Summary
East Jerusalem matriarch (born 1921; the name Adila is altered, as are all names in the book) whose oral history opens Three Mothers, Three Daughters: denied schooling by her father, married at fourteen, mother of thirteen, whose family stayed in East Jerusalem through the 1948 war (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 216, 234-244).
Details
- Umm Mahmud is seventy-two in the authors’ framing, mother of thirteen adult children and grandmother of thirty-seven, married fifty-eight years and living fifty-four years in a hillside East Jerusalem house; seven of her children have emigrated, to the United States, Kuwait and Jordan (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 234-238).
- Her father, a British mounted policeman, refused her schooling — “What does she need school for? It will only make her strong-willed.” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 254) — though her younger sisters later went to school; neither she nor her husband can read a newspaper or the Koran (lines 254-256).
- She was married at fourteen to a clan cousin of about twenty chosen by her father, with a mahr of forty Palestinian pounds pre-mahr and twenty post-mahr; at the kitab the sheikh was told, falsely, “She’s nineteen!” (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 268-273).
- Her first baby was born dead in hospital; most of her children were then born at home with a midwife, the last four in hospital, and she records trying and failing to end her twelfth and thirteenth pregnancies, naming the thirteenth, Marianne, herself (lines 297-326).
- Of 1948 she says her family stored food, did not flee and did not return, and that she was nearly killed three times by bullets; her sister’s husband and three or four neighbours, not soldiers, were killed (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 305-317).
- She distinguishes traditional herbal healers, whose cure she credits for her own and her son Tawfiq’s recovery from shock, from faith healers and fortune-tellers, whom she calls haram and phonies (lines 262-264).
- In the Dialogue with Marianne she holds that a daughter with a parents’ home cannot live alone, that if a girl goes wrong people talk about the mother, and, pressed for a yes or no, that she would not allow Marianne to work on a book travelling with a man as Rafiqa Othman does with Michael Gorkin (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 429-484).
- She chose Marianne’s name herself, her mother-in-law being sick and near death, though she had never heard it before and people called it a Christian name (lines 702-704).
- Of the June 1967 War she says the family sheltered five days in a nearby church with about eighty others while her house was bombed, and that on returning they still had their house because they had not fled; some of her brothers and sisters and their spouses had gone on foot to Jordan (lines 704-718).
- She refuses to talk politics — it gives her a headache — and of the First Intifada says she does not know whether it is good, against its unemployment and jailings; she holds what happens to fate and God’s decree (lines 720-726).
- She travelled twice to the Washington area without her husband, who said, “If America was no further than the Bab al-Amud* I still wouldn’t go.” (line 730, asterisk as printed); she never got used to America, refused to dress as an American woman, and kept her thawb (lines 730-740).
- She made the hajj with her husband in 1984, walking the Kaba circuit against his wish to rent a cart and pulling him away from a narrow street called the Street of Death on the way to stone the devil at Mina; the return over the Allenby Bridge, with its shoe confiscation and body-inspection rooms, she calls humiliating (lines 742-750).
- After the hajj she resumed the five daily prayers she had given up in the child-raising years, and full Ramadan fasting with Mondays and Thursdays added; she says all her children pray except Marianne, who fasts but does not say her daily prayers (lines 752-754).
- Her one remaining worry, she says, is to see Marianne married, to an educated man, unforced, while she is still alive (lines 758-764).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Marianne, Michael Gorkin, Rafiqa Othman