A WOMAN IS NO MAN by Etaf Rum

This troubling novel revolves around Isra, a Palestinian woman who comes to live in Brooklyn as the wife of a Palestinian man whom she barely knows, and her daughter Deya.  A third woman, Isra’s mother-in-law, Fareeda, is a powerful factor in both women’s lives.  The gist of the story is that Arab-American women live in almost complete subjugation to their husbands.  They do not go out alone, they do not speak English, they are discouraged from pursuing education, and they have no job skills that would help liberate them from unspeakable oppression.  When Isra’s husband starts to beat her into submission, although actually she is already pretty submissive, for the crime of having produced four daughters but no sons, her story becomes almost unbearable.  Even more depressing is the fact that other women, including her mother-in-law, turn a blind eye to the abuse, and Isra’s mother is complicit in perpetuating the plight of her own daughter by having forced her into an early and ultimately dangerous marriage.  The gloomy prospects for these women makes for a predictable, frustrating, and repetitive read.  Also, this novel contains a few grammatical errors that a decent editor should have caught.  I can understand such errors in the dialog, although most of the dialog in this case is in Arabic, in theory, and translated for our benefit, but they are especially annoying in the prose narrative.  All that aside, life for these women is not that different from those living under Taliban rule in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  I am disheartened to know that many Palestinian-American women, despite living in the U.S., will not escape their repressive and abusive culture.