A Wife For My Son by Ali Ghalem
Today I believe in the possibility
of love; that is why
I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
Franz Fanon
How very sad it is that this
novel is out of print, indeed long out of print, as it is one of the most complex,
most moving explorations I have ever read of what it means to be a Muslim
today, in this case an Algerian Muslim woman struggling hard to define herself amidst
the competing claims of traditional Islam and those of the modern world. Originally
published in 1979 as Une femme por mon
fils, it is a charged, highly nuanced treatment of the twisted, often
crippling ways in which men and women are taught—even fated—to relate to one
another by the traditions that bind them.
Writes Doris Tentchoff (so
trenchantly I must quote her at length), A
Wife For My Son “underscores the observation that the personal is political
and links the personal struggle to the world stage as it chronicles the story
of seventeen-year-old Fatiha’s determined struggle to gain control over her
life after a traditional arranged marriage to an Algerian who toils in France
as a guest worker. Drawing on the multiplicity of strands that constitute the
plight of this pair, Gahlem weaves a revealing portrait of working-class life
in contemporary Algeria. And because he probes intimate family relationships,
the books confronts the intransigent problem: how to transform structures at
the core of society—the relationships between women and men. Given Ghalem’s unflinching
feminist stance, the novel is remarkable for its lack of rancor, for the
compassion with which its main characters are depicted. Concern is not with an
abstract good and evil, but with human beings who, for historical reasons, are
locked into vastly disparate and unbridgeable worlds, each predicated on
different presuppositions and operating according to a different cultural
logic. The yawning gap in perceptions, expectations, and aspirations between middle-aged
working-class parents on the one hand, and their offspring on the other,
produces spiraling rounds of misunderstanding, conflict and crisis.”
The story, with its
trenchant exploration of the relationship between the personal and political, is
further intensified when one considers it against the backdrop of recent Algerian history, namely that of the French colonization of Algeria, a century-long period
of tyranny and exploitation that culminated in a frenzy of bloodshed and
destruction in the French-Algerian war.
Franz Fanon
At the heart of this
struggle for national self-determination, a struggle writ small in the
character of Fatiha, were such philosophers and political lions as Franz Fanon
and Albert Camus, who helped to flesh out the many tensions between France and
Algeria that persist to this day. Gillo Pontecorvo’s brilliant 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.
Albert Camus
Compared by one
critic to Ibsen’s revolutionary play, A
Doll’s House, this novel treats the condition of modern Muslim women, and
of women in general, with an even greater frankness and depth. Not only does
Fatiha slam the door on her husband, so to speak, but she renounces the entire
patriarchal system by leaving him and his family home, determined to live by her own terms,
to raise her newly born child alone. As
a final act of hope she names her daughter “Noura” or “light”.
Here, finally, is one of the few available photographs of the author:
Peter Adam Nash
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