The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series) [Paperback]

Daisy Al-Amir (Author), Barbara Parmenter (Translator), Mona Mikhail (Introduction)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0292790678 | ISBN-13: 978-0292790674 | Publication Date: 1994

Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience--that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone.

Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world.

In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 95 pages
• Publisher: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin (1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292790678
• ISBN-13: 978-0292790674
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,226,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars it's not what I expected, April 18, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series) (Paperback)

I was expecting woeful tales of life as a female in Muslim society but I was wrong. Her stories are wonderful in the context of just being a human female. She thinks of a lot of the things that I do, for example obsessing over someone else's possessions at a yard sale. Her insight into male/female thinking is very poignant. This is a bargain book and leads me to seek out other female Arab writers works.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting thematic elements, December 6, 2003

By 

"sarahmac82" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series) (Paperback)

Al-Amir writes in a minimalist style, focusing, for the most part, on small scenes of humanity. Interesting observations about the place of time within an individual person's life are explored in "For a Pittance." After purchasing a photo album in an estate sale while visiting a foreign city, the narrator ponders the idea of living in the present. By immersing herself in the history of an unknown family, the narrator is able to live in the present because she is distracted from her own personal past and future. On page 21, the narrator thinks,
"I was squandering the present that I had planned to enjoy. I had deliberately forgotten my own past so that it wouldn't disturb the serenity of my present, the present I had rescued from crisis in order to forget the past and distance me from the future. And now I was intentionally occupying myself with an unfamiliar time and place, with people who are strangers to me. In my imagination I had arranged a future for their past."
I think what the narrator doesn't realize is that only by immersing herself in the photo album is she able to live in her own present moment, a moment she is glad ends at the end of the story when she returns to her home.

A few things bothered me about Al-Amir's writing style. I am willing to attribute these minor details to lingual discrepancies, but of course I can't read the Arabic version and thus don't know for sure. Exclamation points abound, along with rhetorical questions. There are very many brief paragraphs, which I found somewhat disruptive. Nonetheless, once I got to a certain point in the book I was able to overlook these grammatical and structural issues because I was interested in the stories that Al-Amir was telling.

In the story "Oh the Waiting List," Al-Amir returns to an exploration of what is means to live in the present. The narrator is placed on a waiting list at the airport to get on a flight home. She feels as if the present becomes burdensome and overwhelmingly static because it is purely about wasting time. This resonated with me and how I feel when I travel-which is that time spent in an airport or on airplane is literally dead time.

I have to say that I loved the story "The Doctor's Prescription" simply for its anecdotal qualities. The woman's breathtakingly logical argument for why the pharmacist should give her tranquilizers belies her true motive in a very clever way. The story is brief, but actually the one that stuck with me the most after finishing the book.

In the last two stories, "A Crutch in the Head" and "The Cake," Al-Amir tries to discuss gender relationships--with mixed results. The play-like dialogue format of "A Crutch in the Head" was off-putting to me at first. I'm also not sure why she separated the dialogue into five line "stanzas." Nonetheless, there is a certain universality of her depiction of the argumentative man and resigned woman. The dialogue format also piqued my interest and served her purpose, I think. I found "The Cake" to be a more powerfully written story. Again, she uses the dialogue format, but in doing so also gives the reader a context in which to understand the story. I think Al-Amir's message is that women protest through tears and men through anger. They each do so because they think that it is the only way to get a response.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Waiting List - An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation, December 7, 2003

By 

Kim Glover (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Waiting List: An Iraqi Woman's Tales of Alienation (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation Series) (Paperback)

The Waiting List is a book that depicts the emotional struggles of Middle Eastern women. The short stories could all be talking about the same person at different times in their life. The author Daisy Al-Amir lends to us her insight into the various issues facing women in the Middle East. Each story, though short, leaves us with a lasting impression that is emotional and thought provoking. "The Umbrella" tells what it is like to be a woman who lives for the approval of her spouse with no self-image. Her friend finds her walking in the rain but barely recognizes her because of her bad appearance. The story called "Weeping" was about a mysterious weeping at night and no one was able to tell where it was coming from. In this story, our heroin brings a different meaning to being in touch with nature. I like the creativity in the weeping. In "A Doctor's Prescription" the woman used intelligence for the wrong reason. I want to withhold what she did because it would be giving the story away. Nonetheless, it shows an intelligent woman who lost hope. "A Crutch in the Head" brings to us a female who confronted her husband with the issues that made her unhappy.

What I liked most about this book was the author Daisey Al-Amir. She was strong enough to cross boundaries and bring us stories that appeal to people all over the world. During times of war in her own solitude she reached outside herself to create. I feel a kindred spirit with her and I appreciate the different sides of women that she was able to portray through her short stories. The stories were in depth enough to be interesting and short enough for us not to get bored.