I purposely avoided reading the works of other Palestinian American novelists making their ways into the world as I wrote Too Soon. When I looked up, I saw my book would be a part of a literary wave I had no idea I was riding, an artistic movement, that felt particular to the Palestinian American experience.
When I encountered books like Salt Houses by Hala Alyan and A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum, I saw I was one of three very different Palestinian American novelists who wrote three very different books that took the same form. Though unusual for a debut novelist to tackle a family saga the first time they are at bat, we had all written intergenerational immigrant tales about one family that centered heavily on the women’s impact upon each other.
What does it mean that several pioneering Palestinian American novelists wrote in a way that feels particularly our own, to begin our books written in English by giving voice to our matriarchs, who were born in different world and spoke a different tongue?
Perhaps, as it was in my case, we cannot tell a coherent tale about our experience of making our homes in the world without grappling with the legacy of the women before us who lived through the loss of theirs. Without understanding them, we cannot understand ourselves.
It’s also notable that we women writers, who live and work in America, are rather ungenerous towards the grandmother figures in our books. Rather than depicting them as meek, as is the pervasive perception of women from that world, we characterize them as almost too powerful, particularly in relation to other women.
What does it mean that several pioneering Palestinian American novelists wrote in a way that feels particularly our own, to begin our books written in English by giving voice to our matriarchs, who were born in different world and spoke a different tongue?
They make choices for their progeny that are distasteful at best, disastrous at worst. These matriarchs traffic in subterfuge, especially about their own agency. While these Palestinian grandmothers are different religions, temperaments, and classes, none of them are to be totally trusted.
In Salt Houses, we begin with a mother packing off a sobbing daughter to marry a benign but rather unsavory man in Kuwait without deigning to consult her daughter about a different suitor who would keep her in Palestine. Though she is a sympathetic character who makes a safer choice for her daughter out of love, she never lets on that it is she, not her husband, who is ultimately calling the shots in such matters.
Nor does she question the godlike power of a parent to dictate a daughter’s choices. So, if the daughter wants someone to blame for an unhappy match, her grudge will be with her father or the patriarchal society, rather than her mother’s role in upholding it.
In A Woman Is No Man, we see a mother ignoring the obvious signs of intense physical abuse that her son inflicts on his young wife. To her granddaughter, she tells unbelievably elaborate lies. The outrageousness of the falsehoods seem to be the point. You only tell lies of that scope with the knowledge that you will inevitably someday be caught, and it won’t ultimately matter that much when you do.
In the first chapter of my book, Too Soon, we find a grandmother who, despite having chafed considerably under the yoke of marriage and motherhood, rings up her last unmarried American granddaughter to unsettle her about her life choices and cajole her into focusing on finding a man in time to have children, though the freedom of being an unfettered artist and intellectual is exactly the kind that the grandmother always craved.
I was surprised when the grandmother of Arabella, the main character in Too Soon, demanded a role as a narrator. I thought I was writing a breezier book, like the novels I gravitated towards and deeply appreciated about Manhattan life.
“My book is not behaving,” I complained to a friend.
It’s as if Carrie Bradshaw’s granny, who survived the Potato Famine and maybe didn’t have a great time as a single girl on the boat to Ellis Island, demands to have her say and show why buying extra shoes and attaching herself to a man feels so life-and-death for Carrie. So, it becomes inescapable for readers to see how the lives of our grandmothers’ generation do more than echo, but actually shape our own. Who wants that?
“I do,” she mused. “And apparently so do you.”
I wasn’t the only one. My takeaway from writing and reading other sagas about three generations of Palestinian American women in this current cultural moment was that redemption takes many forms.
It’s myopic to believe the powerlessness we feel in the face of so much unrelenting violence, an impotence so immense it cannot be fully processed, will not inevitably affect how we parent, probably not all for the good.
Though not all of the cycles of intergenerational trauma have been broken, some had been. Against all odds. Miraculously. If we women storytellers have freed ourselves from being silenced, that meant we were given tools do so, no matter how imperfect.
Through the act of uncovering our grandmothers’ secrets, we writers face the dark truth that we will soon contend with secrets of our own. We are living through a time that is arguably as traumatic as any other in the Palestinian story. It’s myopic to believe the powerlessness we feel in the face of so much unrelenting violence, an impotence so immense it cannot be fully processed, will not inevitably affect how we parent, probably not all for the good.
We will, one day, be the matriarchs whose fingerprints leave traces of how we have tried to move the next generation forward, never knowing all the ways we are still holding them back.
Our sense of powerlessness also affects our writing. In that way, among others, the arts are not a level playing field. It is harder to get to your desk when it is harder to get out of bed in the morning, to value your work in a society that does not value your life.
I chose not to read the works of other Palestinian American novelists as I wrote Too Soon, since I didn’t want exposure to influence my artistic process. How many deliberately avoid these works because they don’t want to be influenced by tales that expose our common humanity? Because they know that will make change inescapable?
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Too Soon by Betty Shamieh is available via Avid Reader Press.
