Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
A Novel
Title: Evil Eye
Author: Etaf Rum
Publisher: Harper
Publication Year: 2023
ISBN: 9780062987907
Rating: 5 stars
One of my book clubs previously read Etaf Rum’s debut novel A Woman is No Man. I found that book sad, but also powerful and when I came across this proof copy of Evil Eye, Rum’s second book, I was excited to bring it home, where it has been on my TBR shelf for almost a year. I finally got around to reading it and I was not disappointed.
The story centers around Yara, a Palestinian-American woman feeling unsettled in her life. Growing up in a traditional home in an isolated Arab community in Brooklyn and watching her mother undergo years of abuse from her father, Yara looked forward to her marriage as a path to freedom. She marries a man named Fadi at nineteen after only meeting him twice. He seems open to giving Yara the freedom she has yearned for in their married life, but ten years into their marriage, she is still unfulfilled.
Shortly after their marriage, Yara left everything she knew behind to move to North Carolina. Despite getting pregnant almost immediately and then having a second child shortly after, Yara still managed to finish her college degree. Having her degree, Yara feels compelled to succeed in her career working at a college and wants to teach, a desire that remains mostly unrealized at her current job. While she isn’t completely satisfied at work, the constant pleas from her overbearing mother-in-law and husband for her to quit her job and stay home with their kids seems like giving up and feels like it would be empty for Yara.
However, after Yara explodes at a coworker for making a racist comment to her, sticking with the status quo isn’t an option anymore. She is ordered by her boss into therapy with a white male therapist she doesn’t want to open up to. Her boss tells her she has to get more involved with her colleagues even though she doesn’t want to. Through this mandate, she meets Silas, a colleague who has recently come out as gay and divorced his wife. He is getting ready to fight for shared custody of his daughter. Despite having little in common, Yara finds a kindred spirit in Silas and gets the emotional support from Silas she has always wanted in her marriage.
While she experiences having a close friend for the first time, things at home do not improve. Fadi is still distant and doesn’t seem to take Yara’s wants and needs into consideration, she feels at a distance from her daughters as well, and she is haunted by the family life she experienced growing up. Everyone tells her she has a good life and she should be grateful and stop complaining, but that doesn’t fill the void she feels inside.
When Yara’s work contract is terminated after the first semester, she suddenly finds herself the stay-at-home mom and housewife that she never wanted to become. However, she uses her time to paint and journal and slowly starts to uncover some of the things that have haunted her from her past. Still feeling unheard and at odds with her husband, she starts seeing a new therapist unaffiliated with the college.
In her work with her new therapist, Yara learns about generational trauma and how the trauma of her grandmother and her mother, the Nakba, domestic violence, and a lack of freedom have all trickled down to her. She knows she doesn’t want to pass this trauma down to her daughters and she will have to save herself. When it becomes clear to her that Fadi has been lying to her and manipulating her, in addition to not taking her wants and needs into consideration, she knows that it is time for her to demand personal freedom, even though it will make her an outcast in her family and her community.
While the book can be heavy and emotional throughout, it does end on a positive and hopeful note that I found really emotionally rewarding and satisfying. It focuses a lot on the Palestinian-American experience and the ways that feminism looks different to women in different ethnic groups, but I think a lot of the ideas about the complexity of mother/daughter relationships and the ways generational trauma impacts families is more universally relatable.
What is really interesting to me and what I often think about in terms of Evil Eye and A Woman is No Man is the way Rum depicts the Arab community. In both books, characters are understandably frustrated and angry with people giving credence to stereotypes that portray Arab women as confined or limited by their culture and sometimes religion (the narrator in this book is not observantly religious). However, the relationships Rum’s narrators experience and witness in those around them often feed into those stereotypes. I think some of it is a desire to express that while some relationships do fall into that stereotypical pattern, we see patriarchal power structures in every culture and ethnic group and that it’s not the problem of just one culture or religion. In this book, Yara also expresses the idea a couple of times that while white American women talk about being liberated, women are still sexualized and kept up to impossible standards of physical appearance and beauty and that isn’t really freedom either. I definitely see her argument. I think the point is that true freedom is for women to be able to dress or act in the way that feels best to them without being shamed for it either way.
I think this book is also important because it looks at the way the violence of the Nakba impacted not just those who lived through it but the generations of displaced Palestinians that came after them. While Yara was born and raised in America, her grandparents’ homes were stolen from them and they lived in tents in refugee camps. They eventually managed to build homes in the camps, where Yara’s parents were born, and then her parents left Palestine for a better life in America. Despite never having even seen the land her grandparents were born on, Yara feels connected to their lost homes and she is still impacted by her family’s dreams to be able to return home. She has fond memories of visiting Teta (her grandmother) in Palestine and many of her paintings are of the beautiful scenes she remembers there, and she has memories of her grandmother showing her the key to their old home and Yara asking her to be able to be the one that keeps it someday. The losses their family suffered in the Nakba have deeply impacted Yara’s life and her personal development even though she was born in America decades later. To fully understand the complicated situation between Israel and Palestine, understanding the history of the situation and its impacts is essential.
I do wonder how much of this book is autobiographical. Like Yara, Rum grew up in an insular Arab community in Brooklyn. She was also married at 19 and moved to North Carolina where she had two children in rapid succession while trying to complete her education. In previous interviews, she has expressed that her books have led her to be ostracized from her community, a concern that plagues Yara with every decision she makes. Of course, these similarities don’t add up to this book being autobiographical, but the rawness and depth with which Rum is able to write about Yara’s experiences make it feel very authentic. Yara doesn’t walk an easy road, so while I hope Rum’s experiences differ from Yara’s, I do wonder how much of Rum is in this book.
While a difficult book emotionally, the writing here is masterful and the pacing keeps the reader engaged without lags or any parts that might have been edited out. The shifts between Yara’s day-to-day life and her journal entries about her childhood gradually paint a full picture for the reader so that they are learning information about Yara as she is processing her own experience. I felt Yara’s fears and frustrations and even though our lives are radically different, I found common feelings that I could relate to. So far, I’ve been extremely impressed with Etaf Rum and I’m excited to see what she comes out with next.