Women of Sand and Myrrh [Hardcover]

Hanan Al-Shaykh (Author), Hanan Shaykh (Author), Catherine Cobham (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1992

A powerful and moving novel, by the Arab worlds  leading woman novelist, about four women coping  with the insular, oppressive society of an unnamed  desert state.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four intertwined first-person narratives use poetic language to paint a hard-edged picture of an unnamed wealthy Arab desert country full of luxurious houses hidden behind high walls and women hidden behind veils. These women cannot drive or travel abroad without their husbands' permission, but they find small outlets that permit them to survive psychologically. An outstanding translation renders al-Shaykh's prose into fluid and elegant English. Suha is a Lebanese woman who has come to the desert with her young son because of her husband's job. Intelligent and educated, she finds both the heat and the culture stifling, and a sexual encounter with her friend Nur only adds to her discomfort and loss of identity. Nur reacts to the protected lifestyle she has enjoyed since birth by becoming spoiled and superficial, even demanding an abortion because she is unwilling to sacrifice her fashionable wardrobe. Suzanne, an American, has also followed her husband and his work, but once in the Arab country she becomes involved with an Arab man who calls her "the Marilyn Monroe of the desert." He worships her until the day she expresses interest in her own sexual pleasure, at which point he accuses her of being a hermaphrodite. Tamr makes her first tiny steps towards independence by attending the Gulf Institute for Women and Girls, where Suha teaches. Tamr comes home with amazing stories for her mother about the oddities she finds there, like "the American who went around smoking a cigarette in a holder." Al-Shaykh is a native of Lebanon whose sexually explicit The Story of Zahra was banned there. In this novel sex is at once a taboo and a driving force behind the lives of these four women as well as others in the community. Suzanne describes how men seek out women in the supermarket and track cars with unveiled passengers; and a ritual part of Nur's life is using a secret telephone in her bedroom to call a stranger with whom she has erotic conversations. All of the characters live in luxury and privilege but with a poverty of self-expression so chafing that it ultimately compels one of them to flee. (Aug.) .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

The realities of life in the gilded cage for contemporary Arab women--in the first US publication from Lebanese-born writer al- Shaykh. Though imbued with an urgent sense of lives blighted and talents wasted, al-Shaykh--in telling her four women protagonists' stories--makes her points by accumulating illustrative detail rather than launching a polemic. In a nameless Middle Eastern city, four friends struggle to make full lives in a society where women cannot drive a car, walk in the streets unveiled, and, if they do have jobs, must work in segregated areas. It's also a society where sex, because of all the constraints, becomes an unhealthy obsession. Only one of the women, Suzanne, a Texan there with her husband on assignment, enjoys the Middle Eastern way of life. As a Westerner, she has more freedom but, more importantly, with her marriage failing--she suspects her husband is gay--she enjoys the attention of the men attracted by her novelty. Suha, a well- educated Lebanese woman, came with her husband to escape the war- -but finding the stifling boredom worse than any bombing, and ashamed of a lesbian relationship with wealthy Nur, she returns to Beirut. Nur, the daughter of a wealthy Bedouin, is the quintessential bored rich woman who seeks sensation at the expense of her marriage to a Western-educated, would-be reformer. And Tamr, whose Turkish mother had been sent to a sheik's harem as a young girl and was married herself at 12, is encouraged by Suha to divorce and then, with the obligatory permission from her closest male relative, start a small, and of necessity women's-only, business. An eloquent and subtle plea for liberalization, as well as an evocative description of a society torn between tradition and the West. A promising debut. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: San Val (July 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417710845
• ISBN-13: 978-1417710843
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AngstGrrl review, July 21, 1998

By 

"adora" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women of Sand and Myrrh (Paperback)

A friend passed this book along to me with the usual 'You have GOT to read this...' commentary. The cover of the copy I was lent has this quote from the Literary Review:

"Marvelously Vivid. I was reminded of The Handmaid's Tale."

Being a big fan of The Handmaid's Tale , I was intrigued.

The sheer reality this book describes is disturbing. Extremely disturbing...at least to a women who was born and raised in the United States after 1969 (like me).

The book get's inside the character's heads while vividly describing what's going on around them, and the sheer maddening aspect of never really knowing what was happening outside of the walls of your home - of knowing that you had little to no real power over your existence.

It's told from the point of view of four different women, with each women getting a separate section of the book. this is an excellent way to arrange this novel because, not only do ! you get to see each of the characters from both the inside and the outside (e.g.: they describe each other), but you also get an in-depth look at life as it is for very different women. For example: Tamr goes on a hunger strike in order to force the male head of her family to allow her to go to school and learn to read, and who witnesses the brutal punishment enacted on a young woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Of all of the women, her story is the most inspiring because of her sheer determination to become self sufficient. After being divorced twice (men are able to divorce their wives at any time, and all it requires is the proper documentation which is delivered to the woman after everything is said and done. She doesn't even know what's happening until someone walks in, hands her the form, and says, pack up and go to your parents house...), she's decided she wants nothing more of marriage and manages to pull! strings and bust heads (e.g.: she actually walks into ! government offices...she's supposed to send in a man to do it for her), until she has the finances and documentation allowing her to open her own beauty shop. It's amazing what the woman had to go through to open a hair salon! Apparently, the author's first novel was banned in several Middle Eastern countries due to it's explicit descriptions of female sexuality. I would not be surprised if this novel were also banned for the same reasons.

I imagine this novel should leave a person thinking how lucky she is to be living someplace other than the Middle East, but I actually found I could relate to many things the characters described, though on a less extreme level. That's part of the reason this book is so disturbing and is so similar to the Handmaid's Tale - it's not to hard to imagine your own world becoming very similar to the one Hanan describes.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Lebanese View of the Gulf, March 15, 2004

By 

Softly, softly . . . (Champaign, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women of Sand and Myrrh (Paperback)

Having been living in the Gulf for several years when I read _Women of Sand and Myrrh_ (which was freely available at our campus library there, by the way), I was struck most of all by the novel's harsh and perhaps distorted view of Gulf cultures. For instance, the view is attributed to Tamr at one point that the Lebanese Suha has essentially brought "civilization" to her desert world, a view that resembles what I heard occasionally from Palestinian or Lebanese students studying in the Gulf but never from the local women.

Other Westerners reading the novel as a look into "the Arab world" may not realize how various, sometimes even divided, that world is and how different Gulf cultures can be from other Arab cultures--both more repressive in some ways and more egalitarian in others. (Another view of the very robust and often outspoken women's cultures in Gulf societies is offered in Leila Ahmed's memoir _Border Passage_, which includes a chapter on a stint she did as an educator in the United Arab Emirates.)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Transcending Borders, November 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Women of Sand and Myrrh (Paperback)

Yes, this novel deals with four women (Suha,Nur, Suzanne, and Tamr) living in an un-named Middle Eastern country...but the problems that many of the women face have echoes of the same problems that an average housewife experiences in Middle America...Suzanne's husband is unloving and cold, she feels fat and undesirable....Suha must live in a place that is far from her home for her husband's job, and her intelliegence is being stifled in this oppressive society, she yearns for freedom...Tamr is going to make it work, she will work within the system to achieve her dreams...and Nur drowns in her hedonistic pleasures, she alleviates her loneliness with lovers, cigarettes, and riches, yet they still don't complete her. All these problems can be found in intelligent women who are not being fulfilled by their society or men or domestic life....buried within this novel is a connection for all women.... while i read it i was enthralled with all the descriptions of food, and horrified at the heavy veils the women must wear in public and in the presence of men and the other social conventions a woman must endure...the men weren't all together despicable either, they were just humans trying to make it....This novel had universal themes (women trying to find happiness, love and most importantly self-fulfillment)peppered with vivid images of a certain type of Middle Eastern society.... a good read!