Book reviews: Bliss and Infidel

I recently read two books, Bliss by O.Z. Livaneli and Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I can’t say that I know much about Middle Eastern culture, or the Muslim religion. Most of my reading throughout my life has centered in American or European cultures, and usually then it has been fiction. I’ve read a lot of books where women have been treated badly, where they been dealt blows in their lives from people that they loved, but they have family or friends in their lives who love them and try to help them out of their bad situation. This, however, is not the situation with Bliss or Infidel.

In Bliss, you are introduced to a young girl who gets violated by her uncle who then locks her in the barn, and orders his recently decommissioned son to take her to “Istanbul;” code for taking her on a long trip and killing her because she has lost her honor. What the uncle doesn’t realize is that Meryem, the young girl, has a huge will to live, and her cousin Cemal has begun to doubt his father’s authority. The pair meet up with a professor who has taken leave of his life, and has rented a sailboat so that he can sail around the Aegean sea and try to reconnect with himself. The three make an unlikely pact, and spend the next few weeks trying to puzzle out their relationship with each other and their lives.

Infidel took me a long time to read, partly because it was so detailed, partly because it was non-fiction, and I don’t usually find myself reading nonfiction. Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, which was going through a civil war in her youth. She and her brother, sister and mother go from one African/Middle Eastern country to another, trying to stay true to their Muslim faith, puzzling out their world. Ayaan eventually is forced into a marriage that she does not want, and she makes a break for freedom en route to her new husband by becoming a refugee in Holland. There, she is able to become educated and starts to question the way that she was brought up and the religion that has shaped her life. She becomes a very outspoken member of the Dutch Parliament, eventually having the go into hiding because of death threats against due of her criticism of the treatment of women in Islam.

These are two very different books, but both deal with the suffering of women. I am not a political person. I don’t have really strong feelings one way or another about this or that world leader, or even this or that political party for that matter. If I like the person, I like them, and don’t really get into the politics of what their party means about them. I do, however, read a lot and try to broaden who I am through the books that I read. My recent journeys into books that are out of my norm have opened up my eyes to the suffering that goes on in the world. I understand that my own religion/culture have misconceptions in the world, and I am not trying to attack anyone’s faith; I understand how deeply rooted our traditions and beliefs are in our lives.

Mainly I identified with these women in they ways they tried to balance out their beliefs and how their religion should be the centerpiece of their life with what they saw in the outside world and how it could be if they didn’t believe facet of what they were taught. For some of us faith comes so easily; for others, we have to find out for ourselves whether our religion can stay alive for us in the real world. Meryem finds her way to a kinder, more serene life where she can have love and acceptance and a livelihood. Ayaan tries hard to put all that doesn’t add up with the way she was taught behind what she calls a “shutter.” She says this in one section:

Sometimes the shutter wouldn’t close any more: I had stuffed too many ideas behind it. I would have an attack of guilt, and take stock of myself: the trousers, the hair, the books the ideas. I would think about Sister Aziza’s angels, who were certainly still on my shoulders, watching me, recording it all. I would tell myself, weakly, that I was pursuing knowledge…I told myself that one day, when I had developed the willpower, when I was back in a Muslim environment, I would find the strength to repent and truly obey God’s laws. Meanwhile, I would be honest. I would try not to harm anyone. I would not myself adopt the ideas I was reading about. But I would keep reading them.

How well I can understand this. But we all come to the day when we have to reconcile all the “stuff” we have put behind our shutter. We have to come to terms with the “sins” that we have committed, and decide if they really are sins (and therefore we need to repent) or if they are our lives (meaning we need to admit who we are to ourselves and live the life we have chosen.) Ayaan chooses to turn away from her religion and culture, and try to help those who suffer within them. She does this at the cost of her family, her job, a dear friend who is murdered because of her, and eventually her adopted country.

Sometimes we can’t reconcile what we put behind our shutters. Sometimes, good or bad, it all spills out and we can’t put it all back together, we can’t go back to being the people we once were or thought we were supposed to be. We need to figure out who we are now, and do what we can to improve on that person.