Western Mold -JK

            From the very beginning, while the book sets out to properly portray “colonial Egypt” it seems to be playing heavily into the twisted Western notion of how people in the Middle East live.

            Amina the wife is subservient, happy to be locked away from the world, content with her chores and the birds on the roof. She is meek and subservient, to the point where she is almost eager to wake up and take care of her drunken husband every single night. Only once are we shown any sign of resistance, when she looks back and remembers a “polite objection to his repeated nights out. His response was had been to seize her by the ears…” Now she is content with her marriage that gives her a “type of security based on surrender”.

The way her children treat her can be seen as a continuation of her husband’s contempt towards her. She admits that she cannot contain her rowdy bickering children, and her daughter insults her only to be told a pray in response.

            Amina’s obsession with the “jinn” and constant need for prayer to restrain the ghosts around her immediately set off alarm bells, her mental state is called into question, and one can only wonder if she was always like that or if her marriage caused this imbalance.

            The only place she feels strong is in the kitchen “here she was queen” and from this comes the only way she can get complements from her husband, on her “perfect food” (14)

            Sayyid’s character fits into the mold of the wild Middle Eastern man, horrible to his family and drowning himself in booze. His thirst for alcohol is matched by his thirst for women

“…professional women entertainers of today are the slave girls of yesterday, whose purchase and sale God made merciful”

            He is presented as a boisterous drunk who despite being well liked by his friends, is seen a terror to his own children. “When they [the children] were in his presence they would not even look at each other, for fear of being overcome by a smile…” His departure is describes as a prison guard releasing the shackles on the prisoners.  

            The daughter who is said to be beautiful, Aisha, is described in a very western sense of beauty. “She has a white complexion suffused with rosy highlights and her father’s blue eyes…she had golden hair”. While it is not as if such traits cannot be found in Egypt, the entire combination can be seen as a Western ideal.

            So far the book seems to be fitting quite well into the Western mold that has been created for the people of the Middle East.