About a Girl

Someone, if so inclined, could write a very interesting essay bringing together my last two reads: Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (a mouthful) and Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, a novel of modern Saudi girls written as a series of mildly salacious e-mails to a listserv. Sadly, this someone is not going to be me. Not this week at any rate.

First Fessler. An adoptee herself, she began compiling an oral history of women who had given up children for adoption in the 50s and 60s, when good girls "didn't have sex" and single women were not mothers. Through the voices of these women, Fessler explores the cultural constructs that virtually mandated adoption - and the resulting trauma for girls who became mothers for an instant - except forever, really - and then surrendered their babies and were supposed to go back to just girls again. The book - and the deep, deep current of emotion it exposes - is a lot more than I can give justice to in a paragraph.

And the quartet of young women in Alsanea's novel represent a generation of women who live almost schizophrenic lives, navigating Arab Muslim and Western values. They aren't hypocrites though - they really are attempting to forge a place for themselves even among competing cultural messages and demands. One thing that I took away, even as the girls were falling in love and breaking taboos, is that they adamantly felt themselves good Muslims, and accepted or even embraced some of the practices we in the West would expect them to either struggle against or accept blindly. My only quibble with the book is that the conversational tone was probably more effective in the original Arabic. Alsanea co-translated the book, and discusses this in an author's note, but I still suspect that the "aha! I know these people!" familiarity readers should feel got lost in translation.