In Brooklyn, at eighteen years old, Arab-American Deya is starting to meet with suitors. Though she desperately does not want to get married yet, she’s raised by grandparents who will not give her any choice. History is repeating itself: Deya’s mother Isra also had no choice when she left Palestine as a teenager to marry Deya’s father, Adam. Though Deya was raised under the belief her parents died in a car accident, a secret note from a mysterious, yet familiar-looking woman makes Deya question everything she was told about her parents and her history. As the narrative alternates between the lives of Deya and Isra, the stories Deya’s family have tried to conceal finally begin to leak.
A WOMAN IS NO MAN is a haunting and heartbreaking accounting of domestic violence, early marriage and motherhood, and the strictures of the community in which Etaf Rum was raised. Etaf is deft in her depiction of a Brooklyn world that exists nearly unseen by the rest of New York, pointedly examining where cultural tradition veers from Muslim beliefs and the cost of idealizing masculinity.