Page 118 - A Woman Is No Man

Fareeda

Summer 1991

That summer, Fareeda and Khaled decided to take Omar back home in

search of a bride. There was no shortage of Muslim Palestinian girls in
Brooklyn, but Fareeda refused to marry her son to one of them. No, no, no.
Everyone knew that girls raised in America blatantly disregarded their Arab
upbringings. Some of them walked around town in tight clothes and a face
full of makeup. Some dated behind their parents’ back. Some weren’t even
virgins! The thought alone made Fareeda shudder. Not that Omar was a
virgin, necessarily. But it was different for a man, of course. You couldn’t

prove whether or not he was a virgin. No one’s reputation was on the line.
She could hear her mother’s voice now: “A man leaves the house a man and
comes back a man. No one can take that away from him.” But a woman was
a fragile thing. This was precisely why Fareeda couldn’t bear the thought of
raising more girls in this country. Wasn’t it enough she had Sarah to worry
about? And now Deya, too? She prayed Isra wasn’t pregnant with another

girl.
Fareeda held on to this hope as she boarded the plane, walking uneasily
behind Omar and Khaled. She couldn’t believe it had been fifteen years
since they first came to America. When they first landed in New York,
Khaled had promised it was only a temporary situation, that once they made
enough money they would gather their children and return home to die on
holy land. But as the years passed, Fareeda knew that day would never

come. She did what she could to ease this truth. She made sure her children
knew Arabic, that Sarah was raised conservatively, and that her sons, as
Americanized as they were becoming, still ended up doing what was
expected of Palestinian men: marrying Palestinian girls and passing down
the traditions to their own children. If she didn’t preserve their culture, their

identity, then she would lose them. She knew this in her core.
That had been her biggest fear lately, especially watching Omar and Ali
come and go as they pleased. But that’s just the way things were, Fareeda