Brooklyn Heights (Modern Arabic Literature) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

am really, really, really enjoying Brooklyn Heights. she is a wonderful writer!!!!
What a powerful book.You are a wonderful writer. I have many questions now about the book and life!!
El-Tahawi's new book, Brooklyn Heights, reflects a new style in Arabic literature today by exposing human weaknesses like spousal betrayal and abuse, and feeling like a stranger among strangers in an alien society.
The characters of Brooklyn Heights, led by the betrayed Hend, are both challenging and innovative because they mirror Miral's personal obsession with bearing witness to a cruel world full of miserable women coming from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The novel is full of meticulously collected female characters, presented by el-Tahawi with their unusual life experiences in New York's famous neighbourhood.
El-Tahawy created these complicated characters to illustrate how an Arab woman feels and lives against all odds in Western society.
Brooklyn Heights is a brutally honest narrative that traces these women's battles with family, society, country, religion and abuse when they decide to live in the US.
The novel details their lives from childhood to the consequences of their choice to leave their homelands and live in Brooklyn Heights, away from the patriarchal values that still hold sway in Middle Eastern and North African countries.
The novel delves into taboo topics, primarily sexuality and religion, to uncover the Middle East.
The characters of el-Tahawi's novel offer young readers a tool for understanding the Arab world because it describes different women, who were raised from an early age in authoritarian societies.
In Brooklyn Heights, Hend, an Egyptian, describes how she was raised in a society where women have no place, and that was why she decided to escape with her daughter to start a new life and forge new links with different people.
Brooklyn Heights portrays deep portraits of these ill-fated women, without damaging their dignity. It also reflects the social context in which el-Tahawi created them, providing a glimpse of life outside the Arab world.
As usual, she is ahead of her time in exploring these women's lives.

Miral al-Tahawy's latest novel is an autumnal narrative that takes the form of a cartographic exploration of an Egyptian emigrant and her child in a neighbourhood of Brooklyn in New York.
The central character in the story is an almost middle-aged woman who escapes her native country and ends up in Brooklyn, amidst a plethora of displaced, outcast and diverse ethnic communities.
Tahawy's style combines several techniques of storytelling; there is a hint of magical realism, ethnographic writing and a deftly -weaved memoir.
Like the narrative, the protagonist is heavy, weary and in a constant state of existentialist ennui. When not in danger of an emotional breakdown, she relishes her own sense of inadequacy and incompetence, in an almost self-exalting manner.
The story is at its best when Tahawy employs parallelism in the narrative as she explores the neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The reader is at once taken across the bridge, the park, the avenue juxtaposed to the village where the character lived, the Cairo her parents used to know, and for every cartographic survey there is one just the same of her homeland.
She has a keen eye as she dissects the various immigrant communities in New York and it seems that Tahawy did a great deal of research, not only the demographic distribution of the various immigrants but also in their everyday lives.
There are a lot of shapes, colours, sounds, languages and religions and Tahawy is comfortable and her language adept enough to capture all these shades and nuances with elegant mastery and calm ease. Yet the high point of her writing comes when she complements her narrative by images of her homeland.
The hint of magical realism that seeps through the narrative is not the apparent appeal of using fantastical elements, but rather the inherent conviction of the characters in the verity of how they perceive their reality.
As an accomplished writer Tahawy does not judge what her character thinks or believes when it comes to describing her homeland. Her prose is filled with a certain musicality and vivid imagery, and the protagonist's nostalgia adds the right shade of grey over the entire narrative, truly reinforcing the idea of narrating through past regression.

The village she used to know is filled with old women whose lives were shaped by social forces beyond their control. While not exactly a feminist critique of Egypt's patriarchal society, she endows those women with enough agency,? (by agency I mean moral and subjective capacity) ingenuity and uniqueness that removes the bitterness of oppression.
There is the Christian grandmother (grandmother of the heroine), taken as a slave girl, and who in spite of never being accepted by the other members of the Muslim family, is respected for her wisdom and 'dexterous hands'. The recollection of her Christian grandmother is redolent of the scent of peppermint, camphor and musk.
Yet the bitterness remains. All through the streets, the bars, and the men she meets and the men she met, the protagonist is at loss of how to reconcile herself with the men in her life and the men around her. She plays different types (the saint, the victim,) and still remains at odds with which role she ought to play. She chastises herself for never being able to play the role of the mother or the seductress and using a lot of cinematic references; she describes her life as a stereotype of the good wife ignorant of how her husband is cheating on her in a typical Zahrat al-Ola (Egyptian movie star famous for roles of innocence and victimhood) film.
She fails to relate to the men she meets in Brooklyn and they fail to understand her.
At the heart of the story is the almost futile attempt of humans to relate to each other and the kind of connection they strive to achieve.
In a final coup de grace and in a typical autumnal narrative, the heroine identifies with the life of another Egyptian emigrant who escaped from Egypt a long time ago, is finally able to 'find herself' and abandoned her husband and child (the heroine is an emigrant and she find another Egyptian female emigrant's life "allegedly" similar to her).
The resolution of the story leaves a lot to be desired and one wonders why Tahawy chose that her character should identify with a marginal dying character, rather than that she finally succeeds in creating her own ending.
Brooklyn Heights (the story itself) is memorable not only for giving voice to marginal, oppressed, sometimes silent female characters but for evoking a vanishing world of those forced to leave their homeland and is filled with 'winds of longing' and distinctive scents.