West of the Jordan

by Laila Halaby

This is a brilliant and revelatory first novel by a woman who is both an Arab and an American, who speaks with both voices and understands both worlds. Through the narratives of four cousins at the brink of maturity, Laila Halaby immerses her readers in the lives, friendships, and loves of girls struggling with national, ethnic, and sexual identities. Mawal is the stable one, living steeped in the security of Palestinian traditions in the West Bank. Hala is torn between two worlds-in love in Jordan, drawn back to the world she has come to love in Arizona. Khadija is terrified by the sexual freedom of her American friends, but scarred, both literally and figuratively, by her father's abusive behavior. Soraya is lost in trying to forge an acceptable life in a foreign yet familiar land, in love with her own uncle, and unable to navigate the fast culture of California youth. Interweaving their stories, allowing us to see each cousin from multiple points of view, Halaby creates a compelling and entirely original story, a window into the rich and complicated Arab world.

Genres: Middle East, Fiction, Young Adult, Contemporary, Literature

232 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Laila Halaby was born in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Jordanian father and an American mother. She speaks four languages, won a Fulbright scholarship to study folklore in Jordan, and holds a master's degree in Arabic literature.

Halaby is the author of two (Beacon Press) novels, Once in a Promised Land (voted one of the top 100 works of fiction in 2007 by the Washington Post, also a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) and West of the Jordan (winner of a PEN Beyond Margins award), a memoir, The Weight of Ghosts (Red Hen Press), and two collections of poetry, why an author writes to a guy holding a fish (2leaf Press) and my name on his tongue (Syracuse University Press). Laila was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and holds two master’s degrees, in Near Eastern Languages and Culture from UCLA and in Counseling from Loyola Marymount University. She works as a counselor in psychosocial oncology at the University of Arizona and also collaborates with communities and organizations to implement creative writing classes and other programming.

Reviews

[DubaiReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arab girls in America.

This is an interesting look at the feelings and emotions of four Jordanian female cousins with Palestinian roots. They all live an expatriated life, in Jordan or USA and relate in different ways to their Arab heritage.

I initially found the book rather confusing and I wished I'd kept a who's who from the start. It felt like a cast of thousands and I had a job remembering how each of the cousins was connected. The chronology was also non-linear, which caused more confusion.
However, it was the beautiful use of words that redeemed this book for me.

"The sky is light blue and the water where it meets is dark blue. "Can we swim out there to where the two blues meet?" (P124)

"Television in our house is like a loud monkey: it never shuts up when it's awake , and it always holds everyone's attention no matter how silly its behaviour" (P18)

And I loved Walid's response when a bartender asked if he could call him Willy; "I learned your language, you can learn my name."

Laila Halaby has a Jordanian father and an American mother and writes from the heart with this collection of stories that reveal the complexity of trying to operate in two diverse cultures at the same time. It's not so much a narrative as a diary and seems to be lacking a definitive ending, but it certainly is an eye-opener it terms of a behind the scenes understanding of the complex Arab situation.

[Lauren Kaskey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took a while for me to really get in to. The way it was structured was a little confusing. The book is about four cousins, each chapter has the name of the cousin as the chapter title (they are all girls, there are multiple chapters with the same title). The only thing is--the chapters are from different viewpoints, but about that cousin. The first four chapters are from the cousins' viewpoints, their own narratives. Then the next chapters might be from the viewpoint of the mothers or grandmothers, or back to the cousins. It was confusing.

Once I did get into it, and started to get all the identities correct, I started to really like it. I'm thinking of re-reading this book almost immediately to see what I can get out of it if I read it with a better understanding of what's going on. This would be a good book to read in a class, where you can struggle with the understanding together, and maybe learn about some of the traditions and fables associated with the story. All around, I really liked it.

[Rrshively · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I didn't rate this book very high, I am glad I read it and think it would be an important book for anyone who wants to understand young women from Palestine and Jordan. It brought fresh insights into the plight of the Palestinians. The interface of their experiences in both the Arab world and America was well written. I found it somewhat difficult to remember which character was which. The blurb on the cover about the book had about two sentences about each girl, and I referred to them each time I was confused. In spite of my low rating. I think this would make an excellent book for a book club that wants discussion raised and wants to read a book of less than 300 pages.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was actually pretty good. It all takes place in America and is about Arab American girls trying to find their place between American culture and Arab culture. That whole trying to adapt to the American melting pot while staying true to your roots. The girls in the story are cousins and it switches between each one and the trials they go through. Of course it comes with the obligatory anti-American rhetoric oxymoron American publishing companies adore so much. So if you can get past the stereotype of Americans being cruel and mean, you might like this book.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this an intriguing novel about the clashing of Arabic and American cultures. The story follows 4 cousins and the choices they make in their lives. A great read!

[Aziza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just like in Raja Abdallah Sabi’s Girls of Riyadh, four young women are at the heart of this story about growing up, identity, family, and (abandoning) traditions. Only this time, the women are from Jordan, a far more open society than Saudi Arabia, and there are even more ties to the United States as the author herself is the daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother.

Being bi-cultural is aptly portrayed by Hala, one of the protagonists who just finished High School in Tuscon, Arizona, but finds herself back in the home country to spend time with her dying grandmother. That the old ways do not die out with her nana is shown by Hala’s difficult relationship with her conservative, widowed father and older sister, and even in the older man she falls in love with when she is in Jordan. Also, Mawal, Hala’s passive, old-fashioned cousin, is symbolic of the old country with its village stories and family traditions. Meawhile in Los Angeles, Hala’s other two more cousins, Soraya and Khadija, stuggle with integrating in the United States. The depressed, sexually active Soraya and the long-suffering Khadija are each other’s opposites; while Soraya expresses her feelings of alienation from either culture by sleeping with her uncle, Khadija is scared of the sexual freedom of Americans, yet is abused by her own father. While this coming-of-age novel is an easy read exploring worthwhile themes of cultural identity and the difficulties Arab women face this day and age, no deeply significant insights are presented nor are the stories of the four women as fresh and entertaining as those of The Girls of Riyadh.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! It follows the stories of 4 Jordanian cousins, and the chapters jump through each of their stories. I never get tired of any of them. 3 of the cousins have moved to America, and 1 of them remains behind in Jordan. It seems as though this author was writing specifically for a more Western audience. She does a great job of balancing a world for the reader which makes you see clearly some of the differences and similarities between your own culture and theirs. Also, she does challenge some of the readers own ideas, but without alienating them. (ahem! In the Name of God ahem!)Woot. Read it.

[Laila · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this book, which I picked out becasue I share a first name with the author. It gave me some insight into Arab and Arab-American culture, as seen through the eyes of several female cousins. Not a whole lot of resolution happens, it's more of a collection of memories. One gripe though was that the author seemed to be a bit overly ambitiousd with the cast of characters she created, too mnay cousins and great-uncles with the same name etc. I had to make a diagram to get it straight.

[Inoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is ostensibly told through the eyes of four Palestinian cousins irregularly alternating chapters but that's really just the mechanism. Some of the chapters attributed to one of the four is a paragraph or couple comments introducing somebody else's story told in the 3rd person. Not very important though. The stories were very personal and emotionally told and the reader can't help but absorb the feelings of great loss and disruption. It will leave you not just thinking but feeling as well.

[Becky J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, but I'm not sure why. Switching the narration every chapter was confusing at first, but I found I could keep track of the cousins by about halfway through with no problems. I found myself thinking about the book and what would happen a lot when I wasn't reading it, which is always a good sign, but the ending was kind of a letdown.

[SP · Rating 4 out of 5]

While starting off a little slow and confusing, I soon grew to enjoy this novel. The stories of 4 Jordanian cousins are relatable, yet in a continent across the world from my own. I recommend this book to young adults.

[Maha · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is no story. It's an easy to read written collections of life stories of four Arab teenagers from Palestine. I struggled to finish it mainly because I could see that it was going no where. Let's see where the book club discussion will takes us!

[Car · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four Arab & Arab-American girl cousins tell the (fictional) stories of their experiences as such, both in the U.S. and in their family's homeland.

[LeAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as great as I expected. This book is good for gaining insight into the life of some Middle Eastern teenagers (both Americanized and not), but it just wasn't that captivating.

[Dorothy Gondwe]

so far enjoying this book, Laila gives her characters their own voices which makes their stories truly unique and independent.

[Holly S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this book, but somehow it fell flat for me.

[Bridget · Rating 2 out of 5]

The four main characters were not well developed. Great premise, but could have been written better.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps I've read too many books on the multicultural identity theme at this point but I was not overly taken by the characters or their lives in West of the Jordan. Flat ending.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poignantly written. The book tells the loosely interrelated stories of four Palestinian cousins and their families

[Fae · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 to be accurate, but I'll round up.
Maybe a few years ago this book would have meant something to me, but at this point, I find it extraordinarily elementary. The novel follows the story of four Arab girls, some of which have hyphenated Arab-American identities, all of which have some ties to the United States. Each young woman comes from a different family background, financial situation, educational station, etc and they all vary in degrees of religious observance, conservatism, worldliness, etc. It seemed that this seemingly vast array of identities is supposed to showcase the diversity of the Arab experience and thereby dispel myths about Arab women or something, but ultimately, the novel plays into stereotypical and essentialist cultural representations. It feels like Halaby has an agenda to "challenge stereotypes" and "represent" Arab voices which creates a really strained and limited story that is engaged even more deeply with stereotypes rather than creating a new emergent understanding. An obsession with stereotypes reproduces stereotypes, and that's basically what this book ends up doing.

This isn't to say that there weren't moments of deep feeling and humanity, or that the prose was in places quite moving. It just didn't really do it for me, and the project of this book was limited.

[Ola El-Gohary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wouldn't call it a novel: no climax, no rising/falling action, no suspense – just a bunch of characters and random anecdotes. It's a documentary of some stories and moments of an average Palestinian life written beautifully, and would be quite exotic to non Arabs willing to know about Arab societies and how migration to the US drastically affected the Arab world. For an Arab, or someone who's supposedly Arab, this is like any long TV Ramadan series – nothing special.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible!