54 pages • 1 hour read
Etaf RumEvil Eye: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Hamsa
The hamsa is a hand-shaped charm that, in many Middle Eastern communities, is worn as protection against the “evil eye.” A person attracts the evil eye by provoking the jealousy of others by seeming to live too comfortable of a life or having a special talent. Both Yara’s mother and grandmother wore the amulet before her, believing in its protective powers, even as they believed that they were suffering from a longstanding family curse. Yara does not share the superstitions of her forebears, but she nonetheless finds herself considering whether she could be attracting the evil eye by, for instance, creating too perfect an image of her life on social media. For her, the hamsa functions as both a sign of pride in her culture and a token of what she inherits from her mother and grandmother: the trauma of the Nakba, the unhappiness of an immigrant wife, and the unarticulated sense of loss made more unbearable by a mother’s unexpected death. The hamsa also marks Yara’s realization that her husband does not know her, even after 10 years. She pleads with him to plan a trip for their anniversary, but his only gift to her is a bracelet with another hamsa charm to match the necklace that she wears—but that he has clearly never asked about.
The family “curse” is viewed differently by different family members. Yara’s mother sees it as punishment for leaving Palestine, but Yara’s father sees it as punishment for Yara’s mother’s erratic and inappropriate behavior. Each of the family members, however, sees the family having fallen victim to the evil eye as somehow the fault of Yara’s mother. This placement of blame mimics the way that victims of complex trauma often blame themselves and should be read as another way in which the novel engages with the convoluted nature of generational trauma. Part of the healing process is moving past self-blame. Yara’s mother dies before she is able to do this, but Yara, with the help of a therapist, realizes that the curse or the evil eye was her mother’s way of talking about complex trauma she didn’t have another language for.
Food
Yara is a passionate and accomplished cook, and mentions of the elaborate meals that she prepares abound within the novel. Her friend Silas also loves cooking and teaches culinary arts at the university where Yara works. Although Silas’s cooking is rooted in his Southern upbringing and Yara’s food connects her to her Palestinian heritage, there are many parallels between the ways that these two characters approach cooking. Both grew up in conservative households whose traditional values were at odds with the kind of freedom they envisioned for themselves. Both struggle as a result of their identity being seen as transgressive by their families. Silas is gay, and Yara strains against the limitations placed on women in her community. Both Yara and Silas have, in spite of their difficulties, a deep appreciation for their cultures. Neither individual condemns the values with which they were raised just because they want more freedom than is typically allowed people in their communities. Yara and Silas both reject the strict gender politics of their families, but they love other aspects of their cultures. Yara’s cooking connects her to her family home in Palestine and to her grandmother. Silas’s cooking becomes a way to maintain ties to his roots and to preserve his relationship with his mother. Yara is not a “perfect” Arab woman, and Silas, because he is gay, does not fit into a typical understanding of Southern “manhood,” but each individual still feels rooted into particular pieces of Arab and Southern culture.
Microaggressions
Microaggressions, or small acts of prejudice and discrimination, pepper the text. Although Yara works in a college with liberal colleagues who pride themselves on their acceptance of cultures other than their own, Yara experiences repeated acts of racism that, although small, create a hostile work environment for her and add to her stress and emotional turmoil. Several women in Yara’s department, but most notably her colleague Amanda, see Yara entirely through the framework of otherness. Because she looks visibly Arab, they assume that she is foreign born, oppressed, and unable to make her own decisions. Although Yara does struggle against the conservative gender roles proscribed in her community, her situation is much more complex than these women realize, as is her identity. Yara is not traditional in her orientation toward religion or marriage, and she has both an education and a job outside of her home. Amanda makes statements about “women in your community” without understanding Yara’s community or any real knowledge about Yara herself. These microaggressions are rooted in racism: Amanda holds particular stereotypes of what it means to be Arab, and she thinks that white culture is inherently better and less oppressive than Arab culture. Privately, Yara notices the difficulties that women experience in white culture and realizes that all cultures have both positive and negative aspects. To white women like Amanda, only the positives of their own culture are visible, and they see only the negatives of Yara’s. Yara also is the target of microaggressions from her supervisor, department head Jonathan. He, too, makes assumptions about Yara’s life based on his stereotypes of her racial background, and he complains that her courses contain too many artists of color. When Amanda posits that Yara is too oppressed to be allowed to leave the country and Yara responds by calling her a “fucking racist,” Jonathan sides with Amanda. Amanda did make a racist statement, but to Jonathan, Yara is to blame because she lost her temper. These microaggressions, which are frequent when Yara is on campus, speak to the theme of The Emotional Toll of Sexism and Racism and show how difficult it is to be a person of color in the US, even in liberal enclaves like colleges. Yara cannot escape the cultural differences that others perceive in her, even when she is just trying to mind her own business and get her work done.
