Message from the Author of The Road From Morocco

Photo by Victor Rugg

As the self-published author of The Road from Morocco —a compelling literary memoir, which reads like a novel — I’m actively looking for a special agent, who will turn this sleeper into a blockbuster.

The Road from Morocco recounts the life of my mother Saadia and, in turn, my own. It seeks to transport readers back in time to a Middle Eastern society far removed from modern American sensibilities—to Morocco, on the northwestern tip of Africa, where my mother was born and wed against her will at thirteen. Based on recorded history and family memories, the book chronicles Saadia’s arranged marriage and hardships as a young mother to mine.  In time, I journey to Europe and then to the United States, where I eventually reach a top position on Wall Street—in theory, the fulfillment of my American dream but in reality an overwhelming experience that threatens everything I hold dear.

It is also the unconventional story of a French-educated, sexually liberated woman from an Arab-Muslim background, which challenges all stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women and brings into light a fresh perspective to an ethnicity too often reduced to the most simplistic of portrayals, particularly since 9/11 and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. This is a story that is utterly relevant in the context of the popular revolts that have spread across the Arab World and the yet unclear role their female populations may be playing.

Since the memoir's first publication last January, I've been actively building a platform and given a few, very well-attended, author's talks locally—the latest one on January 28, 2012 at the BookHampton bookstore in East Hampton.

The book has been selling on Amazon and in local bookstores. According to a Book Hampton manager, it's become one of their bestselling consignment books ever.  Perry Habermann, owner of the Montauk Bookshop, agrees. That happened with little if any promotion. I was interviewed on local stations and a few articles and reviews were written in the local press—the most recent appeared on November 9 on the front pages of the Arts Sections of the East Hampton Press and the Southampton Press. Duplicated nationwide, the success of the book is all but certain.

I’m gratified by the consistently glowing reviews from my readers (see samples on Amazon Customer Reviews) but unhappy with the pace and scope of its distribution. There’s no question in my mind that The Road from Morocco has already shown it is bestseller material and the right agent—with the right publisher—combined with my own worldliness, speaking skills, and passion will make it happen in no time.

I was born and raised in Morocco, lived in Europe for a few years and travelled to over thirty-five countries.  In 1980, I came to Florida to attend college and was granted a series of fellowships to attend graduate school in New York University, where I earned a post graduate degree in Politics and Middle Eastern Studies.  As a first time author, I relied on my deep love of French and English literature and my years of voracious reading to hone my skills as a writer.  In the words of a reviewer, “The levels of professionalism and literary finesse present in this work are high, and readers will know immediately they are reading a work by a practiced and experienced writer.” 

In closing, I need your help, my beautiful readers, finding that enthusiastic and seasoned agent who will understand my vision and share in its success? 

In the meantime, I can’t wait to hear from you!

Wafa Faith Hallam

November 20, 2011

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

wfhallam@gmail.com

Sag Harbor Express - Book Review - March 2, 2011

Leaving Morocco: One Woman’s Journey of Discovery

By Annette Hinkle

Wafa Faith Hallam has been a lot of things in her life — a traveling bookseller, a waitress, a PhD candidate, a senior financial advisor, a wife and a mother.

And now, she is also an author.

Hallam’s new book “The Road From Morocco” is a memoir about being born into a traditional patriarchal Arab household and what happens when members of the family break out of the bonds of that society. Simply put, it’s a story of self-discovery, and what makes it so compelling is the incredible distance Hallam has come, both figuratively and literally, in just a single generation.

“The book came about at a time when I felt bewildered by the direction of my life,” explains Hallam. “My mother was married at 13 against her will. That was the precursor for everything. She did not submit to that life. She decided it was not the life for her and fought tooth and nail to choose a different direction.”

Though she loved her conservative Muslim father, after her mother successfully ended the marriage, it was hard for Hallam to resist her mother’s new and empowering way of life. Hallam’s mother raised her children in a liberal environment in Morocco, living in cities and sending them to French schools, while she built her own business, followed European fashion and enjoyed the nightlife — quite unusual for an Arab woman.

Had it not been the 1960s and ‘70s, Hallam’s story might have been very different. The Pill gave Hallam’s mother the freedom to decide she would have no more children after her fourth and the woman’s liberation movement opened up a whole new world to her, as well as her daughter.

Just 16 years younger than her mother and highly educated, Hallam in many ways took on a role that was far beyond her years. She enjoyed the party scene and freely experimented with sex, developing relationships with older men while still in high school. With little input from her mother, she dropped out of school in her senior year to travel extensively with a boyfriend selling books as part of his thriving business.

“As much as she loved me, I was so opinionated and mature in my ways,” recalls Hallam. “I had the better of her in our arguments. I was overwhelming her with my rationale. I took over, for better of for worse. We were friends, but we weren’t supposed to be friends.”

“I had so much fear and anxiety,” she adds. “I was running away from not being able to control it with a suicide attempt and was trying to get the answers no one could give me.”

“It took this book to put that in perspective.”

Hallam eventually found her way from Morocco to the United States and after studying at the University of Florida and New York University, she settled in New York. She brought her mother here to live and worked at Merrill Lynch as a senior financial advisor and vice president. But beginning in the late ‘90s her mother’s failing health, a market crash, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Iraq war, and rampant anti-Arab and Islamic sentiment in this country drove her to reexamine her life.

“My mother became sick and there was the tremendous market crash with the tech bubble,” recalls Hallam. “Clients were calling and crying and I started feeling their pain. I couldn’t detach. I felt that empathy — my clients pain, my mother’s pain, 9/11, Iraq. I was disintegrating before my own eyes.”

“I felt I had failed myself,” adds Hallam who had, over the years, slowly changed her name to sound more western —using the first name “Faith” (which is what Wafa means in Arabic) and her married name, O’Brien.

“Not only was I working in a man’s world, most of my clients were Jewish,” says Hallam. “They had no clue who I was. I had Christmas trees at home, my daughter’s name is Sophia. I said I spoke French, so I played off that. I couldn’t have clients fearing me.”

“But it was a lie. I was not French,” she adds. “I would have long therapy sessions and leaves of absence. Then my mom died in March of ’04 and I have no clue why she never got better. She passed away very quickly, that was horrendous.”

Hallam realized she was not being true to herself and walked away from it all — ready to tell her story. She also felt compelled to dispel the myths of what an Arab looks like. So she left New York and moved to Sag Harbor in 2009 to finish her book. It is now home for her.

“I had a feeling I was living a lie, I wanted to be true to myself,” she says. “I’m an amazing, beautiful, complex person, screwed up as I was, and it should matter. This was like coming out of the closet.”

“My mom had wanted to tell her story, but the book was never about her,” says Hallam. “To free yourself you have to dig out these things and look at them. Our tendency is to put it under the rug. But you need to accept it, mourn it, feel that again. It’s overcoming fear then awakening. It’s entirely about finding the truth about who I am and what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

Interestingly enough, Hallam’s personal journey is not unlike that the people in Arab countries in the throes of revolution will soon be embarking on themselves. Similar revolt is highly unlikely in Morocco, a country with strong political parties and a legitimate monarchy ruled by the democratically minded King Mohammed VI. But in neighboring Arab countries, Hallam sees the first steps of a citizenry finding its place in the new world order. She points out that in images broadcast of the protests, completely absent have been banners proclaiming hatred against America or Israel. The people, she notes, are saying “let’s start with ourselves.”

“Be the change you want to see, whether you’re an individual or country it starts by looking within. You can’t aspire to change from the outside,” says Hallam. “People have been abused for so long, I can’t say it’s going to happen smoothly. When you decide to change, there is suffering. You have to decide what’s not working and figure out how to solve it before you do change. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

On Saturday, March 5, 2011 at 6 p.m., Wafa Faith Hallam reads from “The Road from Morocco” at Canio’s Books, 290 Main Street, Sag Harbor (631-725-4926).

http://sagharboronline.com/leaving-morocco-one-womans-journey-of-discovery/

"Faith Abundant," an essay review of 'The Road From Morocco' in TingisRedux.com

Faith Abundant

Published in TingisRedux.com

By Anouar Majid

Published: March 16th, 2011

Excerpts

Many years ago, while sitting with a friend in a café in the Moroccan city of Tangier, I expressed my unfailing admiration for Mohamed Choukri, author of the acclaimed memoir For Bread Alone (al-khubz al-hafi) and its sequel Streetwise (the somewhat inexplicale translation of what should have been The Time of Error, or zamanu al-akhta’).  I told my friend, a Ministry of Justice official on his way up to a judgeship, that what I liked most about Choukri was his literary courage (al jur’a al-adabiya).  My friend, a conservative man with a classical education in Islamic Studies, dismissed such courage as mere silliness, the ranting of a down-and-out man seeking attention and literary fame.  Our society, my friend pronounced, was light years away from appreciating such openness and candor.  We trade in appearances, not in existential truths.  We reward conformity and punish daring acts of individualism.

Things have changed since then, and Choukri is now universally acclaimed across Morocco and much of the Arab world.  The die-hard Tangerian is long gone, too, as is my friend, who, one day, collapsed in Fez and never got up. Yet I now find myself asking the same question about the mesmerizing memoir of a Moroccan woman that kept me engrossed for two days straight. The more I read into Wafa Faith Hallam’sThe Road from Morocco, the more I realized I was holding a book that—if all literary lights are not dimmed by convention—should become an instant classic.

I honestly cannot recall a time when an autobiographical account has spoken to me as forcefully as Hallam’s memoir. In fact, I never ever read anything remotely comparable to it. Hallam’s trailblazing book shatters literary and social conventions with such force that it is bound to provoke strong reactions. The book contains precious lessons about why freedom and equal rights matter, why the male oppression of women in Arab and Muslim societies is a sad farce, why rich life experiences are still the only reliable ingredient for a soaring story, and why identity is a complex construct that is nearly impossible to tease apart.  There is more—way more—in this fast-moving and intense account, but I’ll return to some of these issues after I provide a sense of the plot.

[...]

Wafa’s journey provides valuable lessons on a number of topics.  It upends the notion that women from Arab and Muslim backgrounds are helplessly trapped in male-dominated structures. Inspired by French and European traditions of openness, Wafa roams across the globe seemingly unimpeded, traveling from country to country, not on her daddy’s largesse (although her maternal uncles help a great deal), but selling books to make a living. Sure, there were few visa restrictions in the decades preceding the mid-to-late 1980s, but Wafa’s peregrinations are unusual in any time period. It’s almost as if she and her family on her mother’s side were genetically engineered to rebel against restrictive social traditions. Like a true Horatio Alger, Wafa has always made a living and reached for more, and like a typical Moroccan or Arab woman, she never ceases to look after her mother and relatives.  She insists on being free, but she is not callous or indifferent, even though a few of the men she lets go might think differently.

Wafa forges her own destiny and is amply rewarded for it. She takes risks every step of her journey. She abandons herself to passion unapologetically. When she finds a man attractive, she tries to get him in bed—and then, if she really likes him after that, fall in love with him. When she needs money she goes to work, whether such work entails waitressing, selling homes, managing people’s fortunes, or working at a store in a village. When a family member needs help, she often comes through, and provides real, tangible assistance. She works out regularly to stay fit and doesn’t hesitate to seek medical or psychological help in times of need. She knows she is prone to wild mood swings and depression, but she never feels sorry for herself or complains about her condition. Wafa, in case there is still any doubt about it, is a natural-born leader.

Like many immigrants, she fudges her identity because of potential discrimination against Arabs in the United States. It would be a tragic misfortune for a woman who has never been bound by any Islamic tradition to be unfairly treated because of her father’s Muslim background. Following 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she reconsiders her stance and reflects on the ways she has erased her Arab and Muslim identity. But, to be honest, she never really had one. She is a universal woman and citizen of the wide-open world from the get-go. She sends her father on pilgrimage to Mecca and leaves all the praying to him—a man who is incapable of helping himself, let alone others. Wafa is beyond narrow national categories.  She is what we like to call a “free spirit”--the genuine article. She falls in love and has the courage to admit romantic failures. That so many relationships grow stale is a well-known fact, but Wafa is not one to stay in them. She expects only truth—of the moment, maybe—but truth, nonetheless. She is a gypsy of sorts, allergic to pretence and dissimulation.

Yet Wafa is also vulnerable when out of sight. She cries when she lets her lovers go or when she is mean to her sister. She worries to death about her mother and drives herself insane fretting about money. Yet these are indispensable traits for a full, wholesome portrait of the woman. These are not, as Wafa might think, flaws to be remedied or weakness to be straightened out. What would she do if she were to discover that mental illness is, indeed, a genetic trait in the family?  Eliminating it though mood-adjusting drugs would simply turn her into an empty shell, as Saadia, her mother, well knows.

Wafa, like any human being who is alive, has her own moods and quirks, but overcoming them through medicine or Zen meditation is not going to help. At best, she could pretend to be a middle-aged American woman seeking spiritual elevation. No one at the “Sisters of Light” group, I am ready to bet, has had her life experiences. When it comes to family, Wafa is anything but typically American. She takes care of a whole family, across continents, because that is what people do. Wafa is not a suburban type, either. She is more like the pioneers who made the United States, the daring men and women who opened the country to new possibilities. To think of Wafa at her meditation sessions in Sag Harbor is to imagine America’s robber barons checking into a monastery and walking away from the world-changing events they have unleashed. Manic people make history and civilization with their larger-than-life appetites and visions. We, readers, are mere passive consumers of their gifts.

There are few people, Wafa, who have the golden opportunity—call it dharma, if you will—to have a full life like the one that has brought you to the brink of despair and even holy madness. Seek spiritual self-fulfillment to recover and recoup, but honor the spirit of your rebellious teenage years.  Without that spirit, I wouldn’t be writing this, and the world would know little about you.

I am, of course, glad you took the time to attend writing workshops—the style does justice to the message. But please protect the voice that has guided you until now with all your might. This is your ultimate gift to us and to your mother (whose voice survives in yours, even though it may have been erased from the voice recorder).

Seek newer heights, apply for jobs, fall in love again, and again, and let yourself be bruised a little. Your unquenchable faith in a better future will guide you. Let the dead rest in peace and the younger ones shape their destinies. Your smitten readers don’t want you to retire and abandon your gypsy ways. Don’t let the temptation of preaching get the better of you.  You—your being—is a work of the spirit.  Just live—and that, dear Wafa, is grace enough.

Link to Original Full Article: http://www.tingisredux.com/opinion/faith_abundant.html

THE AUTHOR: Anouar Majid is Director of the Center for Global Humanities and Associate Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of New England. His work has dealt with the place of Islam in the age of globalization and Muslim-Western relations since 1492. He has been described by Cornel West in his book Democracy Matters as one of a few "towering Islamic intellectuals."  Majid’s work has been profiled by Bill Moyers in the Bill Moyers Journal and by Al Jazeera's Date in Exile program.  He has been interviewed by several media organizations nationally and internationally. See More: http://www.une.edu/cgh/director/index.cfm

Chapter One - The Virgin Bride

THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO

Wafa Faith Hallam

CHAPTER ONE

The Virgin Bride                                                     

     



















Saadia on her wedding day.

She was shivering in the dark but not from the cold. It was a warm night, in fact, but she couldn’t keep her body from shaking. She had a long, white sleeping gown on and no seroual, the traditional underpants she had worn all evening. Her sister and his mother had made sure of that when they took the wedding clothes off her, slowly and delicately, one piece at a time. She had pleaded for them to do it and not the neggafa who had dressed her and undressed her all through the night as she changed from one costume to the next, looking exquisite in her colorful and elaborate headdresses and jewelry.

     She started crying a little, but Zhor, her sister, scolded her, whispering in her ear to behave herself and not make a fuss. She held a trembling hand out to Lalla, her sweet mother-in law.

     Save me! Her eyes were imploring. Lalla gazed for a brief instant at the anguished, frail-looking thirteen-year-old with tears in her clear gray eyes. Ever so lightly, she touched her cheek with the back of her hand, letting her fingers linger.

     “It’ll be alright, baby, don’t worry. It will be okay, I promise,”she said softly.

     And then they left the room hurriedly, taking the wedding kaftans with them and closing the door behind. She was trapped then and utterly lonely.

     The joyful chanting of the women assembled outside grew louder, and he entered the nuptial chamber, dressed in a magnificent white djellaba which oddly made him look even older and wearier than his thirty-three years. She was sitting in the bed, pale and frightened and so small. She appeared to him like a lovely painted doll, a little skinny doll—smaller than he remembered her, he said later. Her dark hair was pulled back, and she still had her festive make-up; rouge on the perfect lips and cheeks, kohl lining the already-black, fiery eyes, hands and feet decorated with henna in intricate designs intended to bring good luck and protect her against evil spirits.

     Ironically, she thought, her luck had just run out and she was looking at evil straight in the eyes. But she was not looking at him, she was too afraid to. Her heart was pounding hard in her chest, and she felt nauseous. He turned off the lantern set on the table in the middle of the room. She heard him move in the dark, undressing himself quickly. That’s when the quivering began; she couldn’t help it. She lowered herself on the bed, crossing her arms on her chest, stiff as a corpse. If only the darkness could swallow her into oblivion.

     She felt him crawling in the bed next to her.

     “Don’t be afraid,” he said gently. He didn’t touch her at first, and she kept very still, her legs stretched tight, hoping, praying that he would just go to sleep and let her be. She could hear the noises outside, the voices of women and their laughter. The celebration was still going on; they were going to be serving the traditional harira for breakfast soon. For a while, he just lay there next to her, motionless. She could hear him recite a short prayer, and he repeated in a whisper, as if to reassure himself as much as her, “Don’t be afraid.” He smelled of musk oil and soap and tobacco.

     Finally, he seemed to be taking a deep breath and he extended his hand under the sheet, touching her arm. She unconsciously shielded herself from him. Her fear was palpable, her breathing short and fast paced.

      He moved closer to her, repeating again, “Don’t be afraid... you know we must do this... It’s God’s will.” He reached for her leg, fumbled a little with her gown, his long shirt. She could feel his hand on her thigh and she let out a sob. No, she thought, I hate you... don’t you know? And she tried to coil away from that prowling hand.

     He stopped short, as if he had heard the howl in her head, and he sighed. “Saadia, we must do this, they’ll be waiting. It is God’s design.”

     He grabbed her more firmly, trying to spread her legs apart, and moved his hand up her thigh, reaching upward toward her groin and her soft and warm, hairless femininity.

     The day before, her older sister, Fatma, had taken her to the hammam and helped her wax herself clean, leaving her smooth as a baby. This was not the first time, to be sure; Fatma had started waxing her ever since she’d discovered pubic hair growth on her young sister’s mons a few months before in the hammam. It hadn’t been pleasant the first time, but she’d gotten somewhat used to it since.

     Suddenly she felt him grow harder against her leg and instinctively grabbed his hand and pulled it away from her in sheer revulsion.

     “Saadia,” he said patiently, “you can’t fight me. This has to be done... just relax and it’ll be all right.”

     Raising himself on one elbow, he tried to caress her. He touched her face and wiped the tears streaming down her cheeks. He lowered his head to kiss her softly on the lips but she turned away in disgust, sobbing now, a tight knot in her stomach and what she guessed was his penis pressing against her skin. She knew she had to let him take her... she was told he would, this was the normal course of things, there was no escaping. She closed her eyes and wished to be dead right there, right then.

     When she opened those eyes again, it was all over. He had turned on his side, away from her, and gone to sleep, just like that.

     She was wide awake and strangely relieved that it was over, feeling the intense burn and soreness in her loins and the wetness between her legs and on the sheet. She didn’t dare touch herself, just pulled her gown down, curled her legs up against her chest and wept quietly. She was mourning the innocent child, forsaken by her loved ones into the crypt inside the earth’s core, only to be desecrated.

     Later that day, the women would be pleased to display the bloodstained sheet and gown in a big round copper tray—proof of her virginity, her sacrifice at the altar of family honor, which would thence be preserved. She had done her daughterly duty. She had endured this unspeakable humiliation as was expected of her, allowed him to pull her legs up, felt his awkward fingers inside her, spreading her and guiding himself within her, and the sudden intense, searing pain as he thrust his way deeper with a small grunt.

     She was thankful for the obscurity, that she couldn’t see his face. Besides, she had kept her eyes shut, savagely biting her lower lip so as not to scream, her head turned to the side, clenching the sheet in her fists, feeling his weight crushing her in silent, helpless resignation. He was not a big man, thank God, rather thin and slender, not at all imposing, and he was done in minutes. Panting, he had let out a curious groan and then pulled out of her.

     “I’m sorry,” he had finally mumbled. “It had to be done.”

     And that had been all-pretty fast, really. To her surprise, she had survived her wedding night.

                                                              * **

     These were the post-war years, the early fifties, and Morocco had been divided into three zones since 1912. Most of the Moroccan territory was under the authority of the French protectorate—a euphemism for colonization. A smaller zone, made up of the Northern provinces, was under Spanish control.  And then there was Tangiers, at the northwestern tip of Africa, gateway to the Mediterranean, on the shore opposite the Strait of Gibraltar: Tangiers, once Portuguese, then British, and finally “liberated” under a multinational statute that turned it into a free zone and an International port in 1923.

     My mother was born in 1939, at the onset of World War II , in a kingdom with a fragmented soul held together by the French shortly before Germany invaded Poland and before France yielded to the Nazi invasion. Slowly but surely, a Moroccan consciousness began to surface. All it needed was a charismatic leader to drive it forward. That emblematic figure materialized in the realm’s young sultan, literally on the eve of my mother’s wedding, as he was taken away from his home and thrust into the night of exile.