with her sisters and characterize them a bit more too. We barely get any development of Nora in the novel, and Layla and Amal are only ever in the background. 

That all being said, even if I agree that Sarah’s development could have been done better, I do think the change in her perspective is highly important to the thematic value of the story. Rum is constantly walking the line here with what expectations are a preservation of one’s culture, and which are a form of oppression of a culture’s women and girls. She is trying to put forth an idea regarding how culture can progress but not lose itself along the way. When Sarah runs away from home, it is implied she also loses her connections not just to her family, but her entire community of Palestinian immigrants and Palestinian-Americans. She loses her connection to her ancestral culture somewhere along the way. Her encouragement to Deya not to leave her family entirely, but instead to fight for her own identity within their family (and culture by extension), is a way of showcasing that Palestinian and Arab culture can survive and even thrive whilst still advancing the rights and lives of its women and girls. It is a form of the natural progression of a people’s culture, rather than a shedding of one’s entire cultural identity in favor of another. It is walking the line of Fareeda’s fears that her family will become so American that they lose touch with being Palestinian and Deya’s fears that her life will never improve and she will end up exactly where her mother and grandmother before her were. By the end of the novel, we see Deya walking the line. She will not abandon her family and community and shed her skin, so to speak, like Sarah did, but she will also not conform to the constraining expectations Fareeda has put on her and end up in a marriage and a life she doesn’t want like Isra did.

I also particularly like the closing chapter of the novel and thought it was brilliant of Rum to end the book where she did. Most readers were probably expecting the novel to conclude with the chapter where Adam kills Isra. However, Rum subverts those expectations instead by having the book conclude exactly before this event takes place instead. We know that this final flashback chapter is the ultimate chapter of Isra’s life because it sees Isra trying to escape her home with her four daughters and flee on a train into New York, with the last image being the train door opening. We know from the chapters in the present timeline, where Deya explained as such to Sarah, that her last memory of her parents was boarding a train with her mother, and they found that their father was already on board waiting for them. After that was the night that Adam beat Isra to death, and Fareeda lied about them being killed in a car accident. It is not hard to connect the dots and realize this is the exact same train ride (it had to be, as Isra was discouraged from going out into the city by herself), and the reason that Rum doesn’t tell us what happens after the train doors open is because we already know. She has already told us Adam was there. We already know what happens next, so she doesn’t need to show us. For good measure, in case some readers are struggling to put it together, she also adds Isra’s own internal narration that Adam would kill her if he found out she was trying to leave. That line isn’t a throwaway; Rum is telling us when this chapter takes place. Her staging of the timeline isn’t what makes this final chapter so brilliant though. It is the deliberate choice to end the book with a message of hope. She easily could have ended it with Isra’s death, but there really is no reason to show it in detail. We have already seen the harshness and brutality of Isra’s life. This book is about hope, and she wanted to end the novel with Isra’s last moment of hope. She still manages to capture the symbolism of the book ending with Isra’s life, but at the same time, end it with a feeling of hope. 

Book review 2 of 5,000 lifetime goal.