41 pages • 1 hour read
Hanan al-ShaykhThe Story of Zahra
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “The Scars of Peace”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Zahra Remembers”
Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts instances of rape, abortion, civil war, self-harm, drug use, thoughts of suicide, medical abuse, and murder.
As a young girl, Zahra hides with her mother. They are behind a door, and finally a man enters whom Zahra recognizes. Zahra realizes that her mother, Fatmé, lied about going to get calcium injections; they’re here because her mother is having an extramarital affair with this man. On another occasion, Zahra visits Damascus with her mother, her mother’s friend, and this man. Zahra gets carsick on the way, and the adults are contemptuous as she asks them to stop so she can vomit. She eventually throws up on herself in the car.
In Damascus, Zahra’s mother shares a bed with the man while Zahra is forced to lie down in another room. When they travel to see Zahra’s grandfather, who lives in a village south of Beirut, Zahra feels something she thinks may be jealousy or contempt—something she later attributes to the distance she felt growing between herself and her mother. Her mother even ignores Zahra’s crying—an attempt to win Fatmé’s attention.
Zahra’s father, Ibrahim, works for the tramway and is gone from morning to evening. When he returns, he eats a meal of melokhia (an Egyptian cuisine akin to soup) full of meat. Zahra, who never gets any meat, watches as her mother gives most of the meat to Zahra’s brother, Ahmad, reserving the rest for Ibrahim. During a visit to Fatmé’s lover, the man serves Zahra and her mother a plate of broiled chicken, which Zahra eats with shame and embarrassment. Though Zahra hates these visits, she realizes that her mother brings her along for protection and comfort. Still, each time Zahra’s mother leaves her to have sex with the man, Zahra feels sick to her stomach. She knows that whatever is happening between this man and Fatmé is secret.
When Ibrahim discovers the affair, he beats both Zahra and Fatmé. Zahra wants to call for help through the window; she pulls at her hair and beats her chest as she’s seen her mother do when she is in pain. Her father, thinking she is about to jump from the window, stops her. Fatmé flees while her husband is distracted, locking herself in the bathroom.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Zahra in Africa”
Zahra flies to Africa to stay with her maternal uncle, Hashem. She remembers him prior to his exile there; he was politically involved with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (PPS) and very controversial. When she sees him at the airport, he greets her in a very physical way that makes her uncomfortable. When she realizes she will be alone in his home with him, she feels upset.
Hashem only talks about Lebanon as he remembers it, which also makes Zahra uncomfortable. He enters her room (which used to be his) every morning and waits for her to wake up. To avoid him, she locks herself in the bathroom. She feels as she does when she caught a cousin molesting her during the night. At the movies, Hashem tries to hold her hand. Although Zahra doesn’t say anything, inside she screams.
Zahra has come to Africa to escape a married man named Malek. Under the guise of promising her a job, Malek raped Zahra. Zahra, who picks her acne obsessively, worries that no one will marry her because she is not a virgin and because Malek forced her to have two abortions. She remembers that her mother aborted twins and feels fear and disgust.
Hashem steals her diary, where Zahra has written about her disappointment with her uncle. To protect her privacy, Zahra grabs the diary and rushes to the bathroom, where she tears up a page and hides it in her underwear, writing a new page to replace the one about her uncle.
At dinner the next night, one of Hashem’s friends, Majed, asks Zahra to marry him. Zahra considers this but continues to worry about her virginity. She remembers disassociating during an appointment regarding one of her abortions; after the procedure, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
To escape Hashem’s continued fondling, she again locks herself in the bathroom, picking at her face and causing her uncle to break the door down. After a sickness that confines her to bed, she decides to accept Majed’s proposal to escape her uncle. When Hashem tells her she’ll have to inform Majed of her “fits,” she tells her uncle that her sickness is his fault.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Uncle”
Hashem reflects on his exile to Africa as he drafts a cable to Zahra’s parents informing them of her impending wedding.
Hashem and many others fled to West Africa after a failed coup d’état in Damascus. Prior to the coup, Hashem lived in Beirut and was dedicated to the PPS and their dream of a “Greater Syria” that would comprise Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. After Antoun Saadeh, founder of the PPS, was executed, Hashem felt alone in his rage and his commitment to the party’s ideals. At meetings, Hashem wondered why other members didn’t want to avenge the loss of their leader immediately. Hashem suggested murdering leaders of other parties—e.g., the Phalangists—but his cousin Hassan, who first introduced Hashem to the party, refused.
Hashem offered himself up to be one of three party members sent to arrest President Shihab (or Chehab) as part of their coup d’état. However, on their way to arrest Shihab, they learned that the coup d’état had failed. Hashem, fueled by adrenaline and refusing to give up his mission, drove toward the presidential palace anyway. He crashed the car attempting to avoid a barricade and began running amid gunfire and against his comrade’s protests. As he ran, he realized he couldn’t defeat the army that he meant to oppose, so he fled, running for over two hours. He eventually got on a bus heading toward Syria, where he received the paperwork to go to Africa.
Hashem is unhappy in Africa, missing his life in Lebanon and feeling out of place among the Lebanese community in Africa, which seems only to care about gambling, food, and speaking French. The respect Hashem once enjoyed has faded, and he has become an accountant, awaiting the day he can return to Lebanon. He feels that only Majed knows what it means to be an expatriate. Majed, however, can now only think about getting married.
When Zahra began writing letters to Hashem, she came to seem to him like an extension of—and his only connection to—Beirut. His longing for her stems from his need to feel connected. He resents that Zahra does not understand that she is the only person with whom he feels he has a relationship or that her presence gives his life meaning.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Zahra’s strained relationship to her mother (and her early relationship to sex, secrecy, and fear) sets the novel’s tone; she experiences sensations of paralysis, anxiety, and loneliness as she contends with her mother’s affair. Zahra reflects, “The distance between me and my mother grows greater, deeper, although we have been as close as an orange and its navel […] I carried this pain and hatred inside me whenever I disobeyed her and felt rejected, neglected by her” (8). Such feelings of distance and longing, coupled with pain, rejection, and neglect, plague characters throughout The Story of Zahra with regard to both their families and their homeland.
Zahra’s reflections also situate the reader within the strict and hierarchical gender and family dynamics of the work’s setting. Zahra watches as her mother reserves meat for the men in her family, leaving none for her. Zahra understands this as an indication of her mother’s love: “Everyday, as we sat in the kitchen to eat, her love would be declared: having filled my plate with soup she serves my brother Ahmad, taking all her time, searching carefully for the best pieces of meat” (11). To Zahra, this indicates not only her place in society but even within her home; she comes only after men, the pleasures of a meal, like those of life broadly, reserved for them and not her. Her father’s violence against her mother, as well as her father’s relationship to Ahmad, further underscores the patriarchal nature of Zahra’s society. Ibrahim is critical of Zahra—particularly the scars and pimples on her face, implying that he sees her value as bound up in her appearance. By contrast, his “one dream [is] to save enough money to send […] Ahmad to the United States to study electrical engineering” even though Ahmad has no interest in school (25). Such details demonstrate the theme of Gender, Oppression, and Violence in 1970s Lebanon.
The Sexual Repression and Shame that permeate Zahra’s life are partly the product of this gender-based oppression—in particular, a double standard surrounding sexuality. Zahra’s introduction to women’s desire (and sex broadly) is fraught; her mother can only act on her feelings in secret, neglecting her daughter in the process, and when her husband learns of her actions, she is subjected to violence. Zahra consequently learns to repress her real desires and feelings, which she associates with fear and shame. Societal norms that tacitly condone sexual violence against women make sexuality still more dangerous in Zahra’s eyes, further contributing to her repression. For example, when Zahra lives with her uncle in Africa, she is wildly uncomfortable with his inappropriate displays of affection but says nothing:
Uncle, if you could hear the beat of my heart, if you could only see the disgust and fury gathered in my soul. If only you knew what my true feelings were. I am at my wits’ end, and am annoyed with myself and hate myself because I stay silent. When will my soul cry out like a woman surrendering to a redeeming love? (34).
Zahra’s inability to express herself compounds the self-loathing she feels about having been raped—something that is not her fault but becomes a source of shame in a society that values women’s sexual purity. The novel thus shows how sexual shame and misogyny feed on one another: Zahra cannot bear to speak the truth about what has happened to her but feels her silence is itself a form of complicity in her own victimization.
The story switches from Zahra to Hashem as a narrator in Chapter 3, offering a new vantage point from which to understand both the setting and the events. Hashem’s narration reveals more about the political landscape of Lebanon leading up to the Lebanese Civil War, as well as the ways the personal and political are inextricably linked. Most notable is Hashem’s conflation of Zahra and Lebanon, which overtly combines the personal with the political. He thinks to himself, “If you were to turn into someone other than my niece, I would marry you” (71). Zahra becomes a piece of the life, country, and identity he left behind—an example of the broader theme of Loyalty, Identity, and Displacement in the novel. Through their union, Hashem feels he could reunite with what he’s lost even while he remains in Africa, but the predatory and exploitative nature of his interest in Zahra implies that he is deluding himself.
