No Place for Grief by Buch Segal Lotte;

Author:Buch Segal, Lotte;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Layla’s words convey the equivocations by which patriarchy is simultaneously evoked and sidestepped, out of her family’s concern for her wellbeing. Accordingly, Layla both understands and rationalizes the practice of polygamy, though she would do everything in her power to avoid it. Layla did avoid it, but at the cost of remaining unmarried until she was nearly forty, which is socially awkward for a woman from a village in the West Bank.

Although it is tacitly known, her sisters do not mention the fact that Layla was close to Mahmood, the son of her oldest sister, Khuloud. They came of age together, were friends, and talked together about everything, Layla recalled. He was engaged to another woman before he was detained, but she broke it off when she learned he had received a life sentence. According to the notion of endogamous patrilateral kinship, relatives on Layla’s father’s side are preferred as suitable spouses for her. This means that the ibn ammi (father’s brother’s son) is considered an ideal husband. However, since Mahmood is Layla’s sister’s son, he is out of the range of men available for Layla to marry for different reasons than marriage preference: both have nursed from Layla’s sister Khuloud, Mahmood’s mother, something that is still practiced in many Levantine families (Clarke 2007). According to Levantine notions of riḍā‛ (milk kinship), this means that Layla and Mahmood are “milk-siblings,” which renders them nasab (connoting a consanguine relation) and thus barred from marrying (Clarke 2007: 382).

However, Layla did marry. She got engaged in January 2011 when a widower from the village who had emigrated returned in order to find a spouse to replace his first wife, who had died of cancer after twenty-one years of marriage, leaving six children behind in a large city in the United States. He proposed, Layla accepted, and the engagement party followed shortly thereafter. A couple of months later he returned for the wedding and a few weeks before my next visit, the newlywed couple had returned from a lavish honeymoon in Turkey. Layla was not to follow him to the United States until four months later, when the paperwork came through. Layla proudly showed me the photos from Turkey and sported a new jilbab with a matching head scarf every time I saw her during my two-month visit. Little gestures told me that her status in the family had changed substantially. Her niece Ibtisam, who is the daughter of her older sister Khuloud, lived with Layla, Amina, and their mother, was now the one who served the guests, cooked, and cleaned, while Layla was treated like a guest of honor. She was also the one who gave the children a few shekels to go to the shops and would time and again discreetly make arrangements to pay for her sister’s and niece’s phone cards when credit on their phones had run out. Layla was glowing and exited to move to America. One night when we walked together to Amina’s new house, I asked her how she felt about leaving behind her family in Dar Nūra.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.