The refugee crisis is one that needs to be talked about, and despite this book’s many shortcomings, it did, at least, do that. It doesn’t do so as welThe refugee crisis is one that needs to be talked about, and despite this book’s many shortcomings, it did, at least, do that. It doesn’t do so as well or as powerfully as I hoped, but it is one of the few positive things that definitely cannot be discounted. It’s just a shame, because it could have been so much more.
This is clearly a book that panders to a white audience. From the offset, the book was obviously invested in creating characters that were human by relating various anecdotes that would make these characters more ‘relatable’. I have nothing against this - in fact, humanizing marginalized characters is something I always support, but it was done so transparently and ineffectually here. It felt forced and artificial, the characters two-dimensional and not existing beyond these few characteristics that defined them. The writing style doesn’t help either - for the most part it’s clunky and painfully detached, and doesn’t pack any of the emotional punch you’d expect for all the dark, harrowing scenes there are throughout. But it doesn’t end there.
One of the main things that bothered me about how this ‘humanization’ took place was that the characters weren’t particularly religious, and it seemed like a decision made to make them somehow more easily relatable, to show that Islam comes in different shades. I just couldn’t see how this was a wise decision here, having the majority of the protagonists not do casual things like pray or wear a hijab, while having the ISIS characters enforce these things in an extremely violent manner. The only time Islam was ever explicitly talked about was through the mouths of these radicalist characters. I’m not blaming the author’s intentions here, I’m just saying that despite the obligatory claim that ‘ISIS is not really Islam’ that’s slipped in near the beginning, all actions and evidence in this novel fail to support this, for the simple fact that there isn’t much explicit Islam outside of this, and that’s a very poor piece of negligence on the author’s part, especially when dealing with an already demonized religion. But it doesn’t end there.
From there I noticed how awkwardly didactic the book would get at times, explaining in very transparent ways about the political situation in Syria, namely the problems with ISIS and the rebels and the Assad regime. The problem is, that’s where the discourse stops. Every time politics are brought up in any way, it stops short of mentioning anything about the involvement of the US or any western powers, for that matter - the brunt of the blame, the brunt of the origin of all the suffering, falls on the shoulders of the Middle East and the Middle East alone. If a book is going to be incredibly direct in its discussion of politics, then there is absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t have come up. But it doesn’t end there, either.
And so the pandering continues. Moving down to a smaller scale, from these large political ideas about who’s to blame for this whole crisis, down to the plot itself, and what happens to our main characters as they attempt to travel west and escape the tragedies of Syria. The blame, again, continues to fall on the Middle Eastern characters. You have the portrayal of the treatment the refugees receive at the hands of the Turkish starkly contrasted against the welcome they’re met with in Greece. In one place, they are described as being treated worse than dogs (there is a literal scene where the main character looks at a dog being fed and says this, in case this wasn’t clear enough to the undiscerning reader), exploited, forced into prostitution through desperation, being cheated out of their money, and generally taken advantage of. In the other, they’re welcomed by (predominantly white) saviours from across the world into a refugee camp, given shelter, food, and clothing. But it doesn’t end there.
In the whole book, the author tries to discount some of the misinformation spread about refugees - tries to paint them in a different light. Tries to show that the suicide bombers and the rapists are an infinitesimal fraction of a larger whole. She says all these things, trying to justify the presence of refugees in a foreign country, while never touching on the treatment these refugees face at the hands of the people they turn for refuge to. She never touches on the harassment, the attacks, any of that. She shows the ugly side of the Middle East, not even attempting to cover it up, bringing forth incredibly incomplete arguments that don’t support the point she’s trying to make, without even bothering to show any of the flip side - any of the ugliness that exists outside of it.
And that’s my main problem with the book. The way it’s framed, the way everything is told, it’s like the root of all evil lies at the heart of the Middle East, and you have these broken people trying to escape it as best they can, while bringing some of that evil along with them. I’m not saying this is the message the book is trying to get across - I’m saying this is the message that ends up getting across when the author fails to acknowledge half of the issue, sweeping it under the rug for whoever’s sensibilities it is she’s trying not to offend. And despite the fact that this is a book that talks about such an important issue, and tries to portray it in such a realistic and harrowing way, this isn’t the type of book that you can make mistakes in, no matter how good your intentions are, and I cannot support it because of that. If you’re looking for a book about the refugee crisis, this is not the book to pick up. I suggest Mohsin Hamid’s Exist West, which deals with much of the same content, while not being riddled with all this pandering and overall ineffectual storytelling....more
This is officially the worst book I’ve read, ever, which is not something I say lightly. It’s a contemporary young adult novel set in Saudi Arabia thaThis is officially the worst book I’ve read, ever, which is not something I say lightly. It’s a contemporary young adult novel set in Saudi Arabia that’s supposedly meant to bravely expose rape culture, but all it does is expose the author’s own islamophobia and girl-on-girl hate. Now, it’s a subtle islamophobia, and I suppose a subtle hate if you’re not looking for it, and maybe that’s why it’s gone largely unnoticed so far. But if anything, it’s more glaringly harmful for its subtlety. Let me take you on a tour through this novel, across the dozens upon dozens of quotes and bookmarked pages, and maybe I’ll be able to make myself a little more clear.
Let’s begin with the fact that Tanaz Bhathena clearly did no research when it came to Islam – which is sort of concerning considering she wrote an entire novel set in an Islamic country. Oh, sure, it seems she knows lots when it comes to the religious police, throwing around everyone’s favourite word, Sharia law, but the history? Apparently the accurate portrayal of that is beyond her. She seems to know a wonderful amount about bridges in hell and eternal damnation, but when it comes to common burial practices? No, not possible, sorry.
Okay, whatever, these are little things, right? Who cares if she doesn’t know that Muslims don’t get buried in coffins or that the three wise men were indeed Zoroastrian priests, that’s not harmful is it? Well, if only it ended there, I could have forgiven this book its shortcomings and moved on with my life.
Let’s move on to the actual Muslim characters portrayed in the novel, shall we? The main character, Zarin, is Zoroastrian, as is the love interest, Porus. The main Muslim characters you see throughout the novel are 1) the religious police 2) Mishal’s family and 3) Farhan’s family. And as far as fucked up representations go, these three really take the cake.
The religious police: do I really need to say much about them? It seems pretty self-explanatory. They’re a constant threat lurking throughout the novel – reminders that girls must cover up their hair, that unchaperoned interactions between unrelated boys and girls are Not Allowed (funny, that this is only mentioned when Zarin is with other boys, but never when she’s with Perfect Porus), and… that’s pretty much it. Is there any talk of the Muslims who are oppressed by the religious police for their beliefs? The fact that the religious police don’t follow any religion, and are pretty much one step short of being ISIS? Of course not, that would be an almost… positive and accurate portrayal of Islam wouldn’t it? And we can’t have that, obviously. But, ultimately, the religious police are a background thing – they don’t really take centre stage in this novel. That’s where the two families come in.
Enter: the two Muslim families closest to the heart of the story. In one, you’ve got a man who abandoned his first wife for a second, because polygamy is a totally common and normal thing (spoiler: it’s not). You have Mishal, a sixteen-year-old girl whose marriage prospects are “limited to creepy grooms nearly twice or thrice [her] age.” (spoiler: this is also not common, despite what every wonderful portrayal of the middle east would have you think). Mishal, whose brother tells her, after his friend attempts to assault her, “Have you learned nothing about men and the necessity of a proper hijab? Or did you want his attention?”. A brother who says that “A woman’s honor is like a tightly wrapped sweet. If you unwrap a sweet and leave it lying around, you expose it to everything out there. If, by accident, it falls into the dirt – tell me, Mishal, will anyone want to eat it?” Mishal, who lives in a society that believes that sex is something that a girl should “[suffer] through like a proper virgin.” (spoiler: also not true). All this, while Abdullah reads porn magazines, smokes, dates multiple girls, and Mishal the prude watches, scandalized. Not to mention the fact that since their father moved out to live with his new wife, he’s legally the “guardian of the household” and this is something that’s not questioned, even once, by anyone. What a great, wonderful, functional family, right? What a fantastically positive portrayal. But it gets worse.
Farhan’s family is where things start to get properly disgusting. How is it first introduced? Here are the actual first lines of Farhan’s point of view in the entire book, no joke: “They were going at it like dogs, Abba and the maid. My father, who my mother said I would look like when I got older – tall, dark, and handsome – banging the maid so hard that he banged the headboard against the wall and left a mark in the paint.” Yeah, a great start, isn’t it? So aside from a cheating father (because the only two Muslim fathers portrayed in the novel have to be these disgusting men who can’t possibly have a healthy relationship with a single wife, it’s impossible), you have the disgustingness that is Farhan himself. Farhan, who’s most renowned as being the school heartthrob. But unlike your usual YA contemporary heartthrob, because all these characters are Muslim, and thus must be degenerate somehow, right, this one drugs girls to get with them, sexually assaults them, and rapes them. On a regular basis. How wonderful, right?
Thus ends the part where I talk about how terrible each of these characters are, and we can move on to more of the general horrors that make up this book. If my above description hasn’t been clear enough, I’m just going to say it: you have the female characters portrayed as these sexually repressed individuals, completely lacking agency, while pretty much the only reason any of the male characters (aside from Perfect Porus, who wants to get to know Zarin for who she is, like the great non-Muslim guy he is) live is for sex.
In general, this book’s obsession with sex is seriously ridiculous. The entire first third of the novel, the only things that happen are that different people have sex, think about having sex, or judge other people for having sex – that is literally it, I’m not exaggerating in the least. Yes, teenagers are hormonal. Yes, they think about having sex a lot. But that is literally the only thing these characters are characterized by. None of the girls have any hobbies, other than gossiping about boys and hating on other girls (and by other girls I mean Zarin). There is not a single healthy girl-girl relationship in the whole book. In fact, the only relationship in the whole book that can actually be termed healthy is the one between Zarin and Porus. Funny, isn’t it?
There’s a lot more I could go into, honestly – the astonishing relationship between Zarin and her aunt (who started shaming her niece at the age of four for “spreading her legs and sitting like a boy”), the slut-shaming rampant throughout the whole book, the idea that a girl has to bleed when she loses her virginity, the inevitability of arranged marriage for not only Mishal but all the female characters, the objectification of girls for their boobs (seriously, there is a concerning hyperfixation on boobs for some reason, you’d think this was written by a white man because this is almost titting down stairs level boobery), a debate that only seems to show domestic abuse as normalized in this society, and more.
I can hardly begin to explain how damaging something like this is – a book that’s being lauded as this brave exposure of misogyny and rape culture, but is written in such bad taste. The context of this book makes the whole discussion fraught with damaging implications, and the lack of any good, or positive, or normal characters in the whole book to counterbalance all the shitty ones is really inexcusable.
This book was more Indian culture rep than Muslim rep to be honest. The characters are mainly Muslim by name, and while that's cool for people out theThis book was more Indian culture rep than Muslim rep to be honest. The characters are mainly Muslim by name, and while that's cool for people out there who can identify with this, I didn't end up getting any of the painfully relatable content I came for, which was disappointing. Review (possibly) to come. ...more
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