My Name is Salma [Hardcover]

Although it is some time since I read this book, the character of Salma has stayed with me long after I closed the final page. Other reviewers have talked about the plot and potential weaknesses in the story but what predominantly has stayed with me is the irreparable damage done to Salma and the ripple effect of pain and sorrow that this causes.
The trauma of separation and divided loyalties that her mother had to live with, her own separation from her homeland and daughter and then the choice she feels compelled to make.
Throughout the book I questioned how rationally Salma was thinking (difficult no doubt given her situation)and this came to a crescendo towards the end of the book when she doesn't seem to be able to see the catastrophic effect her actions will have on John and Imran.
So it is not only Salma whose voice continues to haunt me but those too of Imran and John - all three of them victims to a circumstance outside of their control and caused by a system of 'honour codes' imposed by others.

First of all, if you have read the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket, you needn't read the book as this summarises the story completely, bar the action of the final page. It's a great shame that the publishers felt the need to do this as it detracts hugely from the narrative tension if 280 pages in, you still know what's coming up. Hopefully, the paperback edition will correct this.

"My Name is Salma" is a novel predominantly about women and the clash between the modern Western view of women's rights and the traditional honour-bound Bedouin value system. Set between the Levant and Exeter, the Salma of the title, is a young woman running for her life after becoming pregnant out of wedlock and dishonouring her family and her tribe. Through a series of under-explained events, Salma ends up in Exeter trying to forge a new life with a new identity.

Faqir wrestles with some big and noble themes here - women, feminism, sexism, migrant dislocation, racism, alcoholism, religious hypocrisy and identity to name but a few - and by blending real time with memory, she creates a woman who remains very much a prisoner of her past no matter how much physical distance she covers. All of this is interesting and adds to the literature that chronicles the immigrant experience. However, Faqir is so involved with her themes, with her downtrodden, Bedouin victim that she fails to create a genuinely coherent story. The action hops around between past and present but as the novel progresses, the leaps through time become increasingly erratic leaving significant events in Salma's life underdeveloped and under-explained. It feels as if Faqir became so involved in her portrait of the isolated broken woman that she lost interest in the story. So, it's never really clear how she finally ended up being allowed to stay in Exeter, nor why she chooses the life she does towards the novel's end and these omissions chip away at the novel's credibility.

This is perfectly good book with plenty to say, but crucially it lacks both fully developed characters and a properly convincing or compelling story at its heart. Ultimately therefore, for me at least, it disappoints.

In her third novel, Fadia Faqir explores the themes of double consciousness and displacement in the postcolonial era. My Name is Salma is also an investigation of a Levantine's cross-cultural experience. Faqir foregrounds a minor incident from her previous novel Pillars of Salt to build her new novel. Salma gets pregnant out of wedlock and is consequently taken into prison as a protective measure to prevent her family from killing her. Salma gives birth to a baby girl who is instantly taken away from her. With the help of a Lebanese nun, she is adopted by an English nun and given the British nationality.

In the UK, the patriarchal oppression Salma has experienced in the Levant takes a new shape. As Faqir describes herself in "Stories from the House of Songs," Salma becomes "a hyprid, forever assessing, evaluating, accommodating" (53). In more than one occasion, she emphasizes her unworthiness, slamming herself as a "trash" (18). Elsewhere, she says "I deserve to be mocked, beaten, even killed" (38). Her sense of fragmentation becomes even a part of her daily life: she tells Parvin in their first encounter that she has several names "'Many names I. Salma and Sal and Sally'" (91); she perceives herself as "a sinner pretending to be Muslim, but was really an infidel, who would never be allowed to enter the mosque" (41). She expresses her alienation from the Exeter society by her inability to digest cream tea; the city's famous offering (20).

Salma is in a constant psychological abyss, believing that "[i]f she kept silent, [she] would slip slowly out of [her] like a snake shedding her old skin" (52). When she meets new people her indoctrination to believe in the inferiority of her Arabic origins comes to the surface: "If I told him that I was a Muslim Bedouin Arab Woman from the desert on the run he would spit out his tea. 'I am originally Spanish,' I lied" (27). The Pakistani shopkeeper Sadiq shows his disgusts at her attempts to assimilate into the English culture by saying "'Salma, Salma, you are becoming a memsahib. Soon you will be English also'" (110). In the pub, skinheads shout at her "'Hey, alien! You, freak! Why don't you go back to the jungle? Go climb some coconut trees! Fuck off! Go home!'" (34). Her landlady, a product of the British Empire who used to live in India, looks at her as a "servant . . . not her tenant who pays her forty pounds a week plus bills" (43-44). Salma feels happy "[i]n transit or public spaces like receptions, lobbies or waiting rooms . . . suspended between now and tomorrow" (138). In short, Salma becomes as "a coconut - white on the inside and black on the out. Hollow on the inside with no spine, substance or colour" (59).

Nevertheless, Salma secures a job as a seamstress and starts a part time English Literature course, where she meets her would-be-husband John, a northerner with feminist outlook, who shares Salma's sense of displacement. Her decision to go back to the Levant to see her daughter has tragic repercussions.

Relying on a narrative technique that constantly blends the past with the present, Faqir ascertains that Salma's current life is shaped by her past. Using English as a medium of expressing her thoughts and describing the daily life of a Levantine rural society, the Jordanian/British novelist manipulates the language and introduces some common Arabic expressions in a way that forces her English-speaking readers to familiarize themselves with them. Faqir's perfect employment of language, including the successful shift of register, allows her to "write her colours back into the predominantly white tapestry" (60) thus aligning herself with Chinua Achebe's and other writers, who occupy a post-colonial, cross linguistic and cultural position, and who use the English language to dismantle the imperial project.