JORDAN

READ

My Name is Salma, by Fadia Faqir, follows the life of Salma Ibrahim El-Musa, a Bedouin shepherdess in a small village somewhere in the Levant, an area that encompasses several countries in the Middle East, including Jordan. Salma’s life is simple, but happy, until she falls in love with a local man and becomes pregnant. She knows that if her father and brother find out, they will kill her, so she seeks help from her schoolteacher. Miss Nailah tells her that her best option is to turn herself over to the police so they can keep her in protective custody where her father and brother can’t reach her. Salma gives birth to her daughter Layla in prison, and Layla is immediately taken from her and sent to live at a home for illegitimate children.

Salma spends eight years living in the prison, afraid of the consequences if she tries to leave. One night, though, a nun smuggles her out of the prison and out of the country. She eventually ends up in Exeter, England, where her name is given as Sally Asher. She finds work as a seamstress and rents a room from an alcoholic widow whose reality alternates between the present day and her youth, which was spent in India. Salma has two close friends in Exeter, an elderly woman named Gwen and a Pakistani refugee named Parvin. Her evenings are filled with studying, as she works to obtain a degree in English literature, and her second job collecting and washing the glasses at a local bar.

Although she seems to have settled into a normal life, fear and self-loathing are with her everywhere she goes. She imagines her brother is around every corner, just waiting to shoot her between the eyes. And despite the fact that she fled her village in order to escape that fate, she feels as though it’s what she deserves, both for becoming pregnant in the first place and for leaving her daughter behind.

After several years in England, Salma finally meets and marries a kind man. But she becomes increasingly obsessed with returning to her home country and reuniting with her daughter, who would be sixteen years old by then. Will the passage of time have softened her family’s anger?

My Name is Salma was a compelling story, although it felt disjointed, with the author hopscotching between multiple times and places so frequently that it was often hard to keep track of what was happening in Salma’s life. Still, it was a good portrayal of the determination of one woman to keep moving forward, even though all the odds seemed to be stacked against her.

COOK

The olive groves in Salma’s village in the Levant figure prominently in her memories of her childhood. On the very first page of the novel, there is this description as Salma looks at the English countryside but yearns for her village: “It was a new day, but the dewy greenness of the hills, the whiteness of the sheep, the greyness of the skies carried me to my distant past, to a small mud village tucked away between the deserted hills, to Hima, to silver-green olive groves gleaming in the morning light.”

So when I started looking for a Jordanian dish to prepare, it seemed fitting to find a recipe for MaazatZaytoon, a green olive dip, at the International Vegetarian Union’s website. It seemed like it would be easy enough to make – just throw all the ingredients in the blender – but there were too few liquids and too many solids for the ingredients to blend properly. I ended up chopping the olives into smaller pieces and using considerably more liquids than the recipe called for – olive oil, lemon juice, and some brine from the jar of olives – before everything reached the right consistency for a blender. The final result was very good, though, served on wedges of Mediterranean flatbread.

GIVE

The GlobalGiving website listed several projects in Jordan, but because of Salma’s studies in English literature, the one I chose to donate to was the “We Love Reading” program, which is designed to “create a generation of change makers by fostering a love for reading among children aged 2-10 throughout Jordan.”

According to the project description, “We Love Reading is an innovative model that provides a practical, cost efficient, sustainable, grassroots approach to create changemakers through reading. WLR supports the activism of local volunteers to increase reading levels among children by focusing on the readaloud experience to instill the love of reading. The program constitutes training local volunteer women, men and youth to hold readaloud sessions in public spaces in their neighborhoods where books are routinely read aloud to children.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/we-love-reading-ambassador-training/

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