On female pleasure and possibilities
Delight stacking on my birthday, and art about the pleasure of inhabiting your life fully
“Anyway, you get it; the older I get — in all likelihood closer to my death than to my birth, despite all the arugula and quinoa - the more I think of this day as a delight. But that’s not today, what I want to land on, if only because one’s birthday is also the day of hollering many delights, if you can muster them, which today I can.~ Ross Gay, The Book of Delights.
I took myself on a book date on my birthday this week. I left the house for caffeine, and instead of crossing the street and going to the coffee shop 5 minutes away as I intended, I turned right and went to the train station instead. I told myself I would go to a coffee shop downtown, but serendipitous delight! the bus to the ferry was pulling in, so I boarded it. Then I told myself I would take the ferry that was a 40 minute crossing, but there was an hour and a half till it departed, so I got myself a coffee and a cake in a jar, and boarded the next departing ferry for a two hour ocean journey. Once we arrived, I disembarked, bought a return ticket right away and boarded again to do the return journey in reverse. Seven hours later, I made it back home still with time to pray my afternoon prayers.
Of those seven hours, I spent four of them on a bench immersed in a book listening to music and looking at the ocean. I stretched my limbs in the sun, drank milky coffee that was sweet and subtle and scooped up spoonfuls of red velvet cake and cream cheese into my mouth with a small wooden spoon, leaving red crumbs in my wake. I walked the deck and listened to songs and took dozens of photos.
I had told no one where I was going. It felt like a stolen gift of a day to immerse myself in novelist Etaf Rum latest book Evil Eye. Her first book “A Woman is No Man” is a powerful, sensitive book about trauma and domestic abuse that I still think about, but this book definitely surpasses it.
Evil Eye follows the story of Yara, who is almost thirty, Palestinian, born in Brooklyn but transplanted to North Carolina, an artist who works at a local college and has a Masters degree, a mother and a wife who has been married for close to ten years. This story is a story of mothers and daughters and explores what intergenerational trauma and healing looks like across generations.
In Yara’s family, her mother was physically abused by her father. There isn’t physical abuse in Yara’s marriage, but she wants more. She wants connection, to be cherished, to be seen and valued, to have the freedom to pursue her dreams, to make an impact, to become more. Yara works and got a bachelors degree and a Masters degree after she married at nineteen so that she could have a life different from her mother. In so many ways she is successful - her life is different from her mothers’, but in so many ways it is exactly the same. The possibilities of her life are circumscribed, she has few friends, in-laws that judge her, a traumatic childhood she has never quite left, and she yearns to travel, to make art, to create a different life for her children and not feel so wrong and bad in her own skin.
Yara’s husband Fadi, sees her struggles as proof that there is something wrong with her. He tells her she is always complaining and believes she should be grateful for how much “he lets her do”, for her independence, for how he provides for her, and for the absence of violence in their home. Instead of empathizing, her husband doesn’t understand why she can’t just be grateful for what a “good person” he is, her father calls her and lets her know how she can be better in her marriage, her mother in law tells her how to make her husband happy. This is her story of delving into her past and her complicated history with her mother - the voice and person who is in her head always and whose eyes she judges herself through.
It’s an incredible book that is wonderfully written, sensitively told, and full of nuance. When Yara can’t apply to chaperone a school trip because of her responsibilities at home, a colleague asks her if that’s “because of her culture and the “way women are treated back home.” Yara calls her out on her racism, and yet, is aware that yes, there are ideas in her community and her family that limit what she can do because of how labour is divided in her home. The author walks this line well of not resorting to stereotypes while still exploring how historical trauma is transmitted and continues to shape subsequent generations unless it is addressed with courage and compassion. The result is a beautiful novel that explores how women’s dreams and expectations from life are so often policed, and how women’s dissatisfaction and instincts are often attributed to the ways they must improve rather than acknowledging that the circumstances in which they live are wanting.
It is also a book that does not pit genders against each other. Yara’s problem is not “all men” and one of her greatest co-conspirators and supports becomes her friend and colleague Silas, who despite their cultural differences and different experiences, truly tries to understand her, celebrate her and support her in what she is trying to explore.