The tea cups clatter on the tray gripped between your sweating hands, matching the chatter of your teeth as your nerves break like a tidal wave. Your new husband, hand picked and delivered. You will be a good wife, a good mother, a good daughter…just as you were taught.
Oh but the histories you carry on your back; the weight of men crushed under stone who know nothing but how to crush back. You endure, women always endure. You learn to read the moods, keep quiet and do your duty. All the while praying for a different life for your daughters because women can’t have dreams, they can’t have goals, they can’t work or read or write.
A woman is no man until the split flesh proves otherwise.
My goodness has this book touched my heart. I’m getting a little choked up even as I write this because the feelings and pain of each of these characters is so very palpable. It may be labeled as a fiction these kinds of stories happen to women every day, any place, for any reason. Cultural expectations aside, this is unfortunately not a rare story.
This book shows so clearly the domino effect of abuse: how one begets the other until the cycle is endless and drowning. It shows how the wounded only want to wound others if only so it lessens their own suffering. It doesn’t and it never will. From Palestine to Brooklyn, the scars of the past will always follow.
But it also shows that it’s possible to break free. It’s possible to become your own person and to not allow the same tragedies to happen over and over again, to face the uncomfortable and to no longer ignore the past. This, my friends, applies to today now more than ever.
“Where I come from, we’ve learned to conceal our condition. We’ve been taught to silence ourselves, that our silence will save us…Only now, as I write this story, do I feel my voice coming.”