Recently, a book club group in Coronado, California, requested a book club visit via NovelNetwork with Huda Al-Marashi for discussion of Huda’s debut memoir, FIRST COMES MARRIAGE. Due to scheduling conflicts on both sides, the author visit was not able to go forward.

The story doesn’t end there, though! Huda graciously offered to answer questions posed by the book club via e-mail and the book club sent a comprehensive list of questions (this group takes their book club discussions seriously). Clearly, thought and care were put into Huda’s responses, which NovelNetwork was able to provide to the book club prior to their scheduled book discussion.

Below is the Q&A session between The Island Book Club and Huda Al-Marashi:

1. Would you please provide a translation for the most commonly used Arabic words in the book?

Most words, I tried to provide the answer in the same line, or in the following lines, I tried to provide enough context that you could parse out the meaning. For example, I talked about the flat roof satah. That is just a flat roof. Or the creamy gaymar, which is just cream. And freshly baked samoun is just a bread roll. I didn’t want to belabor the text with very obvious translations because I wanted it to read as seamlessly as possible. I know one word I struggled to artfully translate was the Mashallah in the beginning, which just is a way of saying, praise God, and I remember taking the words, praise God, in and out of those early lines a number of times and deciding to leave it out. Most other words I tried to use a standard transliteration so you could find it on google, too. I think I might have leaned on context a bit heavily for the word Iman, that means faith, or wudhu, which is the way we wash up before prayer. It’s kind of like dipping your fingers in holy water but with a lot more water and you pour water over your face, arms, and then wipe your wet hands over your head and the top of your feet. 

2.  Did you ever have that talk with your mother about how she coped and adjusted to her life when she immigrated to the USA , and what did she tell you?

I did. We had many conversations that I used to inform my perspective on her as I was writing the book. I asked her a lot of questions about what it was like to come to the US as a young newlywed, and I had so much empathy for what she went through. Most notably how isolating it was in the beginning before she learned the language and went back to school. She used to share a room with her seven siblings in Iraq. She’d never spent the night away from home, and then she got married before graduating high school and she moved to another country where she didn’t speak the language. This was something I appreciated even more when I moved to Mexico and got a glimmer of how powerless you feel when you don’t speak the language in a place where you are trying to live, not just visit.
One thing that is tricky with writing a memoir is you know everything that happened and you have more perspective than you can show on the page from the very beginning. You have to set up the world as your protagonist knew it then so the reader can come along the ride of the character’s transformation. But, as I was writing the book, I was very aware that my mother was doing the best she could with what she knew at the time and that she was just trying to pass along certain values and ideals, but at the same time, she didn’t know which things we were listening to, which rules we were going to take as law and which rules we’d question. One thing she used to say to me, laughing, “Of all the things I said, those are the things you remembered,” and I often think about that with my own kids. What things am I saying that they are clinging to or misunderstanding? As parents, we try our best to pass things on to our kids, but we really have no idea what they are paying attention to, what they are ignoring, and what will actually stick.

3.  How was your book received by your relatives, other than your immediate family, especially those who adhere to strict interpretations of Islam?  It was very explicit in many ways.

I was terrified of my family’s reaction, and I lost many a night’s sleep prior to my release wondering what the fallout to the book would be. I thought it would be unbearable to carry on in my family and community life after people had read about the most intimate details of my life. But as a writer, I knew the story required my complete and total honesty and that it was disingenuous to discuss the newlywed experience of two virgins without discussing physical intimacy. It was very important to me to normalize newlywed angst and disappointment in the book. I think it’s normal and natural, but it’s also very stigmatized and taboo to discuss in both cultures. For all our differences, everyone agrees this is supposed to be the happiest time in your life, which just sets people up to feel terrible when they are trying to find their way into their new roles as husband or wife. 
However, what I did not account for was that my relatives and family and community would understand what I was trying to do in the story, that they too would relate and see their younger selves in the book. I have been floored and taken aback time and again by how supportive my relatives have been, from my in-laws to uncles to cousins to community members in my mosque. At the end of the day, we’re all just human. We all go through similar things, and most of my relatives and friends have been grateful to finally see themselves in a story that looks more like their lives and experiences. My father-in-law was the one I feared most, and even he kissed me on the forehead and said, “You are a very brave woman.”  He said that he’d been unsure where I was going in the beginning, but that when he got to the end, he understood why included everything I did. Now he recommends it to everyone, and I wish I hadn’t agonized quite so much!

4.  Do you think that religious rituals remembering past injustices to People/Religions might cause or inflame hatred to others of a long lasting nature?  (Acknowledging that most religions seem to encourage this.)

I’m not sure the context of this question, and if you are referring in particular to those lamentation rituals I discussed in the book here or a more general question about religious storytelling. Shia lamentation stories are not intended to inflame hatred. I think that ritual’s longevity and appeal is in creating a place for mourning and grief. I think that story has such resonance for many Shia because there is solace in knowing that injustice in the face of a brutal, corrupt regime is a historical constant, that even the Prophet Muhammad’s own grandchildren were not spared from the ravages of war and displacement. And, I think it creates a place where people can come together and collectively grieve and mourn losses, and in that way, it’s an almost cathartic space, especially for men who might not otherwise feel okay to cry and this occasion offers them a religiously and socially acceptable place to express sorrow. And, the sermons that go along with these gatherings focus on some kind of moral lesson, bravery, courage, familial love, rather than rallying up people against an “enemy.” However, this story can and has been used in that way. It was a way to rally people against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and he outlawed these religious gatherings for many years and targeted these kinds of gatherings for attack during those religious holidays. But as you mentioned in your question, so many religious stories and verses in holy books have been used to incite violence or stoke hate. And, I think what all this points to is the importance of general religious education. People of all faiths could benefit from basic religious literacy about what it means to be a member of a faith community; how religious story-telling can be manipulated; how we must constantly put our religious beliefs within their historical context; and how taking religious texts literally will always be problematic. We are so profoundly influenced by religion and yet we rarely study it as a subject. We are told to not have conversations about religion–that this is a touchy subject–but I think certain patterns of thought are replicated in all faiths and these broad patterns are something we absolutely can and should study and discuss. Religions, at the end of the day, may have at their center the divine, but they are human institutions. It would do us all good to acknowledge the ways our human natures have complicated and continue to complicate the spiritual experience. 

5.  Over time you had many insights to help you realize the value in your marriage.  What do you consider the most important?

I’ll answer 5 and 6 together. I did end up getting a Masters in Education while I was in Mexico through a distance program for teachers. It wasn’t relevant to the story, so I didn’t include it. When we came back for that year my husband commuted to his clinics in Tijuana, I had enrolled in a Masters in History program, but I found that the coursework no longer compelled me. I was still processing my experience at the internado, and I wished I had had better tools to work with the girls. I ended up taking a year of pre-requisites for Marriage and Family Therapy license at UC San Diego instead. But following that year, we started our family and a long chain of moves for my husband’s medical training. Writing was something I could do wherever we lived and around my kid’s schedule, and so I switched my focus to writing courses, workshops, and conferences. However, when I came to write this book, I carried both history and counseling frameworks in mind. I thought of myself as writing a primary source that was trying to document the first generation experience of a pre-internet era and also I thought of some of the counseling principles I wanted to say about marriage. Without being too heavy-handed, I wanted to show that marriage, no matter how you get there, is ultimately a decision. Even when you have a typical love story, you ultimately have to make the choice to commit and get married, and our nature as decision makers has a huge impact on our relationships. My husband is different style of decision-maker. He’s more intuitive. He goes with his gut, and he doesn’t look back. I am more of a ruminator. I always have been, and he was one of the first decisions I was ruminating on! But I was too young to recognize the pattern. I didn’t know myself as a decision-maker.
And, this kind of self-knowledge of who you are as a decision-maker, what is your story about love, what are your expectations of a romantic relationship, is absolutely critical in a relationship. We are all experiencing our spouses in our minds. Everything gets filtered through our own interior space, and that’s why I think marriage can be so hard. We share physical space but not interior space, and so two people can be in the same room and having completely different experiences. And because I wanted the book to be a story of this evolving interior space, I tired very hard to mimic the kind of critical voice that is typical of our inner thoughts, and how my character (which is me but memoirists treat themselves as characters) comes to realize that it wasn’t so much her spouse she was struggling with but how she was narrating her experience of her spouse in her own mind. 

6.  Did you complete advanced degrees?

7.   What are you doing as a career at this time and/or plan to do?

I’m still writing. I haven’t found my way into my next book yet, but I am working on six different essays at the same time. I hop from one to the other while my kids are in school, and then I pick them up, and go into mom-mode. They are 17, 14, and 8 years old now. 

8.  You seem to have formed many ideas of what are the best  features of your life with two cultures , American & Iraqi.  Can you tell us a few of those?

As I mentioned a few questions above, I wanted the book to be about my evolving interior space. So I had to establish this very black and white way my young self understood and navigated her world in the opening chapters. And, I think it’s very common for the children of immigrants to over-rely on their bi-cultural experience as a way to explain their world. Then towards the end, my experience of this third space in Mexico shook up that understanding. These things that my character had understood as very Iraqi were also very Mexican, and these things she thought Muslim girls couldn’t do, like study abroad, were also misunderstood because there were plenty of Muslim girls in the medical school. And, so I wanted to show that she comes away with those boundaries blurred, and she realizes that all things, all types of people, ideas and attitudes, are present in all cultures. 
However, there are broad cultural values that we can use to discuss Western and Eastern cultures even if they really don’t apply on the individual level. While there may be way too much variety among people to make generalizations, culturally and at the idea level, we can discuss the kinds of values we see suggested and celebrated in our larger societies. I think these kinds of conversations are helpful and valuable because they expand our notions and ideas of what is normative. That was another thing I wanted to offer with the book was just another way of looking at love and relationships. The Hollywood story has been exported around the globe, but it’s extremely narrow. It can leave everyone feeling as if their relationship doesn’t measure up. The more Eastern story of love and romance allows for a bit more pragmatism. You don’t have to be marrying your soulmate, or even “in love”. You don’t have to “know” or have been together for several years trying to figure it out if he or she’s the “one”. You can take the plunge and figure things out along the way. And, this is something that I’m finding that a lot of my non-Muslim audiences appreciate and want to discuss more. I think we ask a lot of new relationships in Western society. We expect our spouses to be our best friends, to complete us, to make us happy, and all that has to happen before you commit. I think those kinds of expectations invariably set us up for disappointment. And, then our language about marriage in Western culture is also frames it as an ending rather than a beginning, it’s settling down, it’s giving up your freedom, where our culture talks about marriage as a beginning, as a marker of official adulthood and independence. There are pluses and minuses to both attitudes, and I think the real value is in the weighing and examination of both. That is what forces us to challenge assumptions that we may not have otherwise realized we were holding.

ABOUT HUDA:

from author’s website

Huda Al-Marashi is the author of First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story, a book the Washington Post called “a charming, funny, heartbreaking memoir of faith, family, and the journey to love. If Jane Austen had grown up as a first-gen daughter of Iraqi parents in the 1990s, she might have written this.”Her other writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Times, al Jazeera, VIDA Review, the Rumpus, the Offing and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Cuyahoga County Creative Workforce Fellowship and an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writer Fellowship. 

AUTHOR VISITS:

Author visits with Huda Al-Marashi available via NovelNetwork.com.