Pillars of Salt by Fadia Faqir

Why couldn't I touch the passing days, smell them, or even sense them? I would have tried to prevent the days treading over the plains of my face. You look in the mirror and see the gray hair, the lines running down the face like permanent tears, and the dimming eyes. Once, I was young and attractive. Everything around me was getting loose: my skin, my clothes, my world. A creature inside me kept shrinking and shrinking, tired of life and its treasury, it sought peace and quiet. Even the palm and orange trees were becoming harder to see. I spun and spun like a silkworm; I dug and dug the soil like an earthworm; and at night I curled my spine like a hedgehog and went to sleep under the solitary sky.

Two women meet in a Jordanian mental hospital: Maha, a bedouin woman from the Jordan Valley, and Um Saad, from the Jordanian capital of Amman. Over many days Um Saad tells Maha the story of how she came to this place: her youthful love for the Circassian Mohammed, her tragic marriage to the cruel Abu Saad, the younger wife he brings into their home, and how he shuffled her off her to get rid of her. Maha has a story of her own, one that is told to us but not to Um Saad, the story of how her husband Harb was killed by the British, and how her sadistic brother and collaborator with the British, Daffash, had her committed in order to take from her the orchard left to her by their father. Though they are from very different families and cultures, both Maha and Um Saad have been shut away in the mental hospital by the cruelties of the men in their lives.

Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt is told in three woven strands: first, the sections titled "Maha," more or less the novel's main narrative. These follow young Maha's shy love for Harb, their marriage and difficulty conceiving, and Harb's murder, as well as the posthumous birth of their son Mubarak, whom Maha considers the last remaining piece of Harb himself. Though Maha cannot read or write and understands little of the political situation, the creation of the British Mandate has tragic consequences for her and her Bedouin village. She and her fellow Bedouin women talk about the British planes as "metal eagles" that drop exploding eggs, and yet Maha and these women understand much better than Daffash, who sucks up to the British and sleeps with a white Englishwoman, what British occupation means. As the men who protect Maha disappear one by one--first Harb, then her father--she is increasingly menaced by the greedy and short-sighted men who launder their lust and greed through the patriarchal values of their religion.

A second strand, the sections titled "Um Saad," is not, as you might suspect, told from Um Saad's point-of-view, but Maha's, listening later to Um Saad's story of woe in the hospital. Um Saad's story acts as a kind of echo to Maha's, a troubling reminder that the cruelties done to Maha are the norm, not an exception. The third strand is told by a "Storyteller" passing through the Bedouin village, who witnesses the travails of Maha. The Storyteller's strand operates on a wholly different logic, borrowed from the fantastical stories of the Arabian Nights, with its djinns and demons and quests. But the Storyteller takes the side of Daffash and the men, retelling Maha's story as that of a "black widow" who seduces men with dark powers, opposed by her virtuous brother. It's the Storyteller's strand that elevates Pillars of Salt into something rather extraordinary: the spikily ironic way that the woman's story is retold by a man, and through the language of Islam. Daffash says, She is mad, and the Storyteller, She is Evil, and yet no one--not even her "sister" Um Saad--seems willing to hear Maha's version.

Pillars of Salt is part of my ongoing project to read a book from every country. With the addition of Jordan, I've read 48 countries so far!