A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

  Downstairs, in the darkness of her room, Deya held her mother’s words up to the window, where a faint light came in from the streetlamps outside. There were at least a hundred letters in her hands, each stacked behind the other in no particular order, all addressed to Mama—Isra’s mother. Deya didn’t know which to read first. Trembling, she sifted through them until her eyes settled on one. She began to read.

  Isra

  Summer 1997

  Summer passed slowly. During the days, nothing could be heard in the house except the whistle of a teakettle. Fareeda hardly spoke, the phone no longer rang, and Isra completed her chores in silence. Sometimes Khaled joined her in the kitchen on Fridays to make za’atar. It was a new ritual. Isra thought the za’atar brought him comfort. She would stand quietly by his side, the way she had done years ago with Mama, handing him skillets and spatulas, washing dishes he no longer needed. Neither of them ever looked at each other. Neither said a word.

  Nadine hardly spoke to her, either. Isra remembered how much she had minded this at first, feeling a bubble of rage burst in her chest whenever Nadine ignored her. But now their distance was a relief. At least she knew where she stood with Nadine. They were not friends, they never would be. She never had to worry about pleasing her, never had to pretend to like her. Their relationship was so much easier than hers with Adam and Fareeda. And yet in this silence, Sarah’s absence seemed to reverberate within Isra all the more. But Isra blamed herself for this hurt—she should’ve learned many years ago not to hope.

  “Why do you always sit by the window?” Deya asked one day after lunch, walking toward Isra, who was indeed in her favorite spot.

  Isra wrapped her arms around her knees. She hesitated, her eyes fixed on a spot outside the window, before replying, “I like the view.”

  “Do you want to play a game?” Deya asked, touching her arm. Isra tried not to flinch. She looked at her daughter and noticed that she had gotten a little taller, a little thinner over the summer. She felt a pinch of guilt for not being more mentally present during their days together.

  “Not today,” Isra said, looking back out the window.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t feel like playing. Maybe another time.”

  “But you always say that,” Deya said, touching her arm again. Isra shrank back. “You always say tomorrow, and we never play.”

  “I don’t have time to play!” Isra snapped, moving Deya’s arm away. “Go play with your sisters.” She returned her gaze to the window.

  The view outside was gray, the sun hidden behind a broken cloud. Every now and then, she turned to look back at Deya. Why had she spoken to her daughter like that? Would it have been so hard to play one little game? When had she become so harsh? She didn’t want to be harsh. She wanted to be a good mother.

  The next day Isra watched Nadine tossing a ball with Ameer in the driveway. Nadine’s smiling face made Isra sick. Nadine stood straight and tall, her belly round as a basketball in front of her. Her third son was on his way. What had she done in her life to deserve three boys? All while Isra had none. But this failure paled in comparison to Isra’s biggest shame: what she had done to her daughters. What she continued to do to them.

  Later that afternoon, while Isra soaked lentils to prepare adas for dinner, Khaled entered the kitchen to make za’atar. But instead of heading straight to the pantry to collect the spices, he stopped in front of Isra and spoke. “I’m sorry, daughter,” he said, “for what I said the night Adam hit you.”

  Isra stepped away from the kitchen sink. Khaled had barely spoken a word to anyone since Sarah had left.

  “I’ve been thinking of that night for some time now.” His voice was almost a whisper. “I’ve been thinking maybe God took Sarah from us as punishment for what we’ve done to you.”

  “No. That’s not true,” Isra managed to say.

  “But it is.”

  “Don’t say that,” Isra said, trying to meet his gaze. She noticed that his eyes were wet.

  “Something like this—it makes you reconsider things.” Khaled walked past Isra to the pantry and returned to the kitchen, spices in hand. He poured the sesame seeds into an iron skillet. “It makes you wonder if any of this would’ve happened if we’d never left home.”

  Isra had wondered this, too, only she hadn’t dared admit it. “Do you want to go back?” she asked, remembering what Adam had once said about wishing he could return. “I mean, would you if you could?”

  “I don’t know.” He stood, slightly stooped, by the stove, stirring the sesame seeds occasionally and opening spice jars he had gathered from the pantry: sumac, thyme, marjoram, oregano. “Whenever we go home to visit my brothers and sisters, I see how they live. I don’t know how they do it.” He turned off the stove.

  Isra watched him pour the roasted sesame seeds into an empty jar. “Why did you come to America?” she asked.

  “I was twelve when we relocated to the al-Am’ari camp. My parents had ten children—I was the eldest. We lived in tents for the first few years, thick nylon shelters that kept us dry from the rain, though just barely.” He stopped, reaching for the spice jars. Next he would mix a tablespoon or two of each into the roasted seeds. She handed him a measuring spoon.

  “We were very poor,” Khaled continued. “There wasn’t water or electricity. Our toilet was a bucket at the back of our tents, and my father would bury our waste in the woods. The winters were cold, and we chopped wood from the mountains to make a fire. It was hard. We lived that way for a few years before our tents were replaced with cement shelters.”

  Isra felt the ache of his words inside her. She had grown up poor, yes, but she could not imagine the kind of poverty Khaled described. As far back as she could remember, her family had always had water, electricity, a toilet. She swallowed a lump in her throat. “How did you survive?”

  “It was hard. My father worked as a builder, but his salary wasn’t enough to support our family. The UNRWA gave out food parcels and financial support. We would stand in line every month for thick blankets and bags of rice and sugar. But the tents were overcrowded, and the food was never enough. My brothers and I would go to the mountains to pick our own food.” He stopped to taste the za’atar and then reached for the saltshaker, giving Isra a nod. She returned the remaining spices to the cabinet. “People were different back then, you know,” Khaled said, placing the dirty skillet in the sink. “If you ran out of milk or sugar, then you walked next door and asked your neighbor. We were all a family back home. We had a community. Nothing like here.”

  Isra felt a deep and sudden pity, looking at Khaled. “How did you leave?” she asked.

  “Ahhh,” he said, turning to face her. “For years I worked in a small dukan outside the camp. I worked until I had saved five thousand shekels, enough to buy plane tickets for us to America. When we arrived, I had nothing but two hundred dollars in my pocket and a family relying on me to feed them. We settled in Brooklyn because it was where the most Palestinians lived, but still, the community here isn’t what it is there. It never could be.”

  “And you would never go back?”

  “Oh, Isra,” he said, turning away to wash his hands. “Do you think we can go back to how things were after all these years?”

  Isra stared at him blankly. In all her years in America, she had never stopped to consider whether she would return home if given the chance. Would she be able to eat the small meals of her childhood, sleep on that old lumpy mattress, boil a barrel of water every time she needed to bathe? Surely those were only luxuries, creature comforts that paled in comparison to community, to belonging.

  When she didn’t respond, Khaled gathered his za’atar and turned to leave. For a moment his gaze drifted toward the window. Outside the sky had gone gray. Isra felt a shudder of sadness at the sight of his face. As he walked away, she wished she knew how to answer his question, how to find the right words. But saying the right thing was a skill it seemed she would never learn.


  “Maybe someday,” Khaled said, pausing in the doorway. “Maybe someday we’ll have the courage to return.”

  Deya

  Winter 2009

  For the remainder of the winter, Deya did little but read Isra’s letters over and over, desperate to understand her mother. She read on the school bus every morning, her eyes buried in her lap. In class she hid the letters inside her open textbook pages, unable to focus on the lesson at hand. During lunch she read in the library, hidden between bookshelves. Some days she even read Isra’s Arabic edition of A Thousand and One Nights, flipping page after page, searching for herself and her mother in its stories.

  What was Deya looking for exactly? She wasn’t sure. A part of her hoped Isra had left her a clue to finding her path, even though she knew such thinking was fruitless—clearly her mother had never even found her own. Most days she could hear Isra’s words echoing in her head: I’m afraid of what will happen to my daughters. She could hear the voice of Isra’s mama, too: A woman will always be a woman. Every time Deya closed her eyes, she pictured Isra’s face, afraid and confused, wishing she had the courage to stand up for what she wanted, wishing she had defied Mama and Yacob, had defied Adam and Fareeda, had done what she wanted for herself rather than what she was expected to do.

  Then one day in early spring, as Deya reread one of Isra’s letters, something came to her. It was so obvious she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t realized it before, but reading her mother’s words, Deya finally saw how much she resembled Isra. She, too, had spent her life trying to please her family, desperate for their validation and approval. She, too, had let fear of disappointing them stand in her way. But seeking approval had not worked for Isra, and Deya could see now that it would not work for her either.

  Alongside this realization, an old voice that had lived in the back of her head for as long as she could remember—so long she had never before seen it for the fear that it was, only as the absolute truth—rose up inside of her. The voice cautioned her to surrender, be quiet, endure. It told her that standing up for herself would only lead to disappointment when she lost the battle. That the things she wanted for herself were a fight she could never win. That it was safer to surrender and do what she was supposed to do.

  What would happen if she disobeyed her family? the old voice asked. Would she be able to shake off her culture that easily? What if her community turned out to be right after all? What if she would never truly belong anywhere? What if she ended up all alone? Deya hesitated. She had finally come to understand the depths of Isra’s love, which she had terribly misjudged, had finally learned that there was more to people below the surface, that despite everything her family had done, they loved her in their own way. What would she do without them? Without her sisters? Even without Fareeda and Khaled? As angry as she might be, she didn’t want to lose them.

  And yet even as she heard this old voice in her head, she could still feel the shift that had just occurred inside her. The old voice was no longer strong enough to hold her back—Deya knew this now. She knew this voice that she had always taken as the absolute truth was actually the very thing preventing her from achieving everything she wanted. The voice was the lie, and all the things she wanted for herself were the truth, perhaps the most important truth in the world. And because of this she had to stand up for herself. She had to fight. She had to. The fight was worth everything if it meant finally having a voice.

  Did she want to put her life in the hands of other people? Could she ever achieve her dreams if she remained dependent on pleasing her family? Perhaps her life would be more than it was now if she hadn’t tried so hard to live up to her grandparents’ opinion of her. It was more important to honor her own values in life, to live her own dreams and her own vision, than to allow others to choose that path for her, even if standing up for herself was terrifying. That was what she must do. What did it matter if her grandparents were mad? What did it matter if she defied her community? What did it matter if people thought negatively of her? What did all these people’s opinions of her life matter? She needed to follow her own path in life. She needed to apply to college.

  Deya spent the night thinking things over and devising a plan. The next morning, she decided to visit Sarah. She’d visited her aunt less frequently in the weeks since Sarah had given her the newspaper clipping. They were still working to repair the damage Sarah had done by concealing the truth about her parents. But now Deya needed her aunt the most. She told Sarah her decision as soon as she walked into the bookstore.

  “Really?” Sarah said. “I’m so proud of you! Has my mother agreed?”

  “I haven’t told her yet. But I’m going to. I promise.”

  Sarah smiled. “What about your marriage suitors?”

  “I’m going to tell Teta that marriage can wait,” Deya said. “And if she doesn’t listen, then I’ll just scare them away.”

  Sarah laughed, but Deya saw fear in her eyes. “Promise me you’ll go to college. No matter what Fareeda says.”

  “I promise.”

  Sarah’s smile widened.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Deya said.

  “There’s no need to thank me.”

  “There is,” Deya said. “I know I’ve been angry at you a lot over the past few months, but that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for everything you’ve done. I should say it more. You reached out to me when I was all alone. You told me the truth when no one else would. Even when I was mad, you stood by me. You’ve been an incredible friend. If my mother was here, she’d thank you, too.”

  Sarah met her eyes, on the verge of tears. “I hope so.”

  Deya stood and hugged her aunt tight. As Sarah walked her out, Deya said, “By the way, I’ve been thinking about what you told me, about courage. Do you think maybe you’ll feel better if you have courage, too?”

  “Courage to do what?”

  “To come back home.”

  Sarah blinked at her.

  “I know you want to. All you have to do is come knock on the door.”

  “I . . . I don’t know,”

  “You can do it,” Deya said, turning to leave. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Isra

  Fall 1997

  By the time the school year started again, so many weeks had passed since Sarah had left that Isra was surprised when Adam told her: he was taking the girls out of public school.

  “These American schools will corrupt our daughters,” Adam said, swaying in the bedroom doorway.

  Isra was in bed. She pulled the blanket closer, feeling a sudden chill. “But the school year just started,” she whispered. “Where will they go?”

  “An Islamic school has just opened on Fourth Avenue. Madrast al-Noor. School of Light. They start next month.”

  Isra opened her mouth to respond, but thought better of it. Instead she sank into bed and disappeared beneath the sheets.

  Over the next few weeks, Isra considered Adam’s plan. As much as she hated admitting it, he was right. She had also come to fear the public schools, afraid that one day her daughters might follow in Sarah’s footsteps. Just the other day she had witnessed Deya waving goodbye to the boys on her school bus! It had made her rigid with terror, and she had yelled at Deya, called her a sharmouta. Deya’s face had crumpled, and Isra had been overcome with shame ever since. How could she call her daughter—a seven-year-old child—such a dirty word? What had she been thinking? Her head ached, and she tapped her forehead against the window to relieve the pain.

  It was shame that made her do it, Isra thought now, shame at being a woman. Shame that made her abort her most recent pregnancy. She hadn’t told anyone that she had gotten pregnant last month, not even Fareeda, who, in the midst of grieving Sarah, still found energy to remind her that Adam needed a son. But there had been no need to tell: Isra had not planned to keep the baby. As soon as the white strip turned red, she had stood at the top of the staircase and jumped off, over and over again, pounding on her belly with clenche
d fists. Fareeda hadn’t known what Isra was doing, only that she was jumping off the stairs. It had clearly scared her. Fareeda had demanded she stop, had called her a majnoona, screaming that she was crazy, possessed, going so far as to call Adam to come home and control his wife. But Isra hadn’t stopped. She’d needed to bleed. So she’d kept jumping until the blood gushed down her thighs.

  Who had she intended to save, Isra wondered now, herself or the child? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she had failed as a mother. She could still see the horrible look in Deya’s eyes when she’d found her jumping. The pain of that moment had been so great that for a second Isra had considered killing herself, too, sticking her head in the oven like her favorite author had done. But Isra was too much of a coward even for that.

  On the nights since, she had lain awake in bed and tried to push the thoughts away, telling herself stories, like the ones from A Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes she pulled out a sheet of paper from the stack she stashed in the back of their closet and wrote letters to Mama, pages and pages she would never send.

  “I’m afraid for our daughters,” Isra told Adam late one night when he returned from the deli. She had practiced the words in front of the mirror, making sure her eyebrows didn’t flinch when she spoke, that she kept her gaze direct. “I’m afraid for our daughters,” she repeated when Adam said nothing. She could tell that he was startled to hear her speak so boldly. She was startled, too—even with all her practice—but enough was enough. How long was she going to let him silence her? No matter what, he was going to beat her—whether she defied him or submitted, whether she spoke up or said nothing. The least she could do was stand up for her daughters. She owed them that.

  She stood up, moving closer to him. “I know Sarah running away has been terrible, but I don’t want our daughters to suffer because of it.”