Qamar, Amjed - Beneath My Mother's Feet
I plan on posting about RaceFail 09, but I also want something positive out of this. Ergo, clearing my backlog of reviews of books by POC this week!
Nazia is a teenage girl in Karachi, Pakistan, and although she is engaged to her cousin, right now she just wants to stay in school. But an accident at work puts her working-class family in even deeper into financial hardship. Now, Nazia must stop school and help her mother clean houses, which further lowers her social status-maids are stigmatized, and her family does not want her fiance to find out.
This is a type of book that's difficult to write well; there are a fair number of badly-written, culturally appropriative, and colonialist books about young women of color asserting their independence via the intervention of white women, white feminism, or general Westernization. While I don't think this book is the absolute best of its kind, it also doesn't stumble into many of the standard pitfalls.
I am not sure how accurate the portrayal of Pakistan is; the author is Asian American but has both lived in Pakistan and visited.
In some parts, it felt like the book did push a little too hard for Nazia's independence, but on the other hand, I like that it is specifically about not Nazia alone, but about Nazia and her mother and the relationship between the two. I particularly like that Qamar looks at sex and class; some of the largest obstacles for Nazia and her mother are their male relatives. And yet, you cannot simply ditch family.
It was also important to me that Nazia found her role models in other Pakistani women; it reminded me a lot of how Kashmira Sheth centered her feminist message in Keeping Corner in the Indian Independence Movement and in Indian history. It is a taking back of history and culture, a way of grounding revolutions, personal and political, within, not positing change as something only given to the working class, women, people of color by people who have more structural power.
I didn't love the book, but I think the author has potential (this is her first novel), and I'll be interested in seeing what she writes next.
Nazia is a teenage girl in Karachi, Pakistan, and although she is engaged to her cousin, right now she just wants to stay in school. But an accident at work puts her working-class family in even deeper into financial hardship. Now, Nazia must stop school and help her mother clean houses, which further lowers her social status-maids are stigmatized, and her family does not want her fiance to find out.
This is a type of book that's difficult to write well; there are a fair number of badly-written, culturally appropriative, and colonialist books about young women of color asserting their independence via the intervention of white women, white feminism, or general Westernization. While I don't think this book is the absolute best of its kind, it also doesn't stumble into many of the standard pitfalls.
I am not sure how accurate the portrayal of Pakistan is; the author is Asian American but has both lived in Pakistan and visited.
In some parts, it felt like the book did push a little too hard for Nazia's independence, but on the other hand, I like that it is specifically about not Nazia alone, but about Nazia and her mother and the relationship between the two. I particularly like that Qamar looks at sex and class; some of the largest obstacles for Nazia and her mother are their male relatives. And yet, you cannot simply ditch family.
It was also important to me that Nazia found her role models in other Pakistani women; it reminded me a lot of how Kashmira Sheth centered her feminist message in Keeping Corner in the Indian Independence Movement and in Indian history. It is a taking back of history and culture, a way of grounding revolutions, personal and political, within, not positing change as something only given to the working class, women, people of color by people who have more structural power.
I didn't love the book, but I think the author has potential (this is her first novel), and I'll be interested in seeing what she writes next.