I didn’t find this
an easy read, having to take it is small bites to allow time to
process. There was a powerful mysticism – what was fantastical what
fantasy.
A novel about women,
Muslim women, Muslim women in North Africa it explodes assumptions.
These are women struggling with the expectations of society but women
with power, vitality, dignity – and little time or use for men.
The issues of
language are explored, therefore it was odd to be reading in
translation, for example and one point:
“I went into
another room where they were teaching children Amazigh. There were
reading cards on the wall and Amazigh letters on the backboard. These
people were working to free themselves of a language they had been
forced to learn and to return to their mother tongue, and in the
middle of a war. It must have been something like reading history
backwards.”
And later:
“Now consider
this… Colonialism can even lead people to stop naming children and
flowers in their mother tongues. But only our language and its words
ring in our hearts. The heart is made up of words.”
For the English, and
first language English speakers more generally, the power of language
to shape identity often seems difficult to grasp – words are
neutral, we forget that some ideas can only be expressed in a
particular language, in particular the longings and laments of the
people under oppression can not be shared in the language of their
oppressors.
But alongside the
trespass I felt as a monoglot English speaker there was an equal
feeling of trespass as a man in a space owned and defended by these
women. I might not be the biggest champion of patriarchy,
nevertheless I remain a beneficiary of it. As an over-educated white
middle-class male I need to talk a lot about my privilege before I
get the right to talk of any experience of oppression. Western
society is run by, and for, guys like me.
There were moments
that powerfully make you stop and think …
“If someone has a
scar on her face and you don’t ask her about it she won’t think
you’re being kind, she’ll just think you didn’t see her face.”
… do we look away
from disfigurement to save their embarrassment or our own – does
our politeness render people invisible.
On the very last
page, the journey done, there is a final reflection …
“It was the first
time I understood what Madam Lilla had done for us all. We did not
need a god to love us if we had a courageous mother...”
The big loving
embrace of Madam Lilla, despite her complexities, is the
transformative action.
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