A Mouth Full of Salt Quotes

“The river was like a bit of string, following her through time and place, anchoring her here – to a village that she hated with all her heart – but also moving her along.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“As the death of a parent either brings families together or breaks them apart, their motherless family eventually drifted away from each other, each sibling searching for their worth in a family of their own.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Fatima stared at Sadig and opened her mouth to scream at him that it was all of those things and more: it was the betrayal, the living of a lie, of false modesty and piety, it was the injustice heavily handed down with no right. It was the punishment that had fallen on her brother because of what someone else had done.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Here, in this patch of land flanking the river, they were all part of the water, and the water was part of them. They were all a drowning waiting to happen.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“It was her own loss that was never acknowledged, and how the loss of a sibling is never considered equal to the loss of a parent. It was all the questions that had no answers and all the questions that were never asked.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“So much nonsense decreed from generation unto generation of what "should" be done, what was "right", how things should be. So much nonsense that determined each person's worth and where they were placed in the hierarchy of life. Who was the highest, who was lower than who, and who was at the bottom, where their very right to life was dictated by those above them.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Whoever had decreed that men shouldn't cry had obviously never lost a child of their own.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“It was one of the many intolerable burdens of their womanhood that plagued their existence, and one which they continued to inflict on their own daughters despite all the misery it caused them in every stage of their lives.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Men don't cry. Men fear nothing. We might as well put scarves on our heads and cower down inside our houses like women.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“As Sudanese and particularly as Arabs, openly displaying feelings of fear or grief was considered unacceptably effeminate, a betrayal to their solid and unwavering masculinity.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“When girls were married they suddenly became important and relevant. Not as important as the older women or –God forbid – the men, but still higher up on the food chain than unmarried girls.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“The Nile brought them life, but the Nile was not their friend.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“She was told more than once that the loss of a child, being left behind by the person who was supposed to support you in your old age and bury you when you were dead, was nothing like the loss of a sibling or parent.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Fatima was dragging her feet. She hated houses of mourning. And the only thing worse than a house of mourning was a house that was waiting for a body to appear because without a body, the actual mourning could not begin or end.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“When Nyamakeem looked into Sulafa’s anguished face that afternoon, she saw herself. She felt her own heart breaking at the loss of the child, the son of the man who had killed her son. She looked at Sulafa and felt the fire in her heart die.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“She had never spoken that way with her cousin before, or with any other male member of her family or community. This wasn’t the kind of village where girls spoke freely in the presence of men. It wasn’t even the kind of village where girls and women walked in public with men; the small back alleys and streets that lined the houses were how they got about, staying out of the men’s way as much as possible.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt

“Mohamed Altahir was exhausted. He had lost count of how many hours he had been awake. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been up for this long, or when there had been this much chaos in such a short time. Their village was a quiet, normal one, and they led quiet, normal lives.”
― Reem Gaafar, A Mouth Full of Salt