THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

Salma Ibrahim is a Bedouin girl growing up in the deserts of Jordan.  Salma loves her family, her life helping her mother, cooking in the open, eating under the fig trees and tending her goats.  But she stayed cautious of her brother, Mahmoud, who abused her.

Once grown, she falls in love with a man from another tribe who seduces her; she is in love, and willingly meets him in secret.  After she becomes pregnant, he denies her.

Salma, for the transgression, is sent to prison; there, she meets other women who have suffered abuse.   Salma delivers her baby and names her Layla before the tiny girl is taken from her.

Salma’s brother is determined to kill her to restore the family’s honor.  Eventually, to flee the hostility of Mahmoud, Salma must leave the country.

Salma struggles to assimilate in the new land.  Slowly, she builds her life, finds work, makes friends, and marries, but cannot forget her little girl.  Years later, determined to find her daughter, Salma returns to her desert home to learn the whereabouts of her child.

 

Written in a conglomeration of mixed tense passages from childhood, to womanhood, of prison and of arrival to England, interspersed with the present tense.  The story offers dream like sequences but always a clear message of the injustice and brutality perpetrated against women.