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David Furst: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst in for Alison Stewart. The latest novel from Brooklyn-born novelist, Etaf Rum, tells the story of a woman who suspects she might be cursed. Yara thought that she was blazing a new trail for herself apart from her traditional Palestinian family. She does get married young, but her husband, Fadi, is open to her going to college and getting a job as long as she's still home to cook dinner and care for the kids.

Yara loves teaching her introductory art class at the local college, and she hopes it will lead to more opportunities in the future, but she can't shake the feeling that something in her life isn't quite what it should be. The novel is called Evil Eye, and you might also know author, Etaf Rum from her celebrated debut novel A Woman Is No Man, and Etaf Rum joins us now. Welcome to All Of It.

Etaf Rum: Thank you so much for having me. This is so surreal and very exciting.

David Furst: It's great to have you with us. This is a novel that explores the ideas of Arab women being restrained by husbands, by society, traditions, family obligations, even by a sense of guilt for what past generations suffered through, but this is a book that also considers some of the Western stereotypes about Arab women being oppressed. As much as Yara resents the stereotype, she also does feel some of that oppression. There's a lot going on here. how did you want to engage with these issues?

Etaf Rum: First of all, very well said. You're right the issues juxtapose each other. I wanted to represent my community, my Palestinian American community, both the light and the dark aspects of it. While at the same time I was very mindful of the Western stereotypes that already existed for Palestinians, especially as a child. I was a child when 911 happened, so my family witnessed the violence and the media representation of Palestinians, Arabs being terrorists.

As a writer, there's this duty to really go into the subject of this community and this culture in its dark and in its light, while also being very careful not to perpetuate stereotypes, and to really present these people as full people. I found that very challenging. I'm really grateful that we're having this conversation because these are the conversations. That's the first step to see these people as real people that are multifaceted.

David Furst: I want to talk about a moment in the book where we really confront that stereotype, all of Yara's feelings that something isn't right, a bubble to the surface, or maybe explode to the surface. When an opportunity to attend a free Nordic cruise arrives at work she wants to apply, but her husband doesn't think that it's feasible for him to watch the kids for a week while she's gone. When a colleague accuses Yara of being an oppressed Arab woman, Yara has an outburst that really forces her to examine her own family trauma. Why do you think that it's this particular incident that really sets Yara off?

Etaf Rum: That's such an interesting question. Just to give context, I was writing the scene during COVID, and as an Arab woman and a businesswoman in my community, I realized that the women around me were the ones that had to stay home and take care of the kids when COVID happened. It made me think about this is not just an Arab issue. It really is a universal issue for women where we are plagued with the guilt of having to be the caretakers and having to be the ones that step down when opportunities arise.

The ones that do not have the flexibility to pursue their dreams, despite their willingness to contribute to family finances, have to step down because of culture, because of family obligations, because of duty. As a Palestinian woman myself, these issues are very strong in my community, and they are stereotypical, but I wanted to talk about them in a way that would maybe allow other women that do not come from my background to really examine the ways in which their own life also is limited because of their gender and. I really hope that I did that.

David Furst: Maybe it could also influence the way people communicate with each other as well.

Etaf Rum: Absolutely. In the novel, it really took a blatant comment from a coworker for Yara to really dig deep into her own maybe self-denial about the ways in which she is in fact oppressed in some ways. I think it does take that in life for some catastrophic moment for us to really look back at our own lives and think, "How much am I deluding myself?" To Yara, this is the question that really takes her along the journey in this novel, peeling back her own superstitions and her own false narratives.

David Furst: After that blatant comment and what was a shockingly explosive reaction, she's shocked by her reaction, then the wondering really begins. Is it an old family curse that is really responsible for Yara's unhappiness? You really explore that in the book, but can you read a passage from the book? Is there something you would like to share with us?

Etaf Rum: Absolutely. To give context, I'm going to read the very first page of the novel. The novel is a traditional third-person narrative with Yara's journal entries scattered throughout, and I chose to start the novel with her first journal entry, so I'll be reading it.

David Furst: Again, the new novel is Evil Eye.

Etaf Rum: "I don't know why I'm writing this. William said it would help me articulate myself to you, reconcile past and present. I need to go back there, need to find a way to reach you, but I don't know how. I've never been good with words. There are some things language cannot communicate. Instead, I paint pictures in my mind. I build a white house with a colorful garden and a quiet lake covered in emerald-green lily pads, then I put myself inside of it.

The rooms are bright and airy with big windows through which I watch the world. Outside birds chirp and flowers bloom, and everything feels calm beneath the wide open sky. I close my eyes and paint more images, one stroke at a time of sunflowers and sunsets and rooms full of books so I don't have to be alone. I try to listen to William's advice, to close my eyes and quiet the voice is in my head, but when I begin to write down memories, attempt to lay them down in clear sentences, the words won't connect. When I look back for you my mind goes blank. I can't describe it, this feeling I cannot name, this wound I cannot see. I feel it though. Like every bone in my body is on fire. William says that writing can transform the unspeakable into a story, only I don't want to tell a story. I want to break free".

David Furst: Etaf Rum reading from her new book, Evil Eye. I have to ask after listening to that, when is the audio book coming or is it already out there and are you voicing it?

Etaf Rum: It is already out there.

David Furst: Oh, good.

Etaf Rum: I'm not voicing it.

David Furst: You're not voicing it. Well, it was a treat to get you--

Etaf Rum: Thank you. We have a talented author, speaker narrator voicing it.

David Furst: A treat to hear you read the beginning of the book, that passage from her journal, Yara's Journal. Now, the central character in Evil Eye, Yara, grew up in Brooklyn, Palestinian American. Marries has two kids, moves to North Carolina. This is an arc that closely follows your own life, right?

Etaf Rum: Yes. I knew that this question was going to play. I was actually plagued by this question as I was writing the novel. I did not want to write a novel that closely resembled my own life, but I found as a sheltered artist that most of the issues and concerns that I wanted to unravel really existed very close to home to me. I also live in one of the most beautiful states in the nation in North Carolina. I thought that I wanted to pay homage to the beautiful seasons here and just the incredible southern culture that is so vastly different than the culture in New York. I also think that that contributed to my decision to set the novel in North Carolina from someone who grew up in the Nnorth.

David Furst: One major difference I have to point out is that Yara says in her journal, in fact, in the passage you just read, "I have never been good with words." Since you are a celebrated author, this sounds like a key difference between you and Yara, but what aspects from your life and story did you really want to make sure came through in Yara's story?

Etaf Rum: I wanted to authentically portray the feeling of not belonging in a community and in a place. Uniquely, what I bring to the table as a writer is that raised in Brooklyn by Palestinian immigrants, and growing up, I was neither Palestinian nor American. I was raised in a very sheltered home and didn't really have access to my homeland as much as I would like to have, or as much as my parents would like to have because of the Israeli occupation and the restrictions on travel.

My parents also did not want to lose us, I'm the oldest of nine children, to what they saw or still see as some corrupt values in this country. There was this conflict in our home and within me as an individual that I really wanted to come across in the novel. I thought it would represent a lot of people of color and immigrants and individuals who even living in this country, really don't feel like they belong in their own families and their own communities.

David Furst: I want to come back to the curse in the Evil Eye. We learned that Yara's mother really started to struggle with her mental health after a fortune teller told her that she was cursed. Why did Yara's mother seem to really take that curse, that information to heart?

Etaf Rum: There's something about superstition from where I come from and in other indigenous communities that really it's our alternative to therapy. I hope I'm not making a blank statement about this. In my experiences, in my community, superstition, curses, that's reading the grounds of Turkish coffee and getting your [unintelligible 00:12:16] read. Those are things that are held in high regards and that are listened to.

Most people deal with their mental health problems by not dealing with them, and so they do rely on these old superstitions. What I wanted to explore in this novel is how mental health in that community needs to be addressed in a more positive way that does not rely on these old narratives and these old superstitions. That allows us to have hope in a more empowering future by reaching out for help. Not necessarily the eastern medicine versus the western medicine, but just to bring awareness to the idea that when you come from a different world, a non-western world, it is good to have the perspective that not everyone views mental health in the same way. I wanted to give the readers a taste of what it looks like in one Palestinian family.

David Furst: That is it, that comes through very powerfully in the book. It is called Evil Eye by Etaf Rum. Another refrain that runs through the book is Yara reminding herself that however bad she's feeling, her mother and grandmother, the people that came before her, had things much worse, had much harder struggles than anything she's dealing with. Why do you think Yara keeps coming back to that comparison, ranking her feelings and her trauma against her families?

Etaf Rum: Great question. Several reasons. The first and obvious is the survivor's guilt. Yara's family, her grandmother is raised in a refugee camp. Her parents are born and raised in refugee camps in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. For Yara, these women have suffered tremendously through traumas and pain that she cannot even imagine, let alone experience herself in modern, beautiful North Carolina with her perfect house and her perfect car. This sense of survival guilt is a very real experience that a lot of daughters of immigrants or survivors really feel like when they do start complaining about the unfulfilling aspects of their life. It's like how can you really complain when your ancestors struggled so much? That was one aspect of it.

Another aspect, I believe, is the minimization of trauma in some households that lead their children to grow up and pretty much gaslight themselves into thinking, "Oh no, I have it pretty good. What am I complaining about?" That is a common characteristic of Yara's thinking throughout the novel, is that she's her own worst enemies. She's adapted a lot of-- the voice in her head is really the voice of her mother and the women in her community, or the narratives of women in the community should do this or should look like that.

David Furst: Or else people might start talking.

Etaf Rum: Yes, and that voice starts to resemble her own voice in which she's battering her own self. Her journey throughout the novel is to uncondition herself and to unlearn these limiting beliefs of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a Palestinian woman, and to know that she is worthy of a fulfilling life. That doesn't necessarily mean that she needs to be obedient. She does not need to be obedient to be worthy of love.

David Furst: Boy, I have so many more questions to ask you and we're almost out of time, but I really want to ask you, have you heard from women in the community who have said anything about the book, who can perhaps really relate to the stories that you tell in this novel, and perhaps in A Woman Is No Man as well?

Etaf Rum: Yes, the amount of feedback that I've gotten from women is incredibly humbling to hear. To be honest, when I started writing A Woman Is No Man, my intention was to capture the experiences of some Arab-American women. I did not realize that women from all races and across all ethnicities could really relate to these women. I had a reading last night at my local bookstore [unintelligible 00:16:32] and a few women came up and said, "I've already read the novel, I've spent all day reading, and I could really relate to Yara." These are white women, Hispanic women, women from across cultures who could still see themselves in this Palestinian American woman, and in the ways that she's limited, and in the ways that she is hoping for a better life. I really hope that the story resonates and I believe that it will.

David Furst: Etaf Rum new novel is Evil Eye. Etaf Rum, thank you for joining us today on All Of It.

Etaf Rum: Thank you so much for having me.

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