Miral al-Tahawy

Hend grew up in one of the villages around Cairo as the only daughter and youngest child of a Bedouin family. When we meet her at the start of this novel, she had just immigrated to USA with her 8 years old son, sans her husband and with very little English and had rented a small apartment in a Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn, some time in the autumn of 2008 (Obama winning the election is one of the first times we see her communicating with her son). But this is not the typical immigration story of perseverance and success against all odds. Or not entirely anyway.

Instead we walk the streets of Brooklyn with Hend and see her reactions to the city and its inhabitants. Most of the Brooklynites we meet are immigrants like her, mostly from the Muslim Arabian world but there are a few others as well - the Orthodox Jews, the dancing teacher neighbor. And while she walks the streets of this new city, she often thinks about her life before she moved - from her childhood to the end of her marriage. As the novel progresses, we start also hearing the stories of other inhabitants of her world - both in the new and in the old worlds.

And somewhere in all that jumble of stories, memories and new experiences emerges the longing for a home - the home some of the characters can never return to, the home another character is slowly forgetting, a place one can call home. Is your home where you were born? Or can you make your home elsewhere, away from the culture you are used to and belong to? Hend never figures these questions although she ends up pondering a lot of them when things happen around her. She is almost always a passive observer - it feels like she was always an observer of her own life, even in the passages about her past.

It works beautifully to a point. I appreciated that the new immigrant felt displaced and looking for her place in the new life and did not find friends even before arriving (while I know that some people are like that, my experience was closer to that of Hend when I moved). I wish the novel was longer - it is too short to support all the backstories and all the stories in the now and here - and because of that a lot of them feel incomplete. I am not sure if that was intentional - after all, all of these stories still continue after the end of the book but the novel felt incomplete.

The novel won the 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (given to an Arabic novel which had not been translated into English yet) and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arabic Booker) in 2011. The author's personal story parallels her heroines to a certain extent - al-Tahawy is from a Bedouin family and her childhood was probably very similar to Hend's (writer's license notwithstanding). She also moved to USA around the same time as her character (although I am not sure if it is to Brooklyn initially).

This was the author's 4th novel and the other 3 are also translated into English so I plan to check them as well - despite my misgivings, it is a novel worth reading - if for nothing else, for the details of modern Bedouin lives. But the immigration part of the story also works, as banal and tired as this genre had become in recent years.… (más)

Nascere in Egitto nel 1967 in una famiglia beduina, durante la guerra dei sei giorni,
preannunciava una vita non facile per Nada. Ma a questa ragazza dolce, vivace e
misteriosa, soprannominata Melanzana Blu, la forza non manca. Il libro è una movimentata
navigazione tra le tempeste della sua anima e dei suoi pensieri: dalla decisione di indossare
il velo a quella di combattere per i diritti delle donne, manifestando in abiti succinti e capelli
al vento. Perennemente alla ricerca di un amore totale, quello del padre prima, quello
dell'uomo che la tradisce poi, e sempre quello delle altre donne, Nada conquista la libertà
di scegliersi il destino. Un destino assolutamente femminile. Un romanzo di formazione
intenso, una storia sulla perenne ricerca di affetto e libertà in una società che spesso
nega l'uno e priva dell'altra… (más)