Written by Hanan al-Shaykh, the Story of Zahra is a very detailed and book that opens the sacred yet messed up life of Lebanese woman by the name of Zahra. A lady by the name of Semia Harbawi gives it the perfect explanation. She says “It is a thrust into those tender zones of the psyche laid open to a probing, inquisitive gaze”. The author of this book really gives the reader a 100% probing into this young lady’s life, with no regard for her secrets, short comings or her embarrassing thoughts and deeds. This is what gives this book its raw detailed edge that made me want to read more and more.
The book shows constant instances of the betrayal of this woman’s trust, the total mutilation of her self-respect and her self-esteem and the continuous invasion of her personal life by strangers and hateful family members. This author shows the outside of the Islamic community what the life of woman that goes against the Qur’an looks like. She had the principles at heart but because along with the help of the continuous taunting of her whole community and the ones she loves most, she was otherwise forced to do the things that she did. In this essay I will explain one of the many negative encounters that Zahra had, IDENTITY PROBLEMS.
She had what is called, Schizoid. This is a personality disorder that originates from a lack of interest in social relationships and results in a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, emotional coldness, and sometimes (sexual) apathy, with a simultaneous rich, elaborate, and exclusively internal fantasy world. These symptoms are exactly what Zahra displays during the book. Ever since a little girl, Zahra’s mother Fatame, sows seeds of her daughter’s own destruction by always carrying her on the trips she took when she left the house to be with her outside man (master).
Even though this may not seem extreme at the time to her mother, this is the tiny seed that did not take much time to eventually grow into a huge tree full of disappointments and ruin. When they would come home and have to hide from her father. This is the first introduction to a traumatized and betrayed young Zahra. I say betrayed, because she was sold the absolute wrong idea of what marriage was and what commitment was at a very young age. She had to enter her childhood in fear, helping her mother to hide a huge secret from her own father, creating a negative light to see her own father in.
The way she describes him is not quite the manner that you may want describe your own father. Zahra spends most of her time going on these secret trips with her mother, off to see her lover. This personality shows the side of Zahra that begins to hate her mother for neglecting her for her lover, quiet and begging for the attention that a little girl deserves. The second instance where it stood out to me that she had an alter personality is now when she becomes a little older. She now begins to show lots of facial flaws that are constantly being pointed out by everyone around her, especially her father.
She makes it a habit to “pick” the pimples on her face and that just disturbs her father so much that it makes him so angry at her that he has to shout at her and eventually resorts to tearing away her already weakening self-esteem. He gives no regard to how she felt because he all was concerned about was for her to quit the fumbling with the imperfections on her face. He and the whole family continued to remind her that she would never get married and that no one would bear to be with her because of how ugly and anti- social she was.
They continue to insult her and make her feel ostracized and unworthy. In this part of her life the reader is presented with a personality of shame, hurt, neglect, and a person who is uncomfortable with the way she looks and doesn’t feel that she has a place in this world for her to be a part of like any other human being. She is left on her own and hardly anyone would spare her the slightest of a hint of kindness. The third and last instance that I, as the reader have encountered yet another personality that is different from the two previously mentioned.
Zahra as an adult has the most problems of all and frankly this is the place where I would consider the pivoting point in her life, because at this point is where everything in her life took a turn for the worse. She continued to struggle with the ridiculing of her appearance and incomprehensible personality by her whole community. She gets impregnated by a married man, not once, but twice and at both times has an abortion at the very young age she already was. She runs away to Africa feels uncomfortable around her uncle, gets married to his friend, and he realises she was not a virgin. This is where her life of lies had begun.
Because she had failed to recognise who she was and to obtain a single character, she was now lost and very much confused about all that was happening. She turned into a compulsive liar, because of the kind of culture she lived in and in the time this took place, she just couldn’t bear to tell the truth. It had to all be hidden. She found herself living day to day patching up her lies with more lies. In this part of her life, her level of submissiveness had grown. She had an urge to fit in even though she failed each time. She succumbed to what the world was saying about her and began to live by it.
When she finally sees the light at the end of her tunnel, and that all this could be turned around, she dies, with false hope and the same low self-esteem, compulsive lying, ostracized self that she was. In conclusion, Zahra had shown many occurrences where she had a problem identifying who she was and being able to place herself in a particular place where she knew she belonged. She had tried to escape her past by moving to Africa, but found more destruction than ever before, she moved back to escape that and confronted her past, but also created newer problems in her life.
There was a certain trend that followed her throughout her life. When she was a child she was exposed to infidelity and sneakiness and so that seemed to follow her. Sexual pleasures were the only way she escaped her problems even though they created more. Zahra had major identity problems and sadly never solved any of them. She died never knowing who she was, as in a stable single personality to be able to identify who she was and eventually find a place where she was destined to be.
