Miral al-Tahawy's The Tent

 

The Tent / Miral al-Tahawy
trans. from the Arabic by Anthony Calderbank
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000, c1995.
95 p. 

This is another novella I picked up recently, focusing on Fatima, a young Bedouin girl in the Sinai desert. She and her many sisters live in women's quarters while her wealthy and nomadic father is mostly elsewhere. Her mother suffers severe depression since she can only bear daughters - she has miscarried sons. Fatima's grandmother despises all her granddaughters for not being boys, and she is cruel and foul-mouthed about it all. 

Fatima is the youngest, and seems to have a gift for second sight, although it might just be a trauma response to everything she sees around her. For a brief time she's taken up by a French anthropologist, who seems to see her as another element in her collection of Bedouin items, like all of her horses. Soon enough Fatima's future ends as she is returned to her home, where she ends up unmarried and living in a small hut on the property as she continues to see things differently from everyone else. 

This was fascinating for its look at Fatima and her sisters; they spend time doing each other's hair, embroidering clothing (her sister is renowned for her skill, which seems a little obsessive, perhaps it's her way of dissociating) and seeing their cousins. As her sisters are married off, we also see some of the customs and rituals of marriage, and also some of the outcomes. 

This was interesting but again there was a little too much uncertainty about what was real or what was Fatima's imagination, at least for me. She isn't able to function well in the society she's stuck in, and while that is a theme that is explored here, and shown clearly, as a reader I found the timelines and situations a bit confusing. That could be because I am not familiar enough with the setting or the writer to get the allusions and deeper meanings of some of the symbols or metaphors here. I thought the writing style was overall really strong, and I may try one of her other books to see how I like it.