54 pages • 1 hour read
Evil Eye: A Novel
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Themes
The Emotional Toll of Sexism and Racism
As a Palestinian American woman, Yara experiences both gender and racial discrimination, particularly in the early chapters of the novel, and these experiences affect her mental health and emotional well-being. Because of her decisions to focus on getting an education and having a career in addition to being a wife and mother, Yara frequently comes up against the judgments of those in her community, particularly her mother-in-law, Nadia. At the same time, Yara struggles with the race- and gender-based assumptions of her professional colleagues, who often condescend to her Arab culture and assume that she is an “oppressed” woman. Because these two forms of discrimination impact the two most important places in Yara’s life—her home and her workplace—she is constantly on her guard; until she meets Silas and starts therapy with Esther, there is really nowhere that she can relax and be herself.
Yara has always been ambivalent about marriage. Not marrying did not seem like a real choice within her close-knit Palestinian American community, but she also witnessed the emotional toll her parents’ unhappy marriage exacted, particularly on her mother. Yara’s husband, Fadi, believes that he holds “modern” views, but during one argument, he points out that he “allows her” to work outside of the home, causing Yara to retort that she still has “no independence compared to [him] or any man [they] know” (79). Early in the novel, Fadi’s refusal to grant Yara permission to apply to chaperone a trip with the college causes her distress and makes her subject to the racist judgment of her white colleagues. The repeated limitations that Fadi puts on Yara, as well as his constant belittling of her emotions and feelings, ultimately lead to their divorce.
However, although she was born and raised in the US, Yara does not simply want to exchange one set of cultural standards for another. White American culture has its own pitfalls when it comes to both gender and race. Part of what makes her white colleague Amanda’s comment about oppressed Middle Eastern women so frustrating to Yara is the fact that, as Yara well knows, Western culture practices its own forms of misogyny:
[E]verywhere she turned she was bombarded with hypersexualized images of women, messages so blatant they became invisible, encouraging the normalization of female objectification and amplifying age-old pressures for young girls to conform to certain sexualized narratives. Not to mention the psychological risks (shame, anxiety, depression) faced by women in a toxic culture that was constantly looking at, evaluating, and objectifying their bodies (112).
For Yara, embracing Western culture uncritically would mean trading one form of misogyny for another while also perpetuating psychological harm. Yet she struggles to articulate her views to her first therapist, a white man. Because she is unable to comfortably or confidently describe her experiences with sexism in both cultures, Yara keeps this to herself and carries the mental load on her own.
Yara’s white coworkers appear to view her through the lens of racial and cultural difference. They stereotype her based on a limited understanding of Arab culture and subject her to a steady stream of microaggressions. They assume that she is oppressed and meek and has little control over her own life and feel comfortable voicing their bigoted opinions directly to her face. When Yara reacts to one particularly egregious comment by calling her colleague Amanda a “fucking racist,” it is Yara who is disciplined. All of these incidents contribute to Yara’s mental burden, and the toxic atmosphere that they create for her at her place of work further erodes her fragile sense of well-being.
Yara recalls watching television shows populated by white actors telling stories about white culture throughout her life. She responds to media featuring Arab Americans with keen interest and is chagrined to note that even her husband, who is also Arab, primarily watches television shows with white actors. The films, shows, and other media platforms that are dominated by white figures tend to objectify women in a way that she finds distinctly troubling. It is only in shows like Mo, which features Palestinian actors, that she finds narratives that resonate with her life and experiences.
Yara’s early exposure to white culture and the subtle arguments for white supremacy made by a media industry in which white voices dominate drives her to help her students gain exposure to more diverse stories. In her introductory art history courses, she includes the work of visual artists of color alongside heavy hitters like Monet, but she receives pushback from her department chair. He views these artists as “fringe” and unimportant within the general history of art in the West and advises her to stick to “the greats.” At the end of the novel, Yara decides to create a meeting and exhibition space devoted to artists of color. For Yara, self-healing is not only moving past her own trauma but also working to bolster a community of women of color who, like her, have experienced a lifetime of othering and damaging discrimination.
Navigating Cultural Displacement
Yara’s experience of misogyny and racism is set in the context of a larger sense of cultural displacement—her own, as well as that of her family and her husband’s family. Yara’s personal sense of displacement comes from having to balance her Palestinian American identity with her individual goals. In her community, she is something of an iconoclast because of her education and her commitment to building her career. She eschews traditional Islamic customs, such as wearing the hijab. Although her husband tolerates her working outside the home, her father and mother-in-law would prefer that she focus solely on her family. Yara’s marriage took her from the diverse borough of Brooklyn to a much whiter college town in North Carolina, a transition that happened in a matter of weeks once she met Fadi. Even though she does not romanticize her childhood—and even though she remained within the Arab community in New York—being in North Carolina increases her sense of isolation and displacement.
Hearing Silas talking about growing up and coming to terms with his sexuality helps Yara articulate her own sense of displacement:
She’d never been sure of who she was. She’d never belonged anywhere—not in Brooklyn, not in Palestine, and certainly not here. Her soul had always been cracked in the center, her body spilt in two, her feet stretched so wide between opposite sides of the globe that she couldn’t stand straight. She was American but un-American; Arab, but not entirely (168).
Yara experiences her cultural displacement as a form of bodily distention, as she feels pulled in multiple directions at once. Yara’s sense of displacement can be triggered by something as seemingly innocuous as the intake form at the college counseling center. The questions about race and ethnicity don’t offer an option for noting her Middle Eastern heritage; technically, Middle Easterners are told to identify themselves as “white” for official purposes. However, Yara neither appears nor feels white; rather, she finds that her identity is invisible or even erased.
Yara’s personal sense of displacement is also part of a longer family history that spans different decades and different countries. Much of the novel, in fact, explores Yara’s family history of displacement during the Nakba, followed by years spent in a refugee camp and immigration to a country that will never truly be home. Although Yara did not experience this personally, she was nonetheless born into this context of cultural (and physical) displacement that stretches back to her family’s forced removal from Palestine in 1948. For Yara’s family, the Nakba meant displacement into a refugee camp that, although initially a tent city, became a massive warren of hastily built concrete structures and homes. Yara’s fictional family, like so many members of the actual Palestinian diaspora, eventually chose to leave. Yet they never felt fully at home in the US, even as they raised a new generation of American-born Palestinians. Yara’s father points out to her, “We are so lucky to be in this beautiful country Amreeka, but it will never be home” (44). When Yara was a child, every adult member of her family had lived parts of that story—essentially, physical displacement and dispossession followed by immigration and a lingering sense of cultural displacement.
Confronting Ancestral Trauma
Although Yara has long understood how the Nakba shaped her family’s migration trajectory, it takes time and therapy for her to understand its impact on her family’s mental health and emotional well-being. Her therapy sessions with Esther give her a language for describing “ancestral trauma”—that is, unresolved trauma that gets passed down through families. Eventually, Yara realizes that “the tragedy of the Nakba had sucked the color from their lives” (279), and confronting the trauma of her family’s past—not only her own personal history—becomes an essential theme in her story. Indeed, although the concept is not articulated until after the halfway point of the novel, the work of confronting ancestral trauma takes place throughout the entire story, as Yara’s journal entries probe the reasons behind her mother and grandmother’s behavior in her youth. In turn, these explorations allow Yara to understand the role that “unacknowledged pain” plays in individual mental health conditions. Her pain does not stem from some “broken” part of her but is the result of wounds that have not been allowed to heal.
Yara’s mother was a complex, emotionally volatile, and emotionally abusive woman. This left Yara with some deep emotional scars and the feeling that she was unworthy and unlovable. Through therapy, Yara ultimately realizes that her mother had been seriously traumatized during the Nakba and had never felt at home in the US after immigrating. Ancestral trauma is in many ways akin to post-traumatic stress disorder because those who experience it are unable to process painful memories, and that pain in many cases turns outward and is directed at others. Because Yara’s mother had no access to mental health care, she floundered, and her pain became rage that she directed at her children.
Yara feels the sting of these memories as well as a gnawing unhappiness. She does not understand why she is not content and is prone, like her mother, to fits of rage. Esther helps her understand the concept of generational trauma and realizes that her mother was powerless against its force. Because her mother did not understand her own trauma, she was not able to deal with it and passed it on to her daughter in the form of a disordered orientation toward her own feelings and toward other people: Yara does not know how to process her emotions and struggles in romantic, work, and other relationships.
For Yara, healing from trauma is itself complex and multi-layered. She uses art to explore her emotions and concludes that she must leave her unhappy marriage to Fadi. One day, she comes to the realization that “she c[a]n’t become the person she want[s] to be if she remain[s] with him” (258). However, healing will go beyond re-conceptualizing her sense of self. Yara will need to find the meaningful connection that was always lacking in her marriage. This happens in her friendship with Silas, a man who accepts her for who she is and makes repeated efforts to understand and accept the complexities of her identity. She will also heal through continuing her commitment to women of color. The collaboration and exhibition space that she plans to open for artists of color is a project that will allow her to help other women like her realize their dreams and heal from their own traumatic experiences as well.
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