Marianne

Summary

Youngest of Umm Mahmud’s thirteen children (the name is altered, as are all names in the book), twenty-seven and still living at home in East Jerusalem, whose oral history in Three Mothers, Three Daughters begins with the story of her unwanted conception and her upbringing by her sister Nuzha (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 216, 329-337).

Details

• Marianne says she was never supposed to be born and that her mother tried to abort her; brothers teased her with it at about age three, and her mother reassured her she had meant before birth, not after (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 323-326, 337).
• Her older sister Nuzha was her mother-figure, whom she called “Mommy”; at about six she travelled to Kuwait for Nuzha’s marriage, knocked at night on Nuzha’s bedroom door wanting to sleep with her as before, and after returning carried Nuzha’s photograph to school until her mother took Nuzha’s place (lines 339-345).
• She attended a coed school in first and second grade with her sister Ibtisam’s son Muhsen, with whom she fought daily, then a girls’ school in Beit Hanina through high school, where she excelled in mathematics, physics, religion and Arabic and, by her own account, cheated in biology (lines 347-355).
• Her father, she says, never stopped her from doing anything and made Sulha with candies after a slap, against her mother’s attempts to keep her from playing with boys (lines 349-353).
• She hid her first period from her mother for months, burning the pads, and says she has never talked with her sisters about sex or the wedding night (lines 359-361).
• Relaying her mother’s telling, she says a young woman who helped in the house before 1948 was killed by the men of her family after marrying and becoming pregnant, because they reckoned the child could not have been her husband’s; against her mother’s “To this day it goes on, no?”, she answered “Then they’re criminals” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 365-385).
• Her tawjihi score was 81; she studied science at Abu Dis College, commuting from home, holding that science is subservient to religion, and graduated in 1991, seven years after starting, because the First Intifada closed the college for three years; she then took a teacher’s certificate year at Bethlehem University on a scholarship (lines 387-413).
• She describes herself as a believer who tries to pray, fasts on Ramadan and expects to make the hajj, but does not dress observantly, and holds that she understands religion better than her illiterate mother because she has read the texts (lines 397-403).
• In the Dialogue with her mother she says she would never live alone, although she feels her family is squeezing the life out of her, and that while living under her parents’ roof she must follow their rules; to her mother’s warning that a husband’s rules will be harder she answers “You mean I’m going to pass from one jailer to another?” (lines 443-520).
• She does not vote in Israeli elections, which as a Jerusalem resident she is allowed to do, and stays out of the Intifada; a relative’s house built without a permit on inherited land, worth about 80,000 Jordanian dinars [about $115,000], was demolished with nothing allowed out, and she says she would not herself have built without a permit (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 774-776).
• Between a Palestinian state run by Arafat and Fatah and one run by Hamas she prefers the religious state, on condition it truly follows Islam’s principles, under which she holds women keep rights to education, work and choosing a husband; she would wear the hejab and long dresses, and says the Arabic qawamun means men’s greater capability, not greater value (lines 786-795).
• She teaches math and science to third-grade girls in an East Jerusalem school, in classes of thirty-five to forty (lines 799-801).
• She will marry only a Muslim, and has met Usama, a professional a little older than her, through a married teacher friend’s arrangement; they meet at his sister’s house and mostly talk by telephone late at night, and she accepts her parents’ rules while living in their house (lines 809-817).
• She holds that after the kitab kissing and hugging are permissible but not “all the way” until the wedding itself, by social custom (line 819).
• She wants two or three children, each with a room of their own, and if she does not marry would adopt a boy and a girl, which she says the Koran supports (lines 831-835).

Related pages

Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Umm Mahmud, Michael Gorkin, Rafiqa Othman