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The Story of Zahra

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A Lebanese writer now living in London, al-Shaykh has been praised as the Arab world's leading woman novelist. Her Women of Sand and Myrrh was a breakthrough in its revelatory descriptions of Arab women's lives.

The Story of Zahra has been banned in seven Arab countries because it candidly addresses of a personal and political nature.

Zahra, a child of the Shia community in south Lebanon is deceived and abused by her parents. To escape, she seeks a haven with her uncle who is living as a political exile in West Africa. Regrettably, he, too, seeks to use her as "the key to making contact with my past as well as my future."

Returning to Beirut to escape a loveless marriage, Zahra finds a strife torn city ablaze with civil war. There she misguidedly enters into a liaison with a sniper in the hopes of saving others. What would her life be like if the violence and gunfire would ever end?

The Story of Zahra is a chillingly told story of a woman's search for peace in a world ravaged by war.

In response to the Lebanese reviewer who knows "everything" about being Lebanese.....this book is purely fiction! However, the author, herself being Lebanese used different aspects of Lebanese culture and society as a setting to her beautiful and saddening story. The story is set upon the horror of civil war and the breakdown of society that inevitably occurs as the war drags on. The story is not supposed to be a true story or one that you could find happened to a typical Lebanese survivor of the war. It is, however, a story about how war can destroy the very fibers of a person's life who is not a member of any warring faction. It is truly a heartbreaking story of a woman-child who struggles to hold onto her own sanity. From, Another Lebanese

The Story of Zahra is about a girl who has never matured into a woman, despite her years and experience. Trapped in her inability to conquer the world within her, Zahra lives as a victim, perpetuating her own dilemma, attracting the disrespect that she holds for herself. She was never given the tools to empower her identity in her own social construct, always searching to understand the mess complicating her situation. Zahra has a resistant spirit that is grossly contaminated by an obedient attitude towards anyone who wishes to use her or degrade her emotionally. Never has she been instructed or taught by observation the ways of carrying ones self in this world to aspire to something better. Zahra has an extreme faith in her own failure and lacks any aspirations, wallowing in defeat daily simply because she exists. The cultural setting for The Story of Zahra makes it difficult for me to appreciate the book for all it is worth. This is because it perpetuates dominating stereotypes that have been delivered through social learning and Westernized media in the United States, leading its citizens to believe they are more evolved than "savage" people in foreign lands such as the lands this story takes place in. Zahra's story is universal despite our not having a war at home, social entrapment is a curse that so many face in every different society. Free will is governed by circumstance that demands compromise, diverting us from our intentions. The seriousness of this opposition to our motivations ranges from person to person along with the affect it has on ones autonomy and opportunity. Also one's ability to overcome these constraints against personal liberty powerfully navigates his or her range of options. Zahra is obviously broken. Almost everyone she comes in contact with in the novel is broken as well, but they are at least adjusted to their incapacities. Zahra is a strong fighter on the inside; she does not succumb to an adaptation for happiness. She does not force herself to find some sort of a false contentment with things that fully displease her, she holds disdain for them. Her struggle remains to be her perceived inability to grow as a female and create her own situations. Her life's purpose becomes by default a reason for other people to feel superior, giving everyone who comes into contact with her a false sense of power. She lives and breathes dehumanization, becoming an object or a tool with no matter. The deconstructive chaos that is war relieved her for a short while from her silent struggle, until it became a new world of pain. She is a masochist, and just as she talks of taking on pain like a sponge, she activates it in her own doings by letting everyone walk all over her.

I found this book, The Story of Zahra, amazing. I never even figured out what the end would be until I reached it. Then I had to ask, how could I be so dumb! I read this book in a matter of hours and was totally engrossed in the story. It really highlights the psychological life of a Muslim woman in Lebanon and how her behavior affects others. I disagree with the reviewer who believes that Zahra has a "psychological disorder." I think that she is a normal woman forced by convention and an oppressive life into behaviors she would never engage in if she was permitted more freedom and an ounce of respect. Zahra is never a person with self-determination but owned and controlled by others. She is eventually treated as a mere comodity.

This book althought set in a world very different than my own, can be seen as universal. The trials of Zahra before the war and after the war show how a troubled woman with psychological disorders manages to survive in a somewhat difficult world. As an Arab woman with a psychological disorder, she is an outsider.

As Salwa Bakr notes in The Wiles of Men women are often seen as silly and crazy when they have psychological disorders.

Although the depiction of the war may not be as detailed or accurate as many wish, that is not what Al-Shaykh is trying to convey with this novel.

She is showing how the war is a catharsis for poor Zahra. While everyone's attention is towards the gory and war fears, Zahra is not pointed out as crazy and strange, she is able to live her own destiny.

This book is a page turner...highly recommended

The Story of Zahra is a book that could have been great but ends up being a mishmash of cliches and stereotypes. Not only does it not accurately portray Lebanon or its history, it also incorporates most of the Orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Arab culture.

The character Zahra is not a sympathetic or even empathetic character and is reduced to being a very one-dimensional victim. She is a very pale shadow of the main characters of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Siri Hustvedts's The Blindfold. Zahra's monolgues are badly written and reminscent of a teenagers diary ramblings. None of the other characters have any dimension, being flat caricatures.

The ending of the novel is quite shocking and powerful, had the author focused more on bringing the rest of the novel up to the level of the ending, it would have been much better.

This book will keep you glued to your seat waiting to see what happens next. "The Story of Zahra" is a powerfully haunting portrait of a young Lebanese girl whose innocence is lost by rape, abortion, abuse, and civil war. This book shows Zahra as a very troubled girl with very complicated relationships both physically and mentally. Zahra is shown to be full of self-deprivation and to have mental problems. Early on we see that Zahra is used as her mother's scapegoat, and from that spawns an unhealthy understanding of love. From her first encounter with Malek, we can see that she feels like nothing. She allows him to have his way with her again and again. She descends further into madness with the sexual encounters with her uncle and Majed. Only during her encounters with the sniper does Zahra become alive. It's during this time of war and madness that Zahra does find herself. In the novel Zahra gives a description of herself that describes her the best way possible.

Here is Zahra, the mature girl who says little; Zahra the princess, as my grandfather dubbed me; Zahra the hard working- student - quite the reverse of her brother , Ahmad; Zahra, in whose mouth butter would not melt, who never smiled at any man, not even her brother's friends. This is Zahra- a woman who sprawls naked day after day on a bed in a stinking garage, unable to protest at anything. Who lies on the old doctor's table... (al-Shaykh, 40)

This book is written by Hanan al-Shaykh, and she was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She is a contemporary Arab writer, and follows in the same vain as Nawal El Saadawi. Being a woman in an Arab society her work is influenced by the oppressive nature in which women of her time were raised. As a Lebanese writer she has pushed the boundaries for Arab women. She writes freely about sex, rape, sanity, illegitimacy, abortion, and divorce. Because of this openness in her books she has been banned in some Arab countries. As a matter of fact with "The Story of Zahra" she had to pay to publish the first copies herself because no one else would publish them.

At first I didn't know what to expect from this book. I settled right in with al-Shaykh beautifully crafted story that I felt as if I was right there in the middle of the story. This book is very heart wrenching and you are there beside Zahra for each twist and turn. You will want to have the tissues on standby. For those of us who are not privy to the details of the Lebanese Civil War or any war it gives great insight on what war does to both a person and a country. I would highly recommend this book to everyone over the age of 18. From the ages of 16-18 it would depend on the teenager and if they could handle this raw telling of a coming of age story.

This book is the story of a young woman, Zahra, negotiating life in Beirut before and during the Lebanese Civil war. She experiences domestic abuse and a dubious affair with a man at her job. After two abortions she leaves Lebanon to live with her uncle in Africa and gets married to another Lebanese expatriate. Zahra and her husband divorce and she moves back home to Beirut to recover from psychotic episodes and the electric current therapy she receives as treatment. When she returns to Beirut, the civil war is in full swing and Zahra experiences both the personal danger and the social freedom given to her by the war. Al-Shayk also addresses the struggle for Lebanese men in their society and in war, showing that patriarchy and oppression in societies affect everyone. Unfortunately, as is the case with Zahra, these men react to these problems by hurting the women around them.

The book is not all dismal, though, Zahra finds empowerment in her life and learns ways to negotiate the world around her. This book is beautifully written, interweaving timelines, and multiple narrative voices, and complex symbolism. Reading this book was an incredibly fulfilling experience for me because of how richly Al-Shayk weaves her narrative.

Al-Shayk effectively explores the ways in which women and their bodies have to negotiate patriarchal societies and war. Zahra's story shows the reader the ways that people's needs and expectations, as individuals as well as nations, affect the psyches of women and young people. Al-Shayk shows just how burdensome other people's desire for connection and identity can be. The symbolism she uses creates a rhythm throughout the novel which pushes her reader onward.

This book is an important look into the hearts of people before and during war time. It makes the reader think hard about what we do and how we hurt others in our struggle for wholeness (whether we try to find it in love, family, revolution, education, or war). If you are looking for a history of the Lebanese civil war or life before the war, this is not it.

Zahra is the story of one young girl, who could be many young girls, but one girl nonetheless. Much of why Zahra turns out the way she does is because other people have projected so much onto her. People expect her to be perfect for her family, for her country, for her religion, for the men who want her. She becomes so ingrained in the identities they give her that the Zahra underneath crumbles into despair and madness.

This book gives voice to a person previously silenced. Al-Shayk gives Zahra and girls like her the power to reveal and explore who they are in the context of the world around them instead of being engulfed by the world.

The concept of "woman as nation" in the Arabic world has been an ever-evolving consistency. It has commonalities that transcend nations, religions, and time periods--and it has peculiarities and specifics depending on the nation, the culture, the religion, the time period, the place, the family, and the individual. Hanan al-Shaykh's protagonist Zahra puts all of this on display. Zahra is Lebanon. She is Lebanon during the civil war. That is how all of the men--perhaps with the exception of her grandfather-- see her. And that is how she sees herself. Her mind takes on this role, as does her body.

In the first half of the novel, Zahra fights against this pressure. She goes inward. Al-Shaykh's writing forces us the readers to feel Zahra's anxieties. This is by no means a light reading. Do not read this to learn a few things about Arabic or Lebanese lifestyles, issues, masculinities and femininities, sexualities, or wars. You will learn, but you will do so primarily through the emotions al-Shaykh's writing demands.

By no means is the novel a drab, drawn-out sob story. The chain of events sounds better than anything Hollywood creates these days: Zahra begins in her home country of Lebanon as a young girl whose mother drags her to extra-marital sexual encounters; naturally, Zahra engages in her own secretive pre-marital sex. She then visits her uncle in North Africa, and al-Shaykh gives us his narrative viewpoint along the way, as well as the viewpoint of one of Zahra's lovers, and both of these narratives provide us with layers of material on masculinity to dig our minds into. Within all of this, al-Shaykh warps time. She forces us to question the idea of narration itself, the reliability of it. At many points throughout the story, Zahra seems like the most anxious human being imaginable--yet her feelings are somehow easily relatable, even to the Westerner, and even to the sheltered Westerner. You will empathize with her, scream at her, and use her as a tool for your own self-reflection.

Zahra returns to Lebanon amidst the chaos of the civil war. There is violence. There is a brother addicted to hash, and to his gun, and to his military brothers, and to his conception of time, and to his perception of power, all of which stems from his masculinity. And there is Zahra. The war invigorates her. You feel the life the war gives to her, her sympathy, her pain, her passion, her sense of time, her body. She risks her life, in many ways, to save her people, as she sees it, all in an attempt to explode her mind and body from the oppressive patriarchal systems that created her very image--both her societal, Lebanese image, and the image she projects onto herself.

For Zahra, the war places her anxieties in perspective, and al-Shaykh allows us to see how in many ways, Zahra's anxieties symbolically produce the Lebanese civil war. All of this growth in Zahra culminates in her relationship with a rooftop sniper--one of the most intriguing relationships I have encountered in any novel. All of the relationships in this novel will grip you; if you ever thought the political and the personal were inherently separate, al-Shaykh will change your mind. But it is not the relationships or the story's plot which make this a worthy read. Al-Shaykh's writing, her construction of Zahra's mind, her warping of time, her ability to make you feel, will keep you reading. You will think of time and narration differently than you did before. You will think of your body and its relationship to politics, family, and fighting oppression in a new way, whether you are a woman or a man. I highly recommend this book, especially if you enjoy complexity and intricate writing, and have some time to think.

When Time Magazine asked its readers last year to nominate the great men and women of the last millennium, only one Iranian found a place on the list: he was Jalaleddin Mowlavi, better known as Rumi, the poet. This was not surprising to those who know that poetry represents the pinnacle of Iranian literary achievements. Iran, also known as Persia, is one of the half adozen or so nations that can be described as truly poetical. " Wounded Rose" introduces three contemporary Iranian poets who have tried to continue a tradition, dating back to almost 1100 years, in three different ways. Mrs. Simin Behbahani has revived the " ghazal" or sonnet form,injecting it with fresh vigour by introducing topics of contemporary life and concern. Nader Naderpour provides a bridge between classical and modern. Naderpour, who died in exile at the age of 70 in February 2000, was by far the best loved Iranian contemporary poet. Although his work was banned by the Islamic regime in Tehran his poems, including those he wrote in California where he spent the last 18 years of his life, continued to attract a wide readership in Iran-thanks to samizdats and pirate editions. Naderpour is the only Iranian poet to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, and many believe he would have won the honour had he not died in exile. The third poet introduced in this volume is Yadollah Royai who represents the avant-garde school of modern Persian poetry. At first glance his poems appear too abstract, too surrealistic, almost alien to the tradition of Persioan poetry. But a closer reading reveals how deeply Iranian he is. The three poets represent three distinct voices in modern Persian poetry, a veritable treasure that deserves to be known to a wider audience outside the Persian-speaking world. Thanks to a number of good translations, Rumi has been a best-selling poet in the United States in the past few years. The three poets introduced in this volume are children of Rumi. Getting to know their work is pure pleasure.The book includes a long introduction that narrates the history of modern Persian poetry and discusses some of its principal themes. The non-specialist reader could skip the introduction and go straight for the poems which are a real treat. A Reader in London