The language and syntax of this book pulled me in immediately. Starting even just on the poem that opens section one, I was drawn to the intricate way beauty and pain seemed to be weaved together. And this continues throughout the book. I’m not entirely sure where to start analyzing the language, but I can can attempt to put my thoughts out into the world in some way.
When we first hear of Rawiya’s story it is through Nour repeating the story just as she heard her father tell it countless times, “Everybody knows the story of Rawiya. They just don’t know that they know it.” (6,7). And this line is repeated verbatim on the following page. It is such a striking way to tell a story because, and I’ll speak for myself here, I try not to repeat things too often or too closely together. So why did this line work so well in this story? And why did the repetition of this line work just as well even though we had just seen it? I don’t really know. Perhaps because we know that Nour has such an attachment to this story, we know it has to be told a certain way. Perhaps because we hear Nour’s voice tell us a story that is separate (although not entirely) from her own. Or perhaps the narrator of this story to us is Nour’s Baba, possibly through Nour. I tended to think of it as the voice of Nour’s Baba, especially after Nour admitted to Abu Sayeed that she could no longer remember the sound of her father’s voice. I like the idea that his voice and Nour’s get to create this story together.
Another thing I found myself extremely interested in was all the questions that Nour asks the reader. There are countless rhetorical questions we see while reading, and they aren’t meant for us to answer necessarily, but I do think that they are meant to make us feel something.
“How many polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?” (67)
“Is somebody sleeping in my burnt out bed? Are people coming to take our charred blankets and clean everything out and build a new house where ours used to be?” (83)
“Can the name of a street on a piece of paper prove that our family was there?” (102)
“Why didn’t I realize that you can’t just superglue a dining table back together, a house? How long will it be until we get back the things we lost?” (121)
These questions are not for us to answer, and maybe they don’t really have answers. But each one burrowed into my heart and made me take a pause in the story. For me, they seemed to point outside of the book, to the world that I’m living in, not Nour’s world. It questions my perspective as a reader, my knowledge, what I can and can’t control both inside and outside of this story. It made me think that I needed to answer these questions for myself. Which does feel like a very selfish way to read this story, but I liked that it made me question my positionality.
Hey Barrie
ReplyDeleteThe repeated phrase was one I was also interested in and how it was working on a craft level. To me, Rawiya's story sounded like it was through Nour's voice, recounting it as how she heard it from Baba. I think she mentioned how Baba was unable to finish it (lost his voice) so she had to find the conclusion and is now telling the story in its entirety. Because she says that phrase in dialogue first, I took it to mean that she was the one narrating Rawiya's sections. The repetition also worked for me because it was attached to an oral story and the use of repetition and patterns seem to be a common thing.
I'm so thrilled you're bringing up these essential questions Nour asks herself. " These questions are not for us to answer, and maybe they don’t really have answers. But each one burrowed into my heart and made me take a pause in the story. For me, they seemed to point outside of the book, to the world that I’m living in, not Nour’s world."
ReplyDeleteIt makes me think that the life advice/wisdom that adults and Huda offer to Nour are similar to the questions... they live somewhere beyond the book, in the mind of the reader well past the text's final word.
I'm so glad you pulled out these questions too. When i give talks about literature, my big line is, that literature is a centuries long discussion of the essential questions--that they never get answered but books keep them alive. That's what you illustrate here. As HJ says, they live somewhere beyond the book. good!
ReplyDeletee
That's a really interesting idea, that the story of Rawiya is told through the father's voice. As the story progressed I did start to wonder who was telling it. Nour says it's the same exact story her father used to tell her, but even her mother, who must have heard it too, told the story a different way. As I kept reading I imagined that Nour's journey blends so much with Rawiya's that in the future she won't be able to tell one without the other.
ReplyDeleteThe questions were very effective in talking to the reader without breaking the magic of the story. There were some lines that made me pause and just soak in the words, they were so moving and uncannily on point about life.