Summary
Special education teacher living in Abu Ghosh and co-author, with Michael Gorkin, of Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories (1996), the Palestinian “insider” of the pair, who alone interviewed the Abu Ghosh mother and daughter and alone took part in discussions of potentially embarrassing material (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123, 158-168).
Details
- Othman began as Gorkin’s Arabic tutor in spring 1989; she was then, and remains in the Preface’s account, a special education teacher, not a language instructor, living in an Arab village in Israel with her parents (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- Her father’s mother was a believer in sheikhs, and she grew up hearing of the evil eye and black magic, though she is not a believer herself; that curiosity led to the authors’ first joint project, on traditional healers (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- Fieldwork together potentially exposed her to considerable criticism; her parents, who had not known of her contacts with Gorkin, gave her plans their blessing after a family lunch at her house (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- In planning the book she successfully opposed including a mother-daughter pair whose family she judged “too problematic” and not representative, resisted pursuing some sexual topics as trespassing on the women’s privacy and dignity, and advocated a slower pace of interviewing (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 93-123).
- She alone interviewed Umm Khaled and Leila of Abu Ghosh, the village where she also lives, and alone participated in discussions of potentially embarrassing material such as memories of the wedding night (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 158, 166, 220).
- The Epilogue (lines 1516-1550) is her own closing account, signed October 1995: it opens with the story retold to her of her second year, when a Hebrew letter was misread as reporting her death and her grandmother calmed her parents — “Praise God that He chose to take a daughter, and not one of the sons!” — and she holds that grandmother, who went to her grave believing a girl worth less, as responsible as anyone for her wanting to do this book (lines 1518-1522).
- In it she argues that college education has given Palestinian women a greater sense of authority — “The gap between us and those who do not go to college—for example, Leila—is profound” — while status within the family and freedom in courting lag a generation or two behind, and that even college-educated women like Samira and Marianne had to court in secret, which she calls humiliating; speaking as an unmarried woman, she sometimes despairs of that freedom ever being attained (lines 1530-1534).
- She defends doing the book with Gorkin against the criticism she expects from Palestinian women friends — the idea was his, they had already published together, and she feels no regrets — and describes the fieldwork difficulties pair by pair: the interviewer–friend collapse with Marianne, met by the tape-only rule; the topics she could not raise with her fellow villagers Umm Khaled and Leila, sexual matters above all; and, with Umm Abdullah and Samira, her different fate as a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose own parents, who fled in 1948, were able to return to Abu Ghosh (lines 1536-1546).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Michael Gorkin, Umm Mahmud, Marianne