The Story of Zahra

“I no longer knew where I stood, what my feelings were, to whom I owed my loyalty.”

Zahra experiences confusion as she tries to both protect her mother and not lie to her father. The rift she experiences from her mother is in part due to the difficult position in which Fatmé has placed Zahra. This evokes and foreshadows the characters’ conflicting allegiances to warring factions in Lebanon; it is one of several moments where the personal and political coincide.

“He wants to marry me because I am docile, because he has never seen my teeth, because I do not rival his own self-importance, because I am a mystery to him.”

Zahra understands that it is her docility and submissiveness that make her “worthy” of marriage in a patriarchal society. Her willingness to play to these expectations results in Majed (and everyone else, as she later notes) never knowing who she really is. This obfuscation of her own desires to pursue a husband she doesn’t even want estranges Zahra from herself. Once she is inside of a relationship, her feigned submission becomes too much to sustain, and she freezes, hides, or erupts.

“It was all part of a conglomeration of fear, a fear, above all, that my image of myself might be overturned…the image of which I had run off hundreds of copies for distribution to all who had known me since childhood.”

Zahra struggles to align her outer life with her inner desires. Her self-presentation removes her farther and farther from her true nature and stems from fear that she won’t be accepted by society. Zahra’s experience reveals the damage patriarchal societal constraints can create, developing the theme of Gender, Oppression, and Violence in 1970s Lebanon.

“Despite all the fiery slogans, colors fade in the end and pages turn yellow.”

Hashem reflects on his allegiance to the PPS and the futility of the fervor he once felt. This quote reveals the impermanence of such movements and how little they have done to liberate or secure peace for the people of Lebanon.

“I answered that he seemed to look on the party just as any housewife might: everything in its proper place, everything well studied; a day for washing, a day for ironing, a day for sleeping together.”

Hashem analogizes Hassan’s allegiance to the PPS to a housewife’s routine, thereby suggesting that Hassan is obedient and structured where Hashem is adventurous and willing to take risks. Hashem assumes Hassan’s methods lack power or efficacy, demonstrating the assumption that women should be organized, dutiful, and docile. This gendered language suggests how embedded patriarchal ideas are in political life.

“Everything you experience in your homeland has meaning and value because it is like the experience between son and father.”

The metaphor that one’s homeland is like one’s family is present throughout The Story of Zahra. Here, Hashem compares his relationship to Lebanon to the one a son has with his father. This does not necessarily imply a positive relationship; Zahra’s relationship to both her parents, for example, is rife with anxiety and abandonment. Country and family are alike, however, in that they are integral to a person’s sense of belonging.

“Poverty cancels out beauty in one’s perceptions.”

Majed reflects on his memories of Lebanon, realizing that the beauty of his country was and is reserved for the privileged. Majed therefore feels a sense of displacement even in his homeland, so he moves to Africa to build a life there. He encounters similar sensations of displacement and separation when he attends the Lebanese Independence Day celebration at the embassy, underscoring his fraught relationship to his homeland.

“I had thought that the fact of being far from home brought people closer together. How mistaken I was. It is only money which makes you strong in the world, gives a choice of friendships and achieves equality.”

Majed notes that his assumption about the unity of the expatriate community was wrong. Money is the true unifier and something he works very hard to grab hold of, even as he continues to feel displaced in Lebanon and in Africa. He thinks that marrying Zahra might also mitigate his sense of alienation.

“I wanted to live for myself. I wanted my body to be mine alone. I wanted the place on which I stood and the air surrounding me to be mine and no one else’s.”

Zahra’s intense desire to be alone, free of the demands of both men and family, overwhelms her in this scene. Zahra does not live to attain the kind of agency she describes; she feels trapped throughout the novel. Zahra’s position evokes that of Lebanon, as the fight to control the country leads to its eventual destruction.

“Even if I were to try to be nothing except myself and stop trying to act and speak like any normal woman who wears clothes and laughs, then he would still find fault with me, and so would they all.”

Zahra is constantly attempting to please those around her with little result. She identifies this struggle here, revealing the impossible expectations placed upon her.

“All I need to do is keep my real self hidden.”

Zahra resolves to bury herself to survive her marriage to Majed. The irony in this scene is that Zahra already hides herself, which results in intense suffering and her sense of entrapment. That Zahra’s mother also hides herself (e.g., her extramarital affair) suggests that women in Zahra’s society must do so in order to survive.

“Is a person born with this uneasiness, even as a person might be born with eyes of a certain shape, hair of a certain color? Ever since I can remember I have felt uneasy; I have never felt anything else.”

Zahra’s constant state of unrest resembles the unrest Lebanon experiences throughout her lifetime; in this sense, her uneasiness was present from birth, as she has never known a society at peace.

“This is not something to make a fuss about in the twentieth century. Our generation should be seeking to influence our parents and those whose minds and attitudes remain narrow.”

Hashem tells Majed that virginity is not something people should worry about any longer, to Zahra’s surprise. This quote speaks to the changing sexual mores all over the world in the 1970s. Though Zahra still suffers under the weight of tradition, her uncle represents the tide turning toward more sexual freedom for women—something that will come with time and work and something that Zahra will not live to see. However, Hashem’s remarks are also self-serving, as he has subjected Zahra to near-constant sexual harassment.

“How did my fear become so dominating? […] Why did I let it consume me and, bit by bit, make me ravage my face till it looks as it does today?”

Zahra identifies the compulsive nature of her skin-picking and its relationship to fear. Though Zahra struggles to identify exactly where the fear within her comes from, she is aware of its consequences—the ways it makes her destroy herself both physically and emotionally. This self-directed violence is a feature of women’s lives under patriarchy, the novel suggests.

“Even the beautiful women we saw in the society pages of the magazines were in the same fix, hiding in some corner of their elegant homes, hearing what I heard, thinking what I thought.”

War becomes an equalizer for Zahra, allowing the societal constraints that once marginalized her to matter less. Though the war eventually comes to weigh on Zahra, she frequently notes how little things that seemed to matter before mean in the wake of such violence and terror.

“How can people forget the nightmare overnight? How can they run smiling out of their homes, as though the deaths that happened only the day before occurred in some other country?”

Zahra wonders how life can go on normally during cease-fires. Her question suggests a broader critique of the way people deny or ignore violence on both a local and global scale; it also speaks to the way leaders perpetuate a violence that they might not ever see.

“Why did none of those leaders, as they stood listening to the groans, pledge to put a stop to the war and cry out, ‘This war shall end! I shall finish it! No cause can be won until the war is stopped. No cause comes before the cause of humanity and safety. The war ends here and now!’”

Zahra’s words critique the many factions that go to war for Lebanon’s future, all the while killing countless Lebanese people. Zahra questions the motives of leaders who no longer seem interested in the people of Lebanon and their safety.

“To belong in a group makes you part of the war and not a murderer. Your gun isn’t a gun, but an object to carry naturally. And the group digests you so that you forget you are an individual.”

Ahmad describes being part of a faction in this way, revealing the nature of organized violence and the military: Murder on a large scale comes to seem justified as serving a larger purpose.

“What was needed to make one person’s pain stronger than another’s?”

Zahra asks this of herself when she sees refugees from East Beirut in front of her house. In questioning why she didn’t do anything, she comments on the difficulty of knowing how to gauge who might be in need when an entire city is experiencing the violence of war.

“My cries became like lava and hot sand pouring from a volcano whose suffocating dust was burying my past life.”

Zahra experiences an orgasm for the first time in her life, and this discovery of her own pleasure allows her to experience herself apart from the trauma she has known. The volcanic imagery underscores that her inner world is beginning to rise to the surface after years of suppressing or ignoring it. At the same time, the imagery is implicitly destructive, foreshadowing her death at the sniper’s hands and maintaining the link between sex and violence that the novel h1`as established.

“I had got him to look at me as a man would look at a woman in peacetime.”

Zahra’s fascination with the sniper becomes a means of finding peace amid the chaos of not only the war but also her own internal landscape. Zahra feels empowered by her ability to create some sense of normalcy, so she continues a relationship with the sniper that eventually results in her death.

“This war has made beauty, money, terror, and convention all equally irrelevant. It begins to occur to me that the war, with its miseries and destructiveness, has been necessary for me to start to return to being normal and human.”

Zahra realizes that the trauma of war has allowed her to begin facing and healing her own traumas. The end of normalcy allows Zahra to quit pretending her own private trauma does not exist; she begins to experience life on her own terms, even though the war limits her options.

“If I decide to ignore the war, there’s nothing to prove its existence as the rain falls and the people scurry past.”

Zahra begins to respond to the war in the same ways she attempts to avoid the pain and conflict in her personal life. She disregards her surroundings, escaping into her relationship with the sniper as she used to escape behind bathroom doors.