A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

“Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s sabr, patience.”

It was much more bearable to pretend her life was fiction than to accept her reality for what it was: limited. In fiction, the possibilities of her life were endless. In fiction, she was in control.

That to understand someone, you had to listen to the words they didn’t say, had to watch them closely.

How many people were hoping to find their story inside, desperate to understand. And yet Deya still felt alone in the end, no matter how many books she read, no matter how many tales she told herself. All her life she’d searched for a story to help her understand who she was and where she belonged.

It was because they’d been loved in their lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures, even in places it clearly wasn’t.

She had always imagined love as the kind she read about in books, like the love Rumi and Hafiz described in their poems. Never once had motherly love crossed her mind as her naseeb. Perhaps it was because of her relationship with Mama, the sprinkles of love she’d fought so hard for and found so lacking. Or perhaps it was because Isra had been raised to think that love was something only a man could give her, like everything else.

She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other.

“It’s not strange at all,” Sarah said. “It’s the loneliest people who love books the most.”

“Too often being happy means being passive or playing it safe. There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation the most—passion, desire, defiance. Revolutions don’t come from a place of happiness. If anything, I think it’s sadness, or discontent at least, that’s at the root of everything beautiful.”