Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women [Hardcover]

Jean Said Makdisi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2006

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo and the United States. She is the author of Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Beirut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this beautifully written memoir, Makdisi (author of Beirut Fragments; sister of the late Edward Said) explores the lives of three generations of Palestinian women, deftly illuminating a tumultuous century of modern Middle Eastern history, while raising important questions about the efficacy of ideology, the process of social development and the role of memory. Opening with the author's birth during WWII—"my birth occurred at a particularly unromantic time: the anxiety of the war and the events in Palestine and Egypt weighed heavily on my parents"—the volume grows ever more engaging as Makdisi moves into the distant past of her grandmother Munira Badr Musa (or Teta) and her mother, Hilda Musa Said. Makdisi moves easily between dispassionate historical report and deeply felt emotion, mining first-person accounts where available and offering extensive research to fill in the gaps. Touching on one calamitous event after the other, from the devastating post-WWI famine in the Levant through the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and up to the Lebanese civil war—and explaining how the lives of women shaped and were shaped by each—Makdisi demonstrates how discussions of tradition and modernity generally miss the mark. "The word tradition is used," she says, "much more than it is explained," and women's specific histories, as they were actually lived generation by generation, are rarely taken into account. Valuable in its insights, sophisticated in its execution, this book deserves to be widely read. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* What began as an inquiry into the lives of Makdisi's grandmother and mother grew into a far-reaching and arresting explication of Arab womanhood. Born in 1940 in Jerusalem, Makdisi suffered the tragic Palestinian disenfranchisement and has lived in Cairo, Syria, the U.S., and Beirut, writing about the Lebanon War in Beirut Fragments (1990). Here she brings her exceptional gifts for deciphering complicated political and social matters to a perceptive and gloriously detailed study of three generations of Protestant Arab women versed in the conundrums of imperialism and the trauma of exile. Brilliant analysis of the influence of British missionaries in the Middle East and women's sovereignty at home informs her portrait of her grandmother (Teta is an Arab word for granny), a schoolteacher and a "feared and respected matriarch." Makdisi then reflects on her mother's unshakable convictions regarding women's role as "towers of strength" responsible for running a nurturing home and refuge from a violent world, values Makdisi contrasts with her struggle to fulfill ambitions both domestic and professional. This is an illuminating and significant work, laced with Makdisi's candid, richly substantiated, deeply felt, and unexpected insights into traditional and modern women's lives. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton; 1 edition (July 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061566
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061567
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #778,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A personal view of history through the eyes of family and change, August 4, 2006

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (Hardcover)

The impetus for this lively, emotionally engaging exploration of three generations in Makdisi's maternal line came from her conflicted feelings about feminism and the traditional domestic-centered woman's role as well as the friction between the two cultural influences in her life - East and West.

Her father was an affluent Christian Palestinian who immigrated to the US and became an American citizen. He returned to Jerusalem to honor his mother's dying wish, "but never really forgave her for deflecting him from what he had seen as his destiny in the New World." Her mother was Lebanese and Palestinian, the daughter of a strict Baptist minister and his European-mission educated wife (Teta) who was, in turn, daughter of an Evangelical pastor.

Makdisi and her siblings (which include the late Edward Said, professor, writer and pro-Palestinian activist, and the historian and writer Rosemarie Said Zahlan, who was also a pro-Palestinian activist) grew up with American passports, though she was born in Jerusalem in 1940 and grew up in Cairo.

"Until 1948, and the Palestine war, our family moved regularly between Jerusalem and Cairo. For Palestinians, the year 1948 was a time of movement, of scattering, of families breaking up and moving apart. It was a time of breakdown, of entropy." Though a child and sheltered somewhat from outside events, she recalls the upheaval in their Cairo home as a stream of relations - distraught refugees - moved through.

"In 1948 the heart of our family was torn out, and the centre of our existence was broken....It is only recently that I have come to understand how deeply affected we have all been by the Palestinian experience, how we have lived our lives in its shadow. Most of all, though we have lived well and done well and accomplished much, though we have made many deep friendships throughout the world, since 1948 we have been outsiders - not only my parents, but their children, and, I fear, their children's children as well."

Makdisi does not dwell on "the Palestinian experience" in this book, which is as much biography and history as it is memoir, but its long shadow is always visible.

As she moves backwards and forwards in time, she describes an arc - a move towards an ideal of "modernity," synonymous with westernization, that carried her grandmother and mother farther from the extended family that gave women support and strength into an isolated role in the nuclear family.

This movement began with the values her grandmother absorbed in the mission schools and culminated in her own marooned existence in an affluent Washington DC suburb, frustrated, bored and conflicted between her role as perfect mother and housewife and her ambitions to be something in the world.

A century-long embrace of Western culture is clearly to blame in her mind, though Makdisi certainly does not advocate a repudiation of all things Western. Instead she concludes her book with a call for a new synthesis of priorities, which combines the "sustenance" of home and family with a connection to the outside world. Well, sure. In the best of all worlds, anyway.

Makdisi grew up thinking her grandmother led a sheltered, isolated, domestic existence, comfortable but limited. But as she researches this book - getting her own mother and uncles to write memoirs and delving into the history of the time, a more rounded and nuanced picture emerges of a woman who endured war and tragedy, love and loss, who worked to build her husband's congregation and who, during WWI and again after her husband's death, struggled alone to keep her family together with little financial support.

Makdisi's mother, Hilda, continued the move away from Arab customs, filling her house with European furniture, dressing in the latest Western fashions, adopting Western tableware and eating habits. No one seemed to regard any of this as a rejection of Arab culture at the time - it seemed more a matter of fashion and sophistication.

Only in retrospect does Makdisi see how it isolated her mother and grandmother from other women and robbed them of matriarchal status later in life. Yet her grandmother was miserable living with her mother-in-law and the matriarchal status seemed to work best when the financial power rested with the matriarchal generation.

Makdisi makes a number of generalizations that readers may quibble with. While I don't know the joy and comfort of the extended family (and it certainly does not appeal) I do know you cannot extrapolate middle class American life from the homogenous confines of an affluent D.C. subdivision. Miserable in her isolation there as a newlywed (as I too would be) I wondered why she didn't move into town, which they could easily have afforded.

The book touches on a century of culture and upheaval - the European occupation and recarving of boundaries after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, various ensuing rebellions, the rise of Zionism in a land where Jews had always lived and the belated reaction of alarm, the bitter legacy of exile and rootlessness following the 1948 war.

She does not explore any of these events in a deep political way but rather notes how each specifically affected her family. Perhaps this is why she does not touch on certain issues, such as the practicality of co-existing Israeli and Palestinian states and the repeated Palestinian rejection of partition.

This is a book filled with rich history, cultural detail and colorful anecdotes, all of which help illuminate a place and people that seem to grow more remote and frightening with every passing day. Makdisi is a fluent and visual writer, with a foot in two cultures and her book should be read by anyone with an interest in the Arab world.

--Portsmouth Herald

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nostalgia, April 28, 2008

By 

Rasha H. Mosaad (Hoboken, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (Paperback)

I grew up in Cairo and now living in the US. I loved this book so much and relate to every word of it. I would defintely recommend it to my son to read in the future as it is a beautiful mix of sociology, history and psycology.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars memoir tells the story of three generations of Arab women, November 4, 2006

By 

J. Davey (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (Hardcover)

Makdisi's memoir carefully collects fine details of the Arab Christian history in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. In tracing her mother and grandmother's and her own personal story and the families that surrounded them, Makdisi takes the reader on a journey that shows the meaningfulness of geographical origin in the arab culture as well as the inherent ability to change, transform and relocate.

This memoir presents an opportunity to encounter in a very human way the event of the partition of Palestine and its effects on families' lives. It is broad in scope touching on everything from questions of class, the situation of women, colonialism, raising a family in a time of war, social movements and the upheaval of governments, being stateless, suffering loss...

This book is recommended to the patient reader who is serious about garnering a deeper understanding of this area of the world or the related subject matter in women's studies.

It is worth noting that Makdisi is the sister of Edward Said. I didn't realize this myself until many many pages into the book.