The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story - Hardcover

Shaykh, Hanan

3.93

1,309 ratings by Goodreads

9780307378200: The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307378209 ISBN 13: 9780307378200

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

“One of the most daring . . . female writers of the Middle East” (San Francisco Chronicle) gives us an indelible work of nonfiction: an account of her mother’s remarkable life, at the core of which is a tale of undying love.

In a masterly act of literary transformation, Hanan al-Shaykh re-creates the dramatic life of her mother, Kamila, in Kamila’s own voice. And so we see 1930s Beirut through the eyes of the unschooled but irrepressibly spirited ten-year-old child who arrives there from a small village in southern Lebanon with her own mother and siblings. We see her drawn to the excitements of the city, to the thrill of the cinema, and, most powerfully, to Mohammed, the young man who will be the love of her life. Despite a forced marriage at the age of thirteen to a much older man, despite the two daughters she bears him (one of them the author), despite the scandal and embarrassment she brings to her family, Kamila continues to see Mohammed. Finally, after nearly a decade, her husband gives her a divorce. Now we are looking through the eyes of a still very young woman who abandons her first family in order to create a family with the man she truly loves, only to be left a widowed mother of five when Mohammed dies tragically young.

As the narrative unfolds through the years (Kamila died in 2001) we follow this passionate, strong, demanding, and captivating woman as she survives the tragedies and celebrates the triumphs of
a life lived to the very fullest. It’s an extraordinary story given a brilliantly realized, luminous voice.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

`Al-Shaykh is a powerful and original writer. Her artistry ... lies in the way she tells about religion, sex, marriage, housekeeping and hundreds of other human activities as they really are in the great golden cage of the desert'

From the Author:

My mother was a phenomenon to all who knew her. She lived her hard life in a peculiar comic way. My mother lied, stole, betrayed, abandoned her children. Loved, hated and said no to her family, to her society. She was also beaten, cursed, starved and adored. She lived in Beirut. Her flat was like a hotel lobby, a psychiatrist's couch, a stage. Young and old gathered around her as if they were in the presence of a comic guru. She took anti-depressants: "the only way to cope with her popularity," she told me once. I knew that she first took them to help ease her guilt for abandoning my sister and me.

Thought I never blamed her for leaving me at the age of 6, and for not being interested in me, nonetheless, I found myself building a wall between us. Throughout the years she never stopped explaining to me the reason for leaving my father to marry her lover. When I eventually listened to her story I found myself, as a novelist, face to face with a treasure wrapped in tissue paper.

- Hanan al-Shaykh

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.