A Woman Is No Man Read online

  Dedication

  To Reyann and Isah,

  nur hayati

  Epigraph

  There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

  —Maya Angelou

  I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

  —Audre Lorde

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Isra

  Part I

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Part II

  Fareeda

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Fareeda

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Part III

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Fareeda

  Isra

  Fareeda

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Fareeda

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Deya

  Isra

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me. Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly. But we will never tell you this, of course. Where I come from, we’ve learned to conceal our condition. We’ve been taught to silence ourselves, that our silence will save us. It is only now, many years later, that I know this to be false. Only now, as I write this story, do I feel my voice coming.

  You’ve never heard this story before. No matter how many books you’ve read, how many tales you know, believe me: no one has ever told you a story like this one. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of, dangerous, the ultimate shame.

  But you have seen us. Take a walk in New York City on a sunny afternoon. Walk down the length of Manhattan until the streets become curved and tangled as they are in the Old World. Go east, over the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan’s skyline thinning behind you. There will be a heavy traffic jam on the other side. Hail a yellow cab and ride it down Flatbush Avenue, that central artery of south Brooklyn. You’ll go south on Third Avenue, where the buildings are smaller—only three, four stories high, with old faces. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge hovers on the horizon like a giant gull, wings spread, the sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline a distant mirage. Head south for a while, past the warehouses refurbished into chic cafés and trendy oyster bars, and the small family-owned hardware stores that have been there for generations. When the American cafés start to thin, replaced by signs in foreign tongues, you’ll know you’re getting close. Cross east two blocks to Fifth Avenue. There you will find Bay Ridge. Our three-square-mile neighborhood is the melting pot of Brooklyn. On our streets you’ll find Latinos, Middle Easterners, Italians, Russians, Greeks, and Asians, all speaking their native tongues, keeping their traditions and cultures alive. Murals and graffiti cover the buildings. Colorful flags hang from windows and balconies. The sweet smell of churros, shish kebabs, and potpourri fills the air—a stew of humanity converging. Get out at the corner of Seventy-Second and Fifth Avenue, where you’ll find yourself surrounded by bakeries, hookah bars, and halal meat markets. Walk down the tree-lined sidewalk of Seventy-Second Street until you reach an old row house no different from the others—faded red brick, a dusty brown door, number 545. This is where our family lives.

  But our story does not begin in Bay Ridge, not really. To get there, first we must turn back the pages to before I found my voice, before I was even born. We are not yet in the house on Seventy-Second Street, not yet in Brooklyn, not yet in America. We have yet to board the plane that will carry us from the Middle East to this new world, have yet to soar over the Atlantic, have yet to even know that one day we will. The year is 1990, and we are in Palestine. This is the beginning.

  Isra

  BIRZEIT, PALESTINE

  Spring 1990

  For most of her seventeen years Isra Hadid cooked dinner with her mother daily, rolling grape leaves on warm afternoons, or stuffing spaghetti squash, or simmering pots of lentil soup when the air became crisp and the vineyards outside their home went empty. In the kitchen she and Mama would huddle against the stove as if sharing a secret, steam swirling around them, until the sunset cast a sliver of orange through the window. Looking out, the Hadids had a mountaintop view of the countryside—hillsides covered with red-tiled rooftops and olive trees, bright and thick and wild. Isra always cracked the window open because she loved the smell of figs and almonds in the morning, and at night, the rustling sounds of the cemeteries down the hill.

  It was late, and the call for maghrib prayer would soon come, bringing an end to the cooking. Isra and Mama would withdraw to the bathroom, rolling up the sleeves of their house gowns, washing the dull red sauce off their fingertips. Isra had been praying since she was seven years old, kneeling beside Mama five times a day between sunrise and sunset. Lately she had begun to look forward to prayer, standing together with Mama, shoulders joined, feet slightly grazing, the only time Isra ever felt human touch. She heard the thick sound of the adhan calling them for prayer.

  “Maghrib prayer will have to wait today,” Mama said in Arabic, looking out the kitchen window. “Our guests are here.”

  There was a knock at the front door and Mama hurried to the sink, where she gave her hands a quick rinse and dried them with a clean rag. Leaving the kitchen, she wrapped a black thobe around her small frame and a matching hijab over her long, dark hair. Though Mama was only thirty-five years old, Isra thought she looked much older, the lines of labor dug deeply into her face.

  She met Isra’s eyes. “Don’t forget to wash the garlic smell off your hands before greeting our guests.”

  Isra washed her hands, trying not to dirty the rose-colored kaftan that Mama had chosen for the occasion. “Do I look okay?”

  “You look fine,” Mama said, turning to leave. “Be sure to pin your hijab properly so your hair doesn’t show. We don’t want our guests to get the wrong impression.”

  Isra did as she was told. In the hall, she could hear her father, Yacob, recite his usual salaam as he led the guests to the sala. Soon he would hurry to the kitchen and ask for water, so she grabbed three glass cups from the cupboard and prepared them for him. Their guests would often complain about the steep hillside pathway to their home, especially on days like this when the air grew hot and it felt as though their house sat only a few inches from the sun. Isra lived on one of the steepest hills in Palestine, on a piece of land Yacob claimed to have purchased for the mountain view, which made him feel powerful, li
ke a king. Isra would listen quietly to her father’s remarks. She never dared tell Yacob how far from powerful they were. The truth was, Yacob’s family had been evacuated from their seaside home in the Lydd when he was only ten years old, during Israel’s invasion of Palestine. This was the real reason they lived on the outskirts of Birzeit, on a steep hill overlooking two graveyards—a Christian cemetery on the left and a Muslim one on the right. It was a piece of land no one else wanted, and all they could afford.

  Still, Isra loved the hilltop view of Birzeit. Past the graveyards, she could see her all-girls school, a four-story cement building laced with grapevines, and across from it, separated by a field of almond trees, the blue-domed mosque where Yacob and her three brothers prayed while she and Mama prayed at home. Looking out the kitchen window, Isra always felt a mixture of longing and fear. What lay beyond the edges of her village? Yet as much as she wanted to go out there and venture into the world, there was also a comfort and safety in the known. And Mama’s voice in her ear, reminding her: A woman belongs at home. Even if Isra left, she wouldn’t know where to go.

  “Brew a kettle of chai,” Yacob said as he entered the kitchen and Isra handed him the glasses of water. “And add a few extra mint leaves.”

  Isra needed no telling: she knew the customs by heart. Ever since she could remember, she had watched her mother serve and entertain. Mama always set a box of Mackintosh’s chocolates on the coffee table in the sala when they had guests, and she always served roasted watermelon seeds before bringing out the baklava. The drinks, too, had an order: mint chai first and Turkish coffee last. Mama said it was an insult to invert the order, and it was true. Isra had once overheard a woman tell of a time she’d been greeted with a cup of Turkish coffee at a neighbor’s house. “I left immediately,” the woman had said. “They might as well have kicked me out.”

  Isra reached for a set of red-and-gold porcelain cups, listening for Mama in the sala. She could hear Yacob chuckle over something now, and then the sound of other men laughing. Isra wondered what was so funny.

  A few months before, the week she turned seventeen, Isra had returned from school to find Yacob sitting in the sala with a young man and his parents. Each time she thought of that day, the first time she’d been proposed to, what stood out most was Yacob, yelling at Mama after the guests left, furious that she hadn’t served the chai in the antique set of teacups they saved for special occasions. “Now they will know we are poor!” Yacob had shouted, his open palm twitching. Mama had said nothing, quietly retreating to the kitchen. Their poverty was one of the reasons Yacob was so eager to marry off Isra. His sons were the ones who helped him plow the fields and earn a living, and who would one day carry on the family name. A daughter was only a temporary guest, quietly awaiting another man to scoop her away, along with all her financial burden.

  Two men had proposed to Isra since—a bread baker from Ramallah and a cabdriver from Nablus—but Yacob had declined both. He couldn’t stop talking about a family who was visiting from America in search of a bride, and now Isra understood why: he had been waiting for this suitor.

  Isra was unsure how she felt about moving to America, a place she’d only seen in the news, or read about briefly in her school library. From them she’d gathered that Western culture was not as rigid as their own. This filled her with both excitement and dread. What would become of her life if she moved away to America? How could a conservative girl like her adapt to such a liberal place?

  She had often stayed up all night thinking about the future, eager to know how her life would turn out when she left Yacob’s house. Would a man ever love her? How many children would she have? What would she name them? Some nights she had dreamed she’d marry the love of her life and that they’d live together in a small hilltop house with wide windows and a red-tiled roof. Other nights she could see the faces of her children—two boys and two girls—looking up at her and her husband, a loving family like the kind she’d read about in books. But none of that hope came to her now. She had never imagined a life in America. She didn’t even know where to begin. And this realization terrified her.

  She wished she could open her mouth and tell her parents, No! This isn’t the life I want. But Isra had learned from a very young age that obedience was the single path to love. So she only defied in secret, mostly with her books. Every evening after returning from school, after she’d soaked a pot of rice and hung her brothers’ clothes and set the sufra and washed the dishes following dinner, Isra would retreat quietly to her room and read under the open window, the pale moonlight illuminating the pages. Reading was one of the many things Mama had forbidden, but Isra had never listened.

  She remembered once telling Mama that she couldn’t find any fruit on the mulberry trees when in fact she had spent the afternoon reading in the graveyard. Yacob had beaten her twice that night, punishment for her defiance. He’d called her a sharmouta, a whore. He’d said he’d show her what happened to disobedient girls, then he’d shoved her against the wall and whipped her with his belt. The room had gone white. Everything had looked flat. She’d closed her eyes until she’d gone numb, until she couldn’t move. But as fear rose up in Isra, thinking of those moments, so did something else. A strange sort of courage.

  Isra arranged the steaming cups on the serving tray and entered the sala. Mama said the trick to maintaining balance was to never look directly at the steam, so she looked at the ground instead. For a moment, Isra paused. From the corner of her eye, she could see the men and women sitting on opposite sides of the room. She peeked at Mama, who sat in her usual way: head bowed, eyes studying the red Turkish rug in front of her. Isra glanced at the pattern. Spirals and swirls, each curling up in the exact same way, picking up where the last one ended. She looked away. She had the urge to steal a glimpse of the young man, but could feel Yacob eyeing her, could almost hear him in her ear: A proper girl never lays her gaze on a man!

  Isra kept her eyes toward the ground but allowed herself a glance across the floor. She noticed the younger man’s socks, gray and pink plaid with white stitching across the top. They were unlike anything she had ever seen on the streets of Birzeit. She felt her skin prickle.

  Clouds of steam rose from the serving tray, covering Isra’s face, and quickly she circled around the room until she had served all the men. She walked over to serve the suitor’s mother next. Isra noticed how the woman’s navy-blue hijab was tossed around her head as if by accident, barely covering her henna-stained hair. Isra had never seen a Muslim woman wear her hijab this way in real life. Maybe on television, in the black-and-white Egyptian movies Isra and Mama watched together, or in Lebanese music videos, where women danced around in revealing clothing, or even in one of the illustrations of Isra’s favorite book, A Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales set in medieval times. But never in Birzeit.

  As Isra leaned in, she could see the suitor’s mother studying her. She was a plump, stooping woman with a crooked smile and dark almond eyes that squinted at the corners. From her expression, Isra decided the woman must be displeased with her appearance. After all, Mama had often said that Isra was a plain girl—her face as dull as wheat, her eyes as black as charcoal. Isra’s most striking feature was her hair, long and dark like the Nile. Only no one could see it now beneath her hijab. Not that it would’ve made a difference, Isra thought. She was nothing special.

  It was this last thought that stung Isra. As she stood before the suitor’s mother, she could feel her upper lip trembling. She walked closer to the woman, clutching the serving tray in her hands. She could feel Yacob glaring at her, could hear him clear his throat, could see Mama dig her fingers into her thighs, but Isra leaned toward the woman anyway, the porcelain cup trembling, and asked: “Would you like some Turkish coffee?”

  But it hadn’t worked. The Americans hadn’t even seemed to notice that she’d served the coffee first. In fact, the suitor had proposed soon after, and Yacob had agreed at once, smiling wider t
han Isra had ever seen.

  “What were you thinking, serving them coffee first?” Mama yelled when the guests had left and she and Isra returned to the kitchen to finish cooking. “You’re not young anymore—almost eighteen! Do you want to sit in my house forever?”

  “I was nervous,” Isra muttered, hoping Yacob wouldn’t punish her. “It was an accident.”

  “Sure it was.” Mama unwrapped the thobe from around her thin frame. “Like the time you put salt in Umm Ali’s chai because she said you were as thin as a lamppost.”

  “That was an accident, too.”

  “You should be thankful their family isn’t as traditional as we are,” Mama said, “or you might’ve blown your chance of going to America.”

  Isra looked at her mother with wet eyes. “What will happen to me in America?”

  Mama didn’t look up. She stood hunched over the cutting board dicing onions, garlic, and tomatoes, the main components of all their meals. As Isra inhaled the familiar scents, she wished Mama would hold her, whisper in her ear that everything would be okay, maybe even offer to sew her a few hijabs in case they didn’t make them in America. But Mama was silent.

  “Be thankful,” Mama eventually said, tossing a handful of onions into a skillet. “God has presented you with a good opportunity. A good future in America. Better than this.” She waved her hands over the rusted countertops, the old barrel they used to heat water for bathing, the peeling vinyl floors. “Is this how you want to spend your life? Living with no heat in the winters, sleeping on a paper-thin mattress, barely enough food?”

  When Isra said nothing, staring at the sizzling skillet, Mama reached out and lifted her chin. “Do you know how many girls would kill to be in your shoes, to leave Palestine and move to America?”

  Isra dropped her gaze. She knew Mama was right, but she couldn’t picture a life in America. The trouble was, Isra didn’t feel she belonged in Palestine either, where people lived carefully, following tradition so they wouldn’t be shunned. Isra dreamed of bigger things—of not being forced to conform to conventions, of adventure, and most of all, of love. At night, after she had finished reading and tucked her book beneath her mattress, Isra would lay in bed and wonder what it would be like to fall in love, to be loved in return. She could imagine the man, even if she couldn’t see his face. He would build her a library with all her favorite stories and poetry. They would read by the window every night—Rumi, Hafez, and Gibran. She would tell him about her dreams, and he would listen. She would brew mint chai for him in the mornings and simmer homemade soups in the evenings. They would take walks in the mountains, hand in hand, and she would feel, for the first time in her life, worthy of another person’s love. Look at Isra and her husband, people would say. A love you only see in fairy tales.