Daughters of the Nile
Daughters of the Cause
*Trigger warning: mentions of abortion
On my long list of things I love which, if you’re curious, also includes cats, crinkle cut fries, and new notebooks, you can add literature that centers women in colonial and postcolonial spaces where things happen that leave me with the same expression as the shocked cat meme (the one with the sitting upright, tabby patterned, possibly Scottish fold cat).
That being said, when I picked up Daughters of the Nile, even I wasn’t expecting to be confronted by and led so seamlessly from a pregnancy termination to very graphic descriptions of a genital herpes flare-up. You know you’ve picked up a great book when you read lines like, “Was this what it felt like to be a man?A mixture of pride and disgust at what was between my legs.” I should have prefaced with this, but let me now say that whatever harrowing things you might encounter in this book, they’re a thousand and one percent not gratuitous.
Zahra Barri’s debut and sadly only novel as of now (*hint hint* Zahra Barri, if you see this), is a multigenerational, multi geographic novel of feminism, queerness, and liberation in ways small and broad. It’s hard to imagine a book with such themes being a timid narrative and Daughters of the Nile certainly isn’t.
First there is Fatiha, whose friendship with real-life feminist trailblazer Doria Shafik sparks a lifelong dedication to the liberation and uplifting of all Egyptian women. But when she later chooses to become a wife and mother, Fatiha struggles to come to terms in these roles with the politics of the woman who once stormed the Egyptian parliament.
Yasminah is Fatiha’s daughter, a rebellious firebrand in her own right with a mild disdain for what she sees as Fatiha’s comparatively outdated views of feminism. Enveloped in scandal after it’s discovered that her Iranian boyfriend Ommy, is bissexual, Yasminah agrees to a marriage of convenience which she subsequently flees to live with her former lover in Tehran. Initially, life seems full of possibilities for the future. Tehran shortly before the revolution had a thriving LGBTQ scene and the youth in Yasminah and Ommy’s privileged circle dreamt of a liberal future under the Shah’s rule.
The most recent timeline is British-born Nadia, daughter of Fatiha’s favorite son, Usman. Stuck in a dead end job delivering tea to BBC editors and praying for a position that will allow her a desk, Nadia self-exiles to London. Partly it is to escape accusations of having “infected half of Bristol with herpes,” but it’s also an attempt to forge a career for herself by interning at a smutty men’s magazine run by a chauvinistic tyrant. Nadia moves in with her Aunt Yasminah whose traditional views she has always kept at a distance.
Despite the various crossed signals across generations, the three women are inextricably bound by their free spirits and the desire for anyone who does not have the inherent freedom of being a man, to live lives that are not shaped by the strictures of societal expectations. Each one has their contribution to the cultural canon. Fatiha was the cofounder of the real life Bint Al Nil magazine (from which the book gets its title), and Yasminah wrote her master’s thesis on queer rights in Islam. Nadia’s contribution is still unclear, but it is through her aunt and grandmother that she will understand who she is and what it means to fight for the right to live life on her own terms.
As a general rule I try to avoid describing female protagonists as “messy” because of what it tends to be associated with. But in this case it’s refreshing that the messiness doesn’t patronize or infantilize the characters. Instead, the women learn who they are through experience but also through mistakes and sometimes, extremely shitty behaviour that carries real consequences.
I was hooked by the first two chapters which contained the aforementioned bodily occurrences, the first chapter being when Yasminah pretends to be on her period to avoid going to the mosque with her family. Even though it’s for the purpose of attempting to terminate her pregnancy, the lie also feels like an assertion of power. Even Fatiha dares not violate this practice. As a Hindu, I was also raised with the practice of being forbidden to touch sacred items or enter sacred spaces while on your period. It’s a belief that can result in an inherent disgust towards your own body even as you later realize there are some advantages to being branded with such shame. So, even if it was intended as just a small detail for the sake of coherence, it carried a lot of meaning to me as the reader.
While the jumping between timelines is initially jarring and at some points – because I was so invested in one person’s story – annoying, it all comes together nicely in the end. That’s not to say that you should expect a sugary sweet ending, rather one in which there is humour in knowing that some things (people) really are allergic to change. I refuse to give up hope that one day Zahra Barri will drop a second book, but in the meantime I wholeheartedly recommend you read Daughters of the Nile.