LEBANON

READ

Women of Sand and Myrrh, written by Hanan al-Shaykh and translated by Catherine Cobham, tells the stories of four women living in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. The country is one in which the laws regarding women are repressive – women don’t drive, they are generally supposed to cover themselves in public, working outside the home is frowned upon, and the men hold all the power.

The four women in these stories are loosely connected, mostly though Suha, a young woman from Lebanon whose family moved to this country because of her husband’s work. She had been educated at the American University of Beirut, and she’d had considerably more freedom in Lebanon. She feels stifled by life in this new country. Endless rounds of visits in the homes of other women, taking care of her family’s house, and other mundane activities are not enough for her. Suha works at a store for a short time, but is afraid of being found out, then she teaches at the Institute, a school for women, but quits when the Institute starts to receive unwanted attention from the authorities. With respect to her husband, Basem, who is working and going out in public without her, she discovers that their relationship “only existed inside the four walls of the house now; it didn’t even extend to the garden or the car or the street.” Life becomes more interesting when she meets Nur, a wealthy young woman whose husband never seems to be around, but it also becomes more dangerous.

The second story is about Tamr, a twice-divorced mother of a young boy. Tamr was one of Suha’s students at the Institute, where she went to learn to read and write. She is a native of this country, but at some point in her life, Tamr had gone to London and experienced freedom. She has longed to be independent ever since. What she wants now is to open her own dressmaking and hairdressing business, but she has to fight for her dream every step of the way. Tamr’s mother, Taj al-Arus, also figures prominently in this story. When she was a beautiful young woman, she was brought to this country from Turkey. She was led to believe she was marrying a Sultan, but she never achieved the fairytale ending she had hoped for.

Suha’s friend Suzanne is a forty-something woman from Texas, who moved to this country with her husband David when he was offered a job there by his company. They brought their young son with them, but put their three daughters in boarding school. Suzanne’s husband hasn’t shown any romantic interest in her for a long time, but in this new country, the fact that she’s blonde and foreign brings her a great deal of male attention. When it seems that David’s job may end and she may have to go back to Texas, she panics. “What does a woman in her forties do in a country swarming with others like her when she’s been used to being the one and only?”

The last story is about Nur, whose reckless lifestyle had finally alienated her from Suha. Nur is from a very wealthy family, and she is given everything she wants growing up. Her father builds her a house of her own on his property when she’s still in her teens, and she travels outside the country every chance she gets. Even so, she decides that if she were married, she would have even more freedom, so she marries Samer, who likes to party and shop and do all the same things that she does. She doesn’t give much thought to the fact that her husband’s friend Waleed is with them all the time, until Samer divorces her because he’s bisexual and wants to be with Waleed instead. She marries another man, Saleh, with whom she clashes from the very beginning. Saleh is a very serious man who wants to be a good citizen of their country, while Nur is self-indulgent and wants to do only those things that give her pleasure. In a country where men have the power, Nur becomes a bird in a gilded cage.

The four women in Women of Sand and Myrrh could not have been more different from each other, but the laws and mores governing them were one-size-fits-all. Except for Suzanne, they all came from wealthy families, which gave them more options than they would have had if they’d come from poor or working-class families. But a cage is a cage, whether gilded or not.

COOK 

No Lebanese dishes are mentioned in Women of Sand and Myrrh, so I looked for some options on the International Vegetarian Union website. There were several interesting choices, but what I really wanted was hummus. Everyone always tells me how easy it is to make, but I’m guessing those people all have food processors, while I just have a blender. At any rate, after hitting the “pulse” button on the blender dozens of times and adding boiling water in small increments, I finally managed to produce a pretty respectable hummus, served with pita bread triangles.

GIVE

With everything that’s going on in Afghanistan right now, it’s easy to overlook the tragedies that are happening elsewhere. In the case of Lebanon, there was a fuel tanker explosion in the district of Akkar earlier this month, and at least thirty-three people were killed. When I looked for projects on the GlobalGiving website, I found one that will provide emergency relief to those who were affected by the blast. Donations will help provide medical assistance and other aid to victims of the explosion and their families. More information about this project can be found at Together for Lebanon: Heal Akkar ! - GlobalGiving.

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