My Mother’s Story

by

Lindsay Champion

Typically, we consider memoirs to be true stories written about a portion of the author’s life. Whether the book is made up of individual essays or a continual personal narrative, the best memoirs reveal personal details of a life story that are not always present in a biography. But what happens when an individual has a gripping life story, yet lacks the education required to write a book? In The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story, Hanan Al-Shaykh acts as a vessel for her mother, Kamila, who is unable to read or write, but has always wanted to write a memoir.

In the forward and afterward of The Locust and the Bird, Al-Shaykh explains her relationship with Kamila and why she had brushed aside her mother’s previous requests to write a book. Al-Shaykh is a prolific Lebanese writer living in London and has never had a good relationship with her mother, who abandoned her in Beirut when Al-Shaykh was six years old. Although Al-Shaykh and her mother were occasionally in touch, Al-Shaykh raised her own family in London, while Kamila lived in Beirut. But upon one visit to Beirut, as Kamila explains that she is reaching the end of her life and is desperate to tell the story that she has never told her daughter, Al-Shaykh is finally persuaded to sit and listen to her mother’s life story.

The majority of The Locust and the Bird, which is translated from Arabic by Roger Allen, is written in first-person and from Kamila’s perspective, although Al-Shaykh is credited as the author of the book. As a small child, Kamila and her brother lived with their mother on the outskirts of Beirut. Her family was poor, and when Kamila was nine, her mother moved the family to the city to live with Kamila’s half-sister and her cold, strict husband, Abu-Hussein. Kamila, who had a taste for fine clothing and jewelry, clashes with Abu-Hussein, who is a no-nonsense penny pincher. As an adolescent, Kamila’s only joy was attending the cinema, where she was able to live vicariously through the love stories that blossomed so beautifully on the screen.

Kamila’s cinema-inspired desires became a reality when she met Muhammad, a seventeen-year-old student who lived nearby. The two shared a love of movies, and although Kamila was unable to read or write, Mohammad read poems and stories to her, igniting her love for literature. As rumors spread among Kamila’s friends that Muhammad wanted to marry her, Kamila’s half-sister suddenly died. Immediately afterward, Kamila’s mother allowed Abu-Hussein to marry Kamila in a vague ceremony, although she was only thirteen years old at the time. When Kamila discovers she has been married to Abu-Hussein, she does everything in her power to make his life miserable.

Kamila’s revenge techniques range from spilling yogurt all over herself that Abu-Hussein had intended to use to feed the entire family, stealing her family’s food and selling it to her friends so she could buy things for herself, and sneaking out as often as possible to see Muhammad, who is devastated to hear about the marriage. Kamila’s feisty personality is amusing and entertaining, and her seemingly never-ending bag of tricks continues for years. During this time, Kamila gives birth to two children, Al-Shaykh and her sister, who are principally raised by family members due to Kamila’s immaturity.

Although the love between Muhammad and Kamila is touching and beautiful, I couldn’t help but feel intense sadness for Al-Shaykh, who, along with her sister, is left with Abu-Hussein when Kamila decides to divorce him and run away with Muhammad. Kamila’s indomitable energy and taste for fine clothing and jewelry doesn’t dissipate, even though she is no longer suffering hardship and has succeeded in turning her dreams of love and comfortable living into a reality. As Kamila grows from an adolescent to an adult, she doesn’t grow out of her childish ways, and feels entitled to do whatever she wants.

Kamila leaves Muhammad to raise their five children while she sleeps or has friends over,  becoming completely dependent on him. She is shocked into reality when Muhammad dies in a car accident at thirty-eight. Suddenly, Kamila is left to fend for herself, with little support from her mother’s family. Kamila, who is so distraught she attends Muhammad’s funeral in her slippers, finds herself alone and entirely helpless. She had placed most of her responsibilities on her husband, and must learn to decipher written documents and become the primary caretaker for her children.

As Kamila describes raising her seven children, including the five children that she had with Muhammad, she continues to put herself first. Although her home is an endless revolving door of friends and neighbors eating and drinking coffee, Kamila gripes that feeding her children is sucking away her money, and that she is constantly paying for their lost school supplies. Kamila appoints her young son to lie to creditors who come to the door demanding money, manipulating them into thinking Kamila was sick or dead while she hid behind the furniture. Despite the money Kamila spends on herself, she does not ask Al-Shaykh and her sister, the children from her previous marriage, to join her family, and speaks negatively about Al-Shaykh when she speaks about her at all, saying that Al-Shaykh “never confided in [me],” was “absorbed in her work,” and “resented me for divorcing her father.”

Despite Kamila’s brave quest for love and happiness in a time when divorce meant becoming ostracized from her family, I found her once-amusing selfishness and cheeky attitude began to stale as she reached middle age. Although I think I was supposed to be giving Kamila a free ride because of her unfortunate childhood, my sympathy dwindled when she seemed void of self-reflection and continued to act like a child. As a senior citizen, Kamila describes going to Disney World and greedily stuffing suitcase after suitcase with overpriced souvenirs. While reading about Kamila’s infantile behavior, I couldn’t help but think of Al-Shaykh and her sister, now adults, who never got to be children themselves.

What I find most surprising about The Locust and the Bird is that despite Kamila’s quick temper and immaturity, Al-Shaykh’s afterward is a loving testament to her now-late mother, honoring her memory and life. This tribute seems out of the blue, considering how infrequently Al-Shaykh is spoken about in her mother’s story. “And thank you,” Al-Shakh tells her mother in the afterward, “because every time I think of you I find myself smiling and laughing.” As a reader, I had an entirely different experience. I was outraged that Al-Shaykh and her sister were such a small part of the book, and felt frustrated by Kamila’s antics. Whether Al-Shaykh had completely forgiven her mother and wrote the book with love, or whether she was still seeking approval from the woman who rejected her, I’m not sure. Al-Shaykh’s forward and afterward seem to skim over the fact that Kamila was absent for most of Al-Shaykh’s formative years, and the great pain it must have caused her during the writing of this book. It is possible that in writing The Locust and the Bird, Al-Shaykh began to understand her mother as the frightened child who was married off at thirteen, rather than the mother who was never there. The cold, distrusting view Al-Shaykh had of Kamila in the forward is entirely missing from the afterward. Instead, Al-Shaykh seems to overlook her mother’s faults and focuses instead on the positive aspects of her mother’s personality; her sense of humor, her many friends, and her brave soul.

Because the author of the book is not Kamila, I realized it may be possible that Al-Shaykh is an unreliable narrator and may be subconsciously making her mother seem more selfish and childish than she really was. In The Locust and the Bird, Kamila is so smug and proud of her immature and manipulative actions, she often seems like a cartoon character instead of a real person. Kamila died in 2001, so it is impossible to tell where Kamila’s story ends and Al-Shaykh’s interpretation begins. Although Al-Shaykh may have cast her mother in a negative light because of some deep-seated hostility, her afterward seemed heartfelt and sincere, as if she had truly forgiven her. “Your brave genes are in my blood,” Al-Shaykh prays to her late mother. “You are the source of my strength and independence.” Al-Shaykh seems to have completely forgiven her mother for all of her mistakes, rising above her own sadness and instead embracing Kamila for the incredible strength it must have taken her to leave Abu-Hussein and her mother’s family, only to lose Muhammad, the reason she gave everything up in the first place.

This book reached me, because I’ve struggled with forgiveness my entire life. If someone wrongs me, whether on purpose or by accident, I make it my duty to cut the person out of my life as soon as possible.  Since the death of my own mother, I’ve tried to forgive her for a rocky childhood and even more turbulent adulthood, but have not yet completely succeeded. When I finished The Locust and the Bird, I realized that perhaps I was being so hard on Kamila because I was grappling to forgive my own mother. I go for months on end having nothing but bad memories of her.  Then one day, something reminds me of my mother that makes me laugh. Eventually, I hope to fully forgive my mother for her faults and mistakes, and that the thought of her humor and bold attitude will make me smile every day, in the same way Al-Shaykh seems to have done. It occurred to me that if Al-Shaykh has truly forgiven her mother, she must be focusing on Kamila as the spirited woman who bravely gave up her family for true love (no matter how imperfectly the love story turned out), rather than the flawed mother who disappeared. Al-Shaykh reminds us that we only have one mother, and sometimes it’s easier to honor her strengths and let the rest go.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story by Hanan Al-Shaykh (Pantheon Books, 2009).


Lindsay Champion’s short stories and personal narratives have been featured in Time Out New York, The New York Press, McSweeney’s, Fray Quarterly, SMITH Magazine, and Common Ties. She has written hundreds of articles for numerous internet publications. She earned her BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied writing. She lives in Los Angeles with an albino goldfish named Betty White. New York Words is Lindsay’s website. Contact Lindsay.