The Story of Zahra

“The distance between me and my mother grows greater, deeper, although we have been as close as an orange and its navel.”

Because of Fatmé’s affair, Zahra begins to feel abandoned by her mother. Zahra’s loneliness thus starts while she is young, and her separation from her mother contributes to her difficult transition to womanhood. Zahra’s troubled relationship with her mother particularly informs her Sexual Repression and Shame; Fatmé’s affair is not only illicit but also a distraction from her daughter, which contributes to Zahra’s skepticism toward sex and men.

“I no longer knew where I stood, what my feelings were, to whom I owed my loyalty.”

Zahra experiences confusion as she tries to both protect her mother and not lie to her father. The rift she experiences from her mother is in part due to the difficult position in which Fatmé has placed Zahra. This evokes and foreshadows the characters’ conflicting allegiances to warring factions in Lebanon; it is one of several moments where the personal and political coincide.

“He wants to marry me because I am docile, because he has never seen my teeth, because I do not rival his own self-importance, because I am a mystery to him.”

Zahra understands that it is her docility and submissiveness that make her “worthy” of marriage in a patriarchal society. Her willingness to play to these expectations results in Majed (and everyone else, as she later notes) never knowing who she really is. This obfuscation of her own desires to pursue a husband she doesn’t even want estranges Zahra from herself.