The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story by Hanan Al-Shaykh (Pantheon)
Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh tells her mother Kamila’s story in The Locust and the Bird, an imagined memoir (written from Kamila’s point of view) that wrenchingly illustrates the lot of women living behind the veil of religious law.After Kamila’s father abandons her mother in 1930s Beirut, the young girl and her siblings are expected to work. At age nine Kamila sells baby bibs in the streets. At 11 she is sent into a room to face “a group of men in red fezzes” and told to repeat the words, “You are hereby my wit-ness.” For two years, Kamila remains unaware that this ritual has betrothed her to the ultra-pious Abu-Hussein, 18 years her senior. During that time, she falls in love with the wealthy Muhammad, who teaches her poetry as well as songs from movies. He also informs Kam-ila that she is engaged.
Desperate to avoid the marriage, Kamila runs away to her estranged father’s house in the country, but he
quickly returns his daughter to Beirut. There she is married to Abu-Hussein, who immediately rapes her. “I was truly slaughtered,” Kamila says, “and the blood on the white dress was the proof.”
Kamila has her first child at 15, and Hanan arrives a few years later, but she continues to see Muhammad secretly for 11 years. Always a survivor and a manipulator, Kamila main-tains a double life until she divorces her husband and marries Muhammad—but she’s forced to leave her daughters with her ex.
“When my mother left home,” Al-Shaykh writes in the prologue, “I decided that a voice had given birth to me.” Her father was little comfort. Soon enough, Al-Shaykh mounts her own rebellion against the man her mother fled.
The writer masterfully blends Ar-abic parable and Western resolve to enter her illiterate mother’s mind and heart, writing what Kamila could not. The Locust and the Bird conquers the distance between mother and daughter, revealing the tragedies that can ensue when cultural machismo forces brave women into impossible choices.
Jayne Anne Phillips's latest novel is Lark and Termite. She is the director of the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program.
