Weekend Review: Velvet

 

Velvet / Huzama Habayeb
trans. from the Arabic by Kay Heikkinen
Cairo: AUC Press (Hoopoe), 2019, c2016.
312 p.

I wanted to read this story as soon as I saw in the blurb that learning to sew helps the main character construct her life. But it's also the story of a woman raised and living her whole life in a Palestinian refugee camp.

Hawwa grows up in the camp with her family; harsh mother, cruel father, sisters and two brothers. Their father is an angry man and beats his children and wife, and worse. One of Hawwa's brothers grows up with this behaviour reflected in the way he lives his own life, as well. 

She learns to sew as a teenager after being apprenticed to Sitt Qamar, a  glamorous seamstress who lives in a nearby town. (There is a chapter in this section that moves away from Hawwa to tell us Sitt Qamar's own tragic love story). Sitt Qamar loves fabric and stitching, and during Hawwa's time with her, Hawa learns about the luxury of beautiful fabrics, being a businesswoman, and a more independent way of life. The existence of velvet is a sign of a richer, more 

Velvet has an aroma of its own, Sitt Qamar would tell her. “It's the aroma of warmth, of dormant heat, of depth and expanse; it's the aroma of wishes and desires, of maturity, maturity of love and of age; it's the aroma of clean flesh, of flesh suffused with yearnings and the sweat of lust.”

As it turns out, Hawwa is a natural, and becomes a gifted seamstress herself. But as we meet the middle-aged Hawwa at the start of the book, she has splurged on a length of pale blue velvet (silk velvet, no poly blends for her) for a wedding dress -- there is a sensuous description of velvet and the secret joy she has in it, imagining her wedding outfit. 

She has fallen in love with a gentle man, some years after being divorced by the abusive husband she was married to by her parents when she was young. She is now caring for her cruel but decrepit mother, and puts off remarrying because she's afraid of what her brother and her son will say - she's been meeting her new love privately, a no no in the eyes of the horrible men in her family. 

The brother she protected all her life, and the son she cared for, treat her like a food producing machine and money dispenser; they are utterly useless and disrespectful of all women, but somehow especially Hawwa. She prepares a big dinner for them, planning to tell them about her intention to marry, but things do not go well. They have already heard. 

The violent ending was a shock and ruined this book for me, I couldn't take it. I was completely engaged in the story, and imagining just one good thing for Hawwa right alongside her. I understand the events of the story, I can see how it came to the conclusion that it did, but I didn't like it. It just seems like there was so much constant misery for all the women in this book, from Hawwa to her mother and sisters and relatives. Only Sitt Qamar seemed to control her fate, but in the end it was a man who destroyed both her business and her life. 

I thought this was a powerful book, worthy of its Naguib Mahfouz Literary Award, but I just wish that the misery was not quite so unrelenting, that these women were given even a ghost of chance.