A Woman Is No Man(92)
Isra felt a deep and sudden pity, looking at Khaled. “How did you leave?” she asked.
“Ahhh,” he said, turning to face her. “For years I worked in a small dukan outside the camp. I worked until I had saved five thousand shekels, enough to buy plane tickets for us to America. When we arrived, I had nothing but two hundred dollars in my pocket and a family relying on me to feed them. We settled in Brooklyn because it was where the most Palestinians lived, but still, the community here isn’t what it is there. It never could be.”
“And you would never go back?”
“Oh, Isra,” he said, turning away to wash his hands. “Do you think we can go back to how things were after all these years?”
Isra stared at him blankly. In all her years in America, she had never stopped to consider whether she would return home if given the chance. Would she be able to eat the small meals of her childhood, sleep on that old lumpy mattress, boil a barrel of water every time she needed to bathe? Surely those were only luxuries, creature comforts that paled in comparison to community, to belonging.
When she didn’t respond, Khaled gathered his za’atar and turned to leave. For a moment his gaze drifted toward the window. Outside the sky had gone gray. Isra felt a shudder of sadness at the sight of his face. As he walked away, she wished she knew how to answer his question, how to find the right words. But saying the right thing was a skill it seemed she would never learn.
“Maybe someday,” Khaled said, pausing in the doorway. “Maybe someday we’ll have the courage to return.”
Deya
Winter 2009
For the remainder of the winter, Deya did little but read Isra’s letters over and over, desperate to understand her mother. She read on the school bus every morning, her eyes buried in her lap. In class she hid the letters inside her open textbook pages, unable to focus on the lesson at hand. During lunch she read in the library, hidden between bookshelves. Some days she even read Isra’s Arabic edition of A Thousand and One Nights, flipping page after page, searching for herself and her mother in its stories.
What was Deya looking for exactly? She wasn’t sure. A part of her hoped Isra had left her a clue to finding her path, even though she knew such thinking was fruitless—clearly her mother had never even found her own. Most days she could hear Isra’s words echoing in her head: I’m afraid of what will happen to my daughters. She could hear the voice of Isra’s mama, too: A woman will always be a woman. Every time Deya closed her eyes, she pictured Isra’s face, afraid and confused, wishing she had the courage to stand up for what she wanted, wishing she had defied Mama and Yacob, had defied Adam and Fareeda, had done what she wanted for herself rather than what she was expected to do.
Then one day in early spring, as Deya reread one of Isra’s letters, something came to her. It was so obvious she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t realized it before, but reading her mother’s words, Deya finally saw how much she resembled Isra. She, too, had spent her life trying to please her family, desperate for their validation and approval. She, too, had let fear of disappointing them stand in her way. But seeking approval had not worked for Isra, and Deya could see now that it would not work for her either.
Alongside this realization, an old voice that had lived in the back of her head for as long as she could remember—so long she had never before seen it for the fear that it was, only as the absolute truth—rose up inside of her. The voice cautioned her to surrender, be quiet, endure. It told her that standing up for herself would only lead to disappointment when she lost the battle. That the things she wanted for herself were a fight she could never win. That it was safer to surrender and do what she was supposed to do.
What would happen if she disobeyed her family? the old voice asked. Would she be able to shake off her culture that easily? What if her community turned out to be right after all? What if she would never truly belong anywhere? What if she ended up all alone? Deya hesitated. She had finally come to understand the depths of Isra’s love, which she had terribly misjudged, had finally learned that there was more to people below the surface, that despite everything her family had done, they loved her in their own way. What would she do without them? Without her sisters? Even without Fareeda and Khaled? As angry as she might be, she didn’t want to lose them.
And yet even as she heard this old voice in her head, she could still feel the shift that had just occurred inside her. The old voice was no longer strong enough to hold her back—Deya knew this now. She knew this voice that she had always taken as the absolute truth was actually the very thing preventing her from achieving everything she wanted. The voice was the lie, and all the things she wanted for herself were the truth, perhaps the most important truth in the world. And because of this she had to stand up for herself. She had to fight. She had to. The fight was worth everything if it meant finally having a voice.
Did she want to put her life in the hands of other people? Could she ever achieve her dreams if she remained dependent on pleasing her family? Perhaps her life would be more than it was now if she hadn’t tried so hard to live up to her grandparents’ opinion of her. It was more important to honor her own values in life, to live her own dreams and her own vision, than to allow others to choose that path for her, even if standing up for herself was terrifying. That was what she must do. What did it matter if her grandparents were mad? What did it matter if she defied her community? What did it matter if people thought negatively of her? What did all these people’s opinions of her life matter? She needed to follow her own path in life. She needed to apply to college.