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The fictional accounts of women’s experiences in Fadia Faqir’s, Pillars of Salt, illustrate issues articulated by women’s rights activists in the Middle East. Traditional roles of women and men and a mythology of femininity and masculinity are juxtaposed with the disparate realities of the characters. The damaging forces of colonial rule, war, and Westernization are also exposed.
I focused particularly on Pillars of Salt, because it contains very sophisticated juxtapositions of women’s reality and mythological accounts of women. It also demonstrates that issues of gender roles are much more complicated than a hierarchy of cruel, powerful men, bent on tradition who maintain the system and progressive women who are helpless to resist or oppose it. For example, the villains of the narratives, Daffash and Um Saad’s father and husband, represent perversions of traditional masculinity. Daffash the ‘more progressive’ (I use this phrase ironically) male character, does not adhere to his traditional duties to his family, to the extreme detriment of his sister and father. The novel does expose the flaws of a system that conditions women’s happiness and well-being on the idea that the men in her society will act in her interests. Also, many of the female characters trust in and are loyal to ideas that inhibit women’s ability to obtain rights and freedoms.
The Islamically based conception of equality between men and women is “an equivalency of rights and duties so as to ensure complementarity” (Egypt’s reservations to Article 16, which regards marital law, of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women). This ideology which appears in most religious doctrines (not only Islam) contends that a man’s natural role is that of protector and provider, while a woman’s is that of a dependent and homemaker. Furthermore, women are often seen as a symbol of cultural preservation and a measure of family honor. In conditions of war and colonial rule, which represents an attack on men’s honor and dignity, attention to women’s roles as prescribed by cultural tradition is often intensified. However, the unusual conditions of war and resistance to colonial rule also may provide openings for women to reconfigure their roles and rights, based on new needs of society.
People are fed dreams, stuffed with dreams the way I used to stuff the hens with grain. Suddenly you discover that what you have been eating all these years is dust and what you have been drinking is just thin air. (p. 223)
In this section of the paper I would like to examine character’s relation to and the ways in which they internalize the mythology of their culture. The book displays many elements of mythology which are quite removed from actual experience and yet become a part of characters’ identity and gain a certain power in their minds. The storyteller’s narrations are an obvious example of a sort of mythology. He voices a stream of rumors of the village garnished with religious invocations which lend his tales legitimacy. The love songs (as well as the cinema), which play a particularly key role in Um Saad’s narratives, are another imaginary depiction of a woman’s experience, which guide Um Saad to beliefs of what she may expect from life and love. The recurring references to eyesight, seeing and blindness, concern the struggle to make sense of real tragedies at the cost of dreams, and the misfortune born from a failure to see the hollowness of these beautiful, luring dreams until it is too late. A tension between past, present and future, between memory and forgetting is another related theme. Much of the interweaved lore of the novel, pertains to the governing of sexual desire, an image of women as sinful seductresses, and notions of honor and purity.
The female characters of the novel are shown to contribute to the survival of many of these notions. Maha’s connection to her mother is particularly symbolized through her weaving, which demonstrates Maha’s recognition of the importance of preserving and giving some form of representation to women’s experiences and also of the power which may come from a bond between women. However, even her mother’s advice seems flawed. Concerning Daffash’s cruelty, Maliha says, “What do you expect? He is a boy. Allah placed him a step higher. We must accept Allah’s verdict.”
Legitimizing a power structure between women and men, which prescribes certain roles and rights, through religion, is a dangerous and ultimately detrimental practice. Women’s submission to this ‘verdict’ and its implications is a source of extreme misfortune. The storyteller is a perfect example of the danger of blindly deeming religious tradition and religious reference as truth. The Prophet Mohammed’s vision of Islam was ultimately meant to be one of justice, and an argument of many women’s groups is that it must be adapted in order to continue to create systems of justice under new circumstances. (Islam also recognizes that both women and men have sexual drives and the right to sexual fulfillment.)
There is also a disparity between Maliha’s warnings about men, and Maha’s relationship with Harb. It is clear that many of the notions concerning gender roles are obstacles to real connection between women and men, the realization of love, and that the imagined differences between men and women can create both a concrete and a psychological separation. Though Maliha intends only to protect her daughter, the message, which she imparts, that sexual contact is a degrading experience for women, is actually part of a patriarchal system which keeps women compliant and powerless to define their own fates. Power is directly related to freedom, and by burying such strict boundaries regarding female conduct in women’s minds, they become accustomed to compromising their desires and choices to accommodate social norms.
Maha is conflicted, torn between her love for Harb and her fear of losing honor and pinning her fate on a man that may be like her brother. Her reservations come partly from the words of her mother:
May Allah protect all women from misery, bird of prey, and shame. My mother told me that men were birds of prey; they chased the quarry as long as it was alive and struggling, but when they had killed it and filled their stomachs, they look around for another. (p. 16)
This is also an example of the ambivalence connected with sexuality. Ultimately, Maha’s experiences refute her mother’s and the village’s association of sexuality with a loss of honor. She struggles with the expectation that a woman must not respond to her lover’s touch, must not show or yield to her pleasure, and her experiences quickly overcome the mythos:
I would not listen to old advice. My body burst with heat and life. No, I would not follow my mother’s advice. Forgive me, mother. The look in his eyes was one of respect and delight. So he didn’t look down on me, because I kissed his forehead. (p. 54)
Maliha’s advice is an example of how women internalize the ideas of purity, threat to honor, and the means by which they can survive within an honor/shame-based system of sexual relationships. Lama Abu-Odeh explains the mechanisms by which this internalized philosophy is enforced and implanted:
Through an elaborate system of commands and prohibitions, girls “learn” their performance at a very young age. The culture guard itself against possible violations by devising sanctions less violent than death that are meant to preclude it, such as physical abuse, spatial entrapment, segregation, the institution of gossip and reputation.
(Constructions of Honor and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies, p. 372)
Maha’s experiences of sexuality with Harb represent a degree of enlightenment which allows her to disregard some of the imparted notions about sexuality. However this enlightenment is not enough for her to develop a full fledged realization of the need to resist and oppose limiting forces of the village. (Another example of a stranger accommodation is Nasra’s choice to twice save Daffash’s life, despite the fact that he raped her and stole her chances of ever having a family.) Maha comes to see her husband as the source of her joy and freedom, her paradise. Though love with a respectful, just partner is one source of empowerment and can provide what may seem to be a relatively large amount of freedom and fulfillment, it proves to be a mistake for Maha to rely wholly on Harb’s grant of freedom and status. Because of her devotion to her husband, and to embodying the image of a perfect wife (by becoming pregnant with a boy as quickly as possible), she does not focus on a need to reform the belief systems of the village and assert her own experiences of truth or consider what her position might be if Harb was not there to ensure her happiness and freedom. (Whether she would have had much opportunity to reform her society, even if she had been more active and cognizant of the importance of reformation, is uncertain.) “I must get used to sharp angles for the sake of my newly born love,” she reasons (in regard to the architecture of her husband’s house). This demonstrates the reason that control of women’s sexuality is “the most powerful tool of patriarchy in most societies.” Women come to associate and justify their sacrifices and accommodations with the attainment of sexual pleasure and love. Although, this initially works out for Maha, Um Saad is an example of a woman who never receives the promised love and sexual fulfillment, despite her submissions. She laments her fate having realized that the fates portrayed in tales and songs are often beyond the reach of real women in her society: “I will never be able to get out again [of the mental hospital.] I am not a character from the One Thousand and One Nights.”
There are even moments/passages where the storyteller admits that his own stories, which symbolize rumor and cultural mythology are not timeless truths, and that there is a danger in fashioning one’s life to accord with them:
The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider’s house, if they but know. . . . what I have woven for you so far is as frail as the spider’s house. A puff of air, tiny drops of rain can wash the spider out and destroy his thready shelter. We shall perish soon. (p. 62)
Unfortunately both Maha and Um Saad only fully recognize this danger after they have lost most of their powers of resistance.
Maha is also able to recognize the disparity between the idealized vision of women and the reality, particularly on her wedding night:
Jarbwa was recounting the story of Umayma. The listening air carried his words to the ears of women. He listed the outstanding traits of Umayma. She was virtuous and pure, yielding and beautiful, generous and brave. When I looked at the rough faces of the women in the ill-lit tent, I realized that the Umayma the men were praising only existed in their own heads.
She charmed me, veiled her face from my sight,
For pure and holy is Umayma’s name.
Slender and full in turn, of perfect height,
A very fairy she, if beauty might
Transform a child of earth into a fairy sprite. (p. 24)
Our bride is green, green.
Her cheeks like apples.
Sprinkle jasmine flowers.
Light candles, burn incense.
I was neither green nor apple-like. I was nineteen years old and my muscles ached with exhaustion. (p. 42)
The vision of the justice of complimentarity is not a reality. In this vision women’s obedience to male relatives is in exchange for their protection and care, and their responsibility to provide for her. The women of the village work very hard for their families, but are given no corresponding increase in rights and freedoms. Achieving the ideal of femininity which is honored in these songs, is an impossible endeavor. Yet, Maha is misguidedly drawn to transform herself into something like this image, as an expression of her love for Harb. Or perhaps too, she is content to enjoy the luck of marrying a man who does not impose such unrealistic expectations on her, and doesn’t completely realize the consequences that these false visions of femininity have in many women’s lives. The contradiction in thinking, between a recognition that the portrayal and expectations of women are unjust and inaccurate and her simultaneous wish to embody ideal traits of femininity, appears earlier in the book when her friend’s fate is ruined by loss of virginity and immediately after, she struggles with the question of whether to visit Harb in the night. She is able to both celebrate her preserved virginity, accept that the rape of Nasra must mean that she had no hope of future love, and understand that repressing her own desires and submitting to the village’s mandates regarding propriety was a form of cowardice and weakness. So she sees her actions as both virtuous and as a failure of character:
Turn your head slowly on the pillow, shut your eyes firmly and forget Harb. I stretched my trembling hands, held my thighs and sighed deeply. Some words in my head. Repetition. Echo. I was a virgin – white as a dove – as pure as dew drops – a virgin –honey in its jars. . . .
I must have lost the love of Harb. Why should he love a coward rabbit? My mother was responsible. She had told me not to give in to men. Men, she had said, believe that women are angels who descend from the seventh sky. I was a bedouin woman, free like a swallow and as courageous as my grandmother Sabha. I should have listened to the call of my heart.
(p. 13-14)
Maha also challenges the image of men as protectors particularly through her inner challenges to the function of Raai, the village watchmen, who “guards the honor” of the women of the village:
Raai was busily protecting the honor of the women of the tribe. How could he protect the women from their dreams? (p. 148)
Where was the mighty watchman when Sheik Talib tried to attack me? The village was blind. (p. 163)
She sees that men are really only protecting the supremacy of their own desires. Women’s sexual desire could be a source of pleasure to them; it was men’s power and force that would really be harmful. She might also have asked where protection was when Nasra was raped, or when she was attacked by Daffash. Her challenges also begin to uncover the existence of opposing views, which are used as justification of male “protection”/control of female sexuality, of women as victims in need of protection or of women as aggressors who must be controlled in order to protect society from immorality and chaos.
An even more stark representation of the ambivalence toward sexuality, and the empowerment that it can grant women is delivered by the storyteller’s narratives. His tales consistently depict Maha, as possessing some sort of evil, magical, sexual power. His accounts of the watchman’s and his own experiences, witnessing evil sexual dramas of Maha, are marked by the witnesses’ sexual arousal (and in the case of the watchmen, multiple references to an inflicted sterility.) Pinar Ilkkaracan explains this ideological phenomenon:
While the “explicit” theory of female sexuality depicts women as passive subjects who seek pleasure in surrender and subjugation, the “implicit” theory as reflected in Imam Ghazali’s interpretation of the Koran “casts women as the hunter and the man as the passive victim.”
(Introduction, p. 5)
In the first chapter of the book, the story teller casts Maha as being born out of the earliest struggle between men and women, born from the injustice of the first female child “killed in sin” because she was not a baby boy. He also says, “Her [the murdered female child] cry echoes in female hearts calling for revenge. That’s why no man can trust his wife, no Lord can trust his mistress.” This fear of women’s mobilization to enact revenge on men for their historical oppression serves as a justification for continued male control, at least for the purpose of male self-interest. The power that women derive through sexuality (since sex is essentially a naturally equal exchange) is very threatening to the system of male supremacy. Also, by placing sole responsibility for sexual acts on women (after all, no one is very worried about protecting male honor through virginity), men try to evade any accountability for their own sexual conduct, and evade also the problem of the illogical imbalance, in the application of standards of sexual conduct, between men and women. Daffash’s assertion that the two women he rapes were begging him for it, and that his “manhood did not allow [him] to let her go without giving her what she asked for,” is another strain of this evasion of responsibility and blame. The storyteller’s account of the consummation of Maha and Harb’s marriage, entirely divorced from reality, shows the fear of active female sexuality and its threat to the power structure:
He was resisting her spell by pushing his head out of the water. She trying to capture his soul by immersing him in that sea of demons. A piercing shriek penetrated my bones when finally she managed to possess his body. The man was crying. Every part of my body was uncomfortably wet.
(p. 61)
Land, like sexuality, is perceived as a site of power. The storyteller’s accounts also portray Maha as seeking material wealth, particularly through possession of the farm. There is an interesting link between the power of female sexuality and of nature, as unconquerable forces. The importance of defense of control over land and control over women also intersect with the threat of colonial forces. Colonial domination does not only represent a misappropriation of land ownership and control. Colonial powers often also seize control of and alter social, cultural and political systems (law, education, justice). And as verified by this statement by Grande Kabylie, a French colonial judge in Algeria, “It is through women that we can get hold of the soul of the people,” (The Colonial War in Fact and Fancy, The Eloquence of Silence, Marnia Lazreg, p. 49), colonial powers are not reluctant to manipulate native women in order to subvert any sense of power that native men may hold onto.
Forces of change and modernization brought by the British are pronouncedly negative. This link between modernization and Westernization or colonial dominance still arises as an obstacle to progress in Middle Eastern countries. Maha, however, can see that certain aspects of modernization (the magical spray for her orchard) can improve the condition of the natives without becoming a part of the disruption of society that the colonial order imposes. Daffash, on the other hand, represents the corrupting influence of the British. Maha’s father grieves that “My son is lured by the city lights. He navigates by false stars.” Maha’s reaction to the “freedom” of the British women, which she sees as simple immodesty, highlights the point that Middle Eastern women may see evidence that they have gained rights and freedoms, in a much different way than Western women.
Though much of the storyteller’s tales are quite falsified, he occasionally delivers a grain of truth. His imagery of the monuments in Petra bear a strong parallel to the language that Maha and her neighbor use when describing the treasure that their bodies represent, which they would prefer to cover, rather than exhibit like the British women (so that their husbands feel, when they sleep with them, as if they have “conquered the cities of Andalusia.”) :
After fingering every wall, touching all the ceilings, and eyeing every pinnacle, I realized that the place will never be demystified, regardless of my efforts. . . . the insignificance of humans who engrave, dig, carve, then die, who are always outlived by dumb stones and blue sky . . . Petra will remain mysterious, unconquerable. . . . Both are locked box of jewelry lined with velvet and full of gold, turquoise, and pearls that you can imagine but can never touch with your trembling eager fingers. (p. 58)
On some psychological level, man’s relinquishing control over women, is surrender to the idea of his own insignificance.
The outcome of the novel seems to be a depressing defeat. Just as Maha acquires a strong spirit of resistance and the women of the village begin to bond together and mobilize to protect each other, Maha is sent away to be imprisoned in the mental hospital. However, this possibility of mobilization and connection between women is a point of hope. Maha, looking down on the village comments:
The women of Qasim were running around busily. Black spots which looked like active ants, no more, no less. All their lives, they sweat and dig the soil to build nests for their men and children and at the end they die and are forgotten. Ants without names, past, or future. (p. 145)
Maha’s and Um Saad’s disillusionment and realization that the imposed roles of women ultimately serve only to disempower, are a necessary step in developing this spirit of resistance. Maha also comes to realize that the nobility of Arab resistance to colonizers (as embodied by Hakim and epitomized by her husband’s battles and sacrifice of life) is also reflected in women’s resistance to patriarchal domination. The bond that she and Um Saad form while in the mental hospital is part of this spirit of rebellion, which they occasionally exhibit by lashing out at or laughing at the British doctor.
There is an interesting contest between the desire to forget the painful memories of loss and defeat, to become blind, to sleep (and perhaps return to dreams), and the importance of retaining the knowledge and the recognition and this spirit of resistance that comes from seeing the harsh reality which the women inhabit. Although Maha sometimes succumbs to the desire to forget, she also encourages Um Saad to recount her painful story, and reminds her that the mental hospital is not a paradise, not an escape, but an ultimate defeat.
The fate and struggles of these characters address the tragedy of the under representation of women’s experiences, and a fatal flaw of societies which do not grant women equal status. Sexuality, privileging of males in terms of status law (and women’s control over their own choices in marriage), inheritance rights, restrictions on female mobility, lack of representation of women’s experiences, violence against women, the intersection between nationalist/ resistance struggles and women’s rights, tensions between modernization and cultural preservation, the haunting specter of (and the need to divorce their goals from those associated with) colonial or Westernizing forces, etc. are all issues represented in this book, that are major concerns of Middle Eastern feminist scholars and movements today.