The Locust and the Bird

June 1, 2009
Al-Shaykh, a Lebanese journalist and author of six novels (including Story of Zahra
), finally succumbs to her illiterate mother Kamila’s haranguing to write her story. The result falls somewhere between memoir and biography as she recreates and undoubtedly takes literary license with her mother’s history. Kamila and her brother grow up in poverty, estranged from their father, until their mother moves them to Beirut to live with their older siblings from her first marriage in the 1930s. Soon, one of their sisters dies of rabies and the family marries 14-year-old Kamila unwillingly to the widower, Abu-Hussein, 18 years her elder. Kamila torments her husband to show her displeasure, but bears him two children by the age of 17. Her starry-eyed love of the cinema is all that assuages her unhappiness but also fuels her affair with a man her own age, Muhammed. After the 10-year affair has shamed both their families, she is granted a divorce from Abu-Hussein but must leave her two daughters behind, including the author, Hanan. Kamila has five more children with Muhammed. Though at times Kamila’s life feels overly condensed, the author’s journalistic talent reveals itself in her ability to get past her own abandonment to paint Kamila as a vivid, willful girl who lived as though she were the heroine of a great film.

June 1, 2009
The memoir of Kamila, a Lebanese Muslim woman whose novelist daughter (Only in London, 2001, etc.) takes on the voice of her mother to tell her story.

Al-Shakyh begins in 1932, when her unschooled mother was also seven, living in poverty in a village outside Beirut. After she moved to Beirut to live with extended family, Kamila, whose views of life were shaped by romantic movies, fell in love with 17-year-old Muhammad. Forced at age 14 to marry her widowed, much older brother-in-law, she had her first child at 15 and her second (the author) three years later. Older family members took care of her children while the pretty, cunning Kamila stole money from her husband, mocked him at prayer and carried on an affair with Muhammad. Eventually she divorced, leaving her children behind, and married her lover. Marriage to Muhammad, however, was far from romantic, and she was soon overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running a household and exhausted by multiple pregnancies. Muhammad's accidental death left her a widow at age 34 with five children to support. Especially vulnerable because she was a woman who could neither read nor write, Kamila somehow kept her family together, though the details are vague. She evaded or conned creditors and surrounded herself with women who gave each other moral support. The author tells less about the later years of her mother's life, part of which she spent with family in Kuwait and later San Diego, where she appears as an unhappy, isolated woman and an interfering mother-in-law. The author returns to her own voice to end her mother's story in Beirut, where Kamila died in 2001. The picture that emerges of a devious woman struggling to make her way in a rigid, male-dominated society is clear, but the prose is often trite and the chronology murky. A dramatis personae and occasional footnotes aid readers unfamiliar with Lebanese history or Muslim culture.

An unflattering portrait, perhaps exacerbated by an infelicitous translation.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2009
After the death of her mother, Kamila, in 2001, Lebanese author al-Shaykh committed herself to telling her mothers story, in her own words. Tricked into marrying her deceased older sisters husband at age 13, Kamila bears him two daughters, the second being the author, before shockingly divorcing her husband and marrying Muhammad, the man she has loved for years, leaving her daughters behind. They have five children before Muhammad dies in an auto accident at 38, leaving Kamila, 34, to raise the children alone. Al-Shaykh interjects Kamilas personal story with accounts of the violence and civil unrest that rocked Beirut from 1975 until the early 1990s and caused Kamila to flee to Kuwait, then the U.S. to stay with two of her children, then finally, after 16 years, back to Beirut, where she lived alone, her seven children all living abroad, exiled by war. After Kamilas death, Hanan puts aside her old resentments to tell her mothers remarkable and poignant story, and gradually comes to understand all her mother has been through, and how she survived.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)