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