Losses & Heartbreak

I didn't want a story set in the Nakba in the late 1940s. I wanted a contemporary tale by Palestinian authors. I found it in Sahar Mustafa's 'The Beauty of Your Face' (2020). It was set in the years after 9/11 2001, but we learn about a lot more years before that. Through a school shooting, we follow the hardships and heartbreaks of an immigrant Palestinian family in Chicago. (Reviews here, here, and here.)

Separation, losses, immigrant identity, racism, school bullies, fitting into America, Muslims being labeled terrorist, school shootings, bigots. It's a tough book for me to read because this isn't my genre, and not because of the themes and the story. I struggled to finish it. The book narrated the story in third person, but from both Afaf and the unnamed shooter's perspectives. Well, mainly from Afaf Rahman's perspective. 

Afaf Rahman is a hijab-wearing Palestinian-American woman who is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls in Tempest, sited in the suburbs of Chicago. This is a Muslim school, following a state-approved curriculum. A school shooting happens one afternoon. As the active shooter makes his way through the school, Afaf Rahman was in the middle of afternoon prayers, and she thinks back on her life. 

I know too much about Afaf's life more than I care for. The story went into excruciating details about Afaf's missing elder sister Nada who later returns to her life as an adult when their father passed away, her brother Majeed who loves her and support her but he isn't religious at all. Then there's her alcoholic-then-reformed father who found religion, her angry mother who has had nervous breakdowns and isn't at peace with her life in America until she returns home to Palestine. We see Afaf became religious, found solace, married Bilal and goes on to have three children, Ayman, Akram and Azmia. 

Before joining the Islamic girls' school, Afaf taught in Chicago, combatting unemployment and poverty, gangs and daily violence. Skin color determined how much funding their school would have, what her students' neighborhoods looked like. Now it's a child's religious upbringing—their faith—that incites hateful vandalism on their family's garage, or being spit at in the parking lot of the Walmart. 

They'd gone from towel-heads to terroritsts.

Alfalfa's unwilling to take off her hijab, though it sometimes feels heavy. A week after the towers fell, she considered it: Just for a little while, until things settle down, her brother Majeed had urged her. But it felt more like a humiliating surrender than protection. How many people had died rather than denounce their own beliefs? It seems they've always engaged in this strange dance with their Christian brothers and sisters.

Readers also learn a bit about the unnamed shooter's life, his dog Jeni, his current lived-in girlfriend Eileen and his absent elder brother Joe. They had an abusive father and a mousey mother. .Joe enlisted in Vietnam, went to war and never came home to them. He left them, without a note or a letter. It's a stereotype of a shooter who hates Muslims, immigrants and brown people. However, it wasn't explicitly said if the shooter is white. In present day, the unnamed shooter was let through the school by the security guard without even a show of ID.  He came face-to-face with Afaf in the small prayer room and shot her in the stomach. 

Afaf survives the shooting with three bullets to her abdomen and one through her left hand. The school saw fourteen girls dead and a dead teacher, Miss Camellia. The shooter tried to kill himself when the SWAT team arrived. But he lived and was sentenced to prison for hate crime with the jury's verdict of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder. 

Afaf became known to the media and the general American public as "the Muslim principal who sat face-to-face with the shooter." After months, Afaf healed from her wounds. She went to therapy and also requested to be put on the visitation list of the shooter. She went to the prison to visit the shooter who wept in her presence, but offered no explanation for his hatred and his actions or remorse over the murders. She found courage and faith after that and made a decision to return to her post at the Nurrideen School for Girls the following August.

The writing thoroughly meanders. At some points, I struggled to understand both perspectives and how they match, or not, or tell us about disparate lives. Or it's this precise displacement that readers should be feeling. What I did understand, is the enormous racism the family would have faced in America in the aftermath of 9/11 and the alt-right's extremism. That included the hatred felt by Muslim tourists and longer-term visitors to America. And it would have worsened today.