A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

  There was a loud rumble in the distance. Startled, she grabbed the mustard-yellow subway card and hurried toward the metal poles. Another rumble, more aggressive this time. From the sudden movement around her, Deya realized the sounds were coming from the trains, and that people were rushing to catch them. She hurried along with them, mimicking their ease, swiping her card through the metal groove in one smooth motion. When the card didn’t register, she swiped it again, more carefully this time. Beep. It worked! She pushed through the turnstile.

  In the darkness of the platform, Deya bit her fingertips and stared anxiously around her, the racket of passing trains making her jump. A man caught her attention as he walked to the end of the platform. He unzipped his pants and a stream of water began to pour onto the tracks in front of him. It took her a few moments to realize he was urinating. Her breath came in short bursts and she turned away, focusing her attention on a rat scurrying across the tracks. Soon she heard another rattle, then a faint whistling sound. Looking up, she could see a light shining from a tunnel beyond the end of the platform. It was the R train. She took a deep breath as it zoomed past her and shuddered to a halt.

  Inside the train was loud, crammed with the onslaught of daily life. Around her people stared absently ahead or into their phones, transfixed. They were Italian, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, Jamaican—every ethnicity Deya could possibly imagine—yet something about them seemed so American. What was it? Deya thought it was the 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.

  Watching them, she understood yet again what it meant to be an outsider. She kept picturing them looking down at her like a panel of judges. What are you? she imagined them thinking. Why are you dressed this way? She could see the judgment brewing in their eyes. She could feel them observing how scared she was standing there, how unassuredly she moved, the garb she wore, and deciding instantly that they knew everything about her. Surely she was the victim of an oppressive culture, or the enforcer of a barbaric tradition. She was likely uneducated, uncivilized, a nobody. Perhaps she was even an extremist, a terrorist. An entire race of culture and experiences diluted into a single story.

  The trouble was, regardless of what they saw, or how little they thought of her, in her own eyes Deya didn’t see herself much better. She was a soul torn down the middle, broken in two. Straddled and limited. Here or there, it didn’t matter. She didn’t belong.

  It took her nearly five minutes of squeezing through the train to find an empty seat. A woman had moved her leather suitcase so she could sit. Deya studied her. Bright skin. Honey-colored hair. Perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses. She looked so confident, sitting there in a tiny black dress. Her legs were long and lean, and Deya caught a whiff of her perfume. Flowers. Deya thought she must be someone important. If only she, Deya, could be someone important. There was so much she wanted to do, so many places she wanted to see, yet here she was, a nobody, struggling even to ride the train so many people used every day without a second thought.

  The woman was staring back at her now. Deya did her best to smile. These days it was hard enough for people like her to walk around in jeans and a T-shirt, let alone a hijab and jilbab. It wasn’t fair she had to live this way, always afraid of what people saw when they looked at her. She finally understood why Fareeda had banned them from wearing the hijab outside of school, finally saw how fear could force you to change who you were.

  After a few deep breaths, Deya took a furtive look around the train car. Everywhere she turned, people were staring. There was that feeling again inching up her chest. She swallowed, tried to push it down, but it clung in her throat. She turned to face the darkened window. Why did she have to be so afraid, so sensitive, so affected by the world? She wished she could be stronger, wished she could be one of those people who could listen to a sad song without bursting into tears, who could read something horrible in the news without feeling sick, who didn’t feel so deeply. But that wasn’t her.

  The R train seemed to go on forever, stopping at countless stations. Deya stared out the window, reading the signs three times at each station to make sure she didn’t miss her stop. Fourteenth Street–Union Square Station. At Court Street, the conductor announced it was the last stop in Brooklyn, and Deya realized the train was about to pass through a tunnel that ran under the Hudson River. The thought of being underwater both frightened and fascinated her. She wondered how it was possible to build a tunnel underwater, how extraordinary its designer must have been. She tried to picture herself creating something beautiful, changing the world somehow, but couldn’t. Soon she would get married, and then what? What kind of life would she lead? A predictable life of duty. She squeezed the card tight. But maybe Fareeda was right. Maybe her life would turn out differently than Isra’s. Maybe Nasser would let her be who she wanted to be. Maybe once she was married, she could finally be free.

  Isra

  Fall 1990

  One overcast November morning, three weeks before she was due, Isra went into labor. Adam and Fareeda took her to the hospital but refused to come into the delivery room. They said they didn’t like the sight of blood. Isra felt a deep terror as they wheeled her into the room alone. She had watched Mama give birth once. The sound of her pain was a permanent fixture in Isra’s mind. But this was even worse than she could have imagined. As the contractions came harder and faster, it felt as though crimes were being committed inside her. She wanted to scream out, like Mama had, but for some reason she found herself unable to open her mouth. She didn’t want to display her pain, not even in sounds. Instead she sucked on her teeth and wept.

  It was a girl. Isra held her baby daughter in her arms for the first time—she stroked the softness of her skin, placed her against her chest. Her heart swelled. I’m a mother now, she thought. I’m a mother.

  When, at last, they entered the room, Fareeda and Adam locked their eyes on the ground and murmured a quiet “Mabrouk.” Isra wished Adam would say something to comfort her or show excitement.

  “Just what we need,” Fareeda said, shaking her head. “A girl.”

  “Not now, Mother,” Adam said. He passed Isra an apologetic look.

  “What?” Fareeda said. “It’s true. As if we need another balwa, as if we don’t have enough troubles.”

  Isra felt a jolt at the word. She could almost hear Mama’s voice ringing in her ears. Mama had often called Isra a balwa—a dilemma, a burden. Any lingering hope that America would be better than Palestine fell away at that moment. A woman would always be a woman. Mama was right. It was as true for her daughter as it had been for Isra. The loneliness of this reality seemed to leach out of the white hospital floor and walls into her.

  “Please, Mother,” Adam said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Easy for you to say. Do you know how hard it is to raise a girl in this country? Do you? Soon you’ll be pulling your hair out! You need a son to help you. To carry on our name.” She was crying now, a deep sucking sound coming from her mouth, and the nurse handed her a box of tissues.

  “Congratulations,” said the nurse, mistaking Fareeda’s tears for happiness. “What a blessing.”

  Fareeda shook her head. She met Isra’s eyes and whispered, “Keep these words close, like a piercing in your ear: If you don’t give a man a son, he’ll find him a woman who can.”

  “That’s enough, Mother!” Adam said. “Get up, let’s go. Isra needs to rest.” He turned to leave, shifting his eyes back to Isra on the way out. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll have a son, inshallah. You’re young. We have plenty of time.”

  Isra passed him a weak smile, holding back tears. How much she wanted to please them. How much she wanted their love. There was music playing in the room, a soft melody the nurse had put on during the labor. Now Isra took it in for the first time, and it soothed her. She asked if the nurse could replay it, asked its name. Moonlight Sonata. Isr
a shut her eyes to the slow, wafting melody and told herself everything would be okay.

  “Bint,” Isra heard Fareeda say whenever someone called to congratulate them. A girl.

  Isra pretended not to hear. Her daughter was beautiful. She had coffee-colored hair and fair skin and eyes as deep as midnight. And a good baby, too. Quiet but alert. Isra hummed her awake and lulled her to sleep, skin on skin, hearts touching. In those moments, she felt a newfound warmth spread over her, the way the sun felt on her face when she had gone fruit-picking back home. She named her daughter Deya. Light.

  Deya’s birth had indeed brought light to Isra’s life. Within days of coming home from the hospital, Isra’s love for Deya had spread over her like a wildfire. Everything seemed brighter. Deya was her naseeb, Isra told herself. Motherhood was her purpose. This was why she had married Adam, why she had moved to America. Deya was the reason. Isra felt at peace.

  She had always imagined love as the kind she read about in books, like the love Rumi and Hafiz described in their poems. Never once had motherly love crossed her mind as her naseeb. Perhaps it was because of her relationship with Mama, the sprinkles of love she’d fought so hard for and found so lacking. Or perhaps it was because Isra had been raised to think that love was something only a man could give her, like everything else.

  Shame, she told herself. How selfish she had been to not appreciate Allah’s goodness all along. To not trust in His plan. She was lucky. Lucky to be a mother, and lucky—she reminded herself—to have a place to call her own. Many families back home still lived in refugee camps, each shelter barely two feet away from the next. But this basement was her home now. Deya’s home. They were lucky.

  As Isra placed her daughter in the crib, her heart swelled with hope. She laid down her prayer rug and prayed two rak’ats thanking Allah for all he had given her.

  Part II

  Fareeda

  Spring 1991

  It was Fareeda’s idea to not breastfeed Deya. Breastfeeding prevented pregnancy, and Adam needed a son. Isra obeyed her without resistance, mixing bottles of formula in the kitchen sink, hoping, Fareeda knew, to regain her favor. She studied Isra’s swollen breasts, a certain guilt rising beneath her ribs. A certain memory at the familiar sight. Fareeda pushed it away. There’s no point in dwelling on the past, she told herself.

  And it worked. Four months later, Isra was pregnant again.

  On the car ride home from Dr. Jaber’s office, Fareeda sat in the passenger seat. Beside her, Khaled tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, humming a melody by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. Fareeda had a full view of Isra in the rearview mirror, holding Deya tightly in the back seat as she stared out the window, watching a flock of pigeons peck crumbs on the sidewalk. Fareeda turned to face her.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Fareeda said. “I knew you’d get pregnant soon if you didn’t breastfeed.”

  Isra smiled. “I hope Adam will be happy.”

  “Of course he will.”

  “But what if he doesn’t want another baby right now?”

  “Nonsense. Children are the glue that keep a husband and wife together.”

  “But what if—” Isra paused, taking a breath. “What if it’s another girl?”

  “No, no, no,” Fareeda said, settling back in her seat. “It’ll be a boy this time. I can feel it.”

  Khaled raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You feel it?”

  “Yes, I can! A woman’s instinct.”

  “Sure you can,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know why you’re still obsessing over sons. Alhamdulillah, we have plenty.”

  “Oh, really?” Fareeda turned to him. “And where was this kindness when I was getting pregnant, or did you forget the torture you put me through?”

  He looked away, red-faced.

  “Now you have nothing to say, do you?”

  “Bikafi.” Khaled fixed her with a glare. “Enough.”

  Fareeda shook her head. How could he be so insensitive after all these years, after everything he had put her through? After everything she had done for him? Because of him. She took a breath and pushed the thoughts away. Fareeda understood her place in the world. The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her that the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in his veins. Nor was she surprised when he married her off to a man who beat her, too. How could he not, when they were so poor that their lives were filled with continuous shame? She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves? Fareeda doubted it, and it was this awareness of the hurt behind the hurt that had enabled her to see past Khaled’s violence over the years and not let it destroy her. There was no point in moping around. She had decided early on in her marriage to focus only on the things she could control.

  She ripped her eyes away from Khaled and returned her gaze to the rearview mirror. “Don’t listen to him,” she told Isra. “Inshallah, you’ll have a son this time.”

  But Isra still seemed worried.

  Fareeda sighed. “And if it is a girl, and it won’t be, but if, God forbid, it is, then it won’t be the end of the world.”

  Isra met her eyes in the glass. “It won’t?”

  “No,” Fareeda said. “You’ll get pregnant again, that’s all.” Isra was lucky. As if anyone had ever been so kind to her.

  “Let’s go.” Fareeda stood in the kitchen doorway and peered down at Isra, who was on her knees, in a faded pink nightgown, reaching for a cobweb beneath the fridge. They had just finished mopping the floors, kneading the dough, and putting a pot of okra stew on the stove to simmer.

  “Where are we going?” Isra asked.

  Fareeda straightened the hemline of her navy-blue thobe, pulling it down over her pudgy midsection. “We’re going to visit my friend Umm Ahmed,” she said. “Her daughter-in-law just gave birth to a baby boy. Umm Ahmed’s very first grandson.”

  Isra’s hands drifted toward her belly. Forcefully, she pulled them away. Fareeda knew the subject made her uncomfortable. Watching Isra tug on the edges of her nightgown, she even felt sorry for the girl. Perhaps she shouldn’t put so much pressure on her, but how else were they to secure their lineage in this country? How else were they to secure their income in the future? Besides, it wasn’t as if Isra was the only woman in the world shamed for bearing a girl. It had always been this way, Fareeda thought. It might not be fair, but she didn’t make the rules. It was just the way it was. And Isra was no exception.

  Outside the air was crisp, the tips of their noses stinging from the leftover winter wind. Fareeda led the way, and Isra followed with Deya in her stroller. It hadn’t occurred to Fareeda until that moment that neither of them had left the house since the visit to Dr. Jaber. The weather had been too cold. Khaled had gotten their weekly groceries alone, driving to Fifth Avenue on Sunday mornings to get halal meat from the butcher shop, and on Fridays, after jumaa prayer, to Three Guys from Brooklyn in search of the zucchini and eggplants Fareeda liked. She couldn’t wait to accompany him again now that the weather was warming up. Fareeda didn’t like to admit it, had never even said it out loud, but in the fifteen years she had lived in America, she could easily count the number of times she had done anything outside their home without Khaled. She couldn’t drive or speak English, so even when she did leave the house, poking her head uneasily from the door before venturing out, it was only for a stroll around the corner to visit one of her Arab neighbors. Even now, walking only a few blocks to Umm Ahmed’s house, Fareeda found herself glancing behind her, wanting to turn back. At home, she knew where her bed was, how many tugs were needed to start the furnace, how many steps it took to cross the hall into the kitchen. There, she knew where the clean rags were, how long it took to preheat the oven, how many dashes of cumin to sprinkle in
the lentil soup. But here, on these streets, she knew nothing. What would happen if she got lost? What if someone assaulted her? What would she do? Fifteen years in this country, and she still didn’t feel safe.

  But it’s better than living in a refugee camp, Fareeda reminded herself as she eyed the passing cars nervously, gathering herself to cross the street. Better than the years she and Khaled had wasted in those shelters. She thought of the broken roads of her childhood, of days spent squatting beside her mother, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, washing clothes in a rusted barrel. Days when she would stand in line for hours at the UN station, waiting to collect bags of rice and flour, or a bundle of blankets to keep them from freezing in the harsh winters, wobbling under their weight as she carried them back to her tent. Days when the open sewers smelled so harshly that she walked around with a laundry pin on her nose. Back then, in the refugee camp, her body carried her worry like an extra limb. At least here, in America, they were warm and had food on their table, their own roof over their heads.

  They reached Umm Ahmed’s block. All the houses looked the same, and the people strolling the sidewalks looked the same, too. Not in how they dressed, which Fareeda found distasteful, with their ripped jeans and low-cut tops, but how they moved, rushing across the street like insects. She wondered how it felt to be an American, to know exactly where you were heading each time you left your front door, and exactly what you would do when you got there. She had spent her entire life being pushed and pulled, from kitchen to kitchen, child to child. But it was better this way, she thought. Better to be grounded, to know your place, than to live the way these Americans lived, cruising from day to day with no values to anchor them down. It’s no wonder they ended up alone—alcoholics, addicts, divorced.

  “Ahlan wasahlan,” Umm Ahmed greeted them as she led Fareeda and Isra into the sala. Inside, other women were already seated. Fareeda knew all of them, and they stood to greet her, exchanging kisses on the cheek, smiling as they stole glances at Deya. Fareeda could see Isra flush in embarassment. Most of these women had come to congratulate them when Deya was born, and made crass remarks about Isra not having a son. More than once, she’d had to pass Isra a look, clearing her throat and signaling her to relax. She wished Isra understood that such comments were normal, that she shouldn’t take everything so personally. But Isra was sensitive, Fareeda thought, shaking her head. Too sensitive. She hadn’t seen enough of the world to be otherwise.