Painted Hands by Jennifer Zobair

The lovely and talented Jennifer Zobair has a debut novel coming out on June 11th!  I was able to get a review copy to read before her release date and enjoyed the time I got to spend with new "friends" Zainab and Amra.

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 From the back cover: 

Muslim bad girl Zainab Mir has just landed a job working for a post-feminist, Republican Senate candidate. Her best friend Amra Abbas is about to make partner at a top Boston law firm. Together they’ve thwarted proposal-slinging aunties, cultural expectations, and the occasional bigot to succeed in their careers. What they didn’t count on? Unlikely men and geopolitical firestorms.

When a handsome childhood friend reappears, Amra makes choices that Zainab considers so 1950s—choices that involve the perfect Banarasi silk dress and a four-bedroom house in the suburbs. After hiding her long work hours during their courtship, Amra struggles to balance her demanding job and her unexpectedly traditional new husband.

Zainab has her own problems. She generates controversy in the Muslim community with a suggestive magazine spread and friendship with a gay reporter. Her rising profile also inflames neocons like Chase Holland, the talk radio host who attacks her religion publicly but privately falls for her hard. When the political fallout from a terrorist attempt jeopardizes Zainab's job and protests surrounding a woman-led Muslim prayer service lead to violence, Amra and Zainab must decide what they’re willing to risk for their principles, their friendship, and love.

Jennifer Zobair's Painted Hands is The Namesake meets Sex and the City, an engaging and provocative debut novel about friendship and the love lives of American Muslim women.

What I thought:

Jennifer Zobair, in PAINTED HANDS, creates a cast of characters that give a fascinating look at Muslim-American culture. Within her story about navigating love and life while balancing Muslim religious and cultural beliefs with an American way of life, Zobair provides an array of characters covering the spectrum between devout followers of Islam and those who reject the beliefs of family and childhood.

The story follows a group of friends for more than a year as they juggle careers, political differences, the trials and tribulations of love and prejudice. Setting aside for a moment that the characters are Muslim, Zobair easily captures the conflict all women face between the desire to be true to themselves and their own beliefs and the pain we feel when we reject the desires and expectations of family and friends. Layered on top of that is the heavy blanket of cultural responsibility and the judgment of a community that expects you to support its long-standing traditions whether they are good for you or not. Or good for society as a whole.

PAINTED HANDS can be read simply as a story about women facing these issues, or it can be read on a deeper level with an exploration of Muslim-American culture and the politics of being Muslim in America. I enjoyed getting insights into a world I’ve had little exposure to and also think Zobair does a fantastic job of illustrating how, when you strip everything else away, we are all just human beings, the same as each other, trying to find our own happy place in the world.

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Do pick up a copy and support a talented author with her debut.  Christmas is only six months away and it will make a great gift!

Also, check out the book club questions at the author's web site.  They will add a great dimension to your reading and definitely show this is a book worth considering if you're looking for a new book club book!

Down River

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night."  -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

I grew up near the river where the bamboo was thick like a jungle forest. When the breeze blew it would lift a layer of chilled air off the surface of the jade water and send it wafting up the steep bank, bladed-leaves shuddering in its wake. Living on the river, you can close your eyes and tell the distance between you and the water because you know how it smells, how it feels the closer you get to it.

And in the bamboo you could imagine you were anywhere. And on the banks of the river, you could watch the water flow and wonder where it would end up, who and what it would touch on the way.  Upriver was no real mystery -- it came from the lake above the dam and sometimes that's where you went to swim.  There was no mystery there. In this world all water comes from that source, but the mystique is downriver.  The water runs to the mighty Mississippi where Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. And from there it roils south to the ocean to become a little piece of the whole wide world, the water that touches every shore of every exotic continent.

When I was twelve I begged my mother to buy me Encyclopedia Brittanicas from a salesman who came to the door.  I knew she didn't want to.  We couldn't afford them, but I could not give up the thought that all that knowledge would walk out my door in the hands of the tired man in his brown suit.

And so, sensing my hunger, and possibly hoping the books would help me make something of myself she signed a contract, paid a downpayment and I was allowed to keep the book he brought as a sample. The rest would arrive by mail.

The following year the Brittanicas gathered dust as I hankered for a boy who made my heart beat in my chest like a caged beast. The blood in my veins tingled in anticipation of seeing him and every sensation was a symptom of a certain and impending death. I'm not sure I ever even spoke to that boy, but to this day I remember his shiny handsomeness, the strong jaw, the broad shoulders. I remember the sharp ache of wanting but not getting.

Then, years later, the river was at my back.  I left it behind to discover what the city had to offer with its lights and fast pace.  The slow beat of natural living was replaced by the white noise of urban life, the hubbub of choosing from a menu of seemingly limitless choices, the excitement of acquisition, experimentation, the challenge of overcoming.  The sinking sensation of failure and loss.

Finally, if I wanted, I had the power to dispell the clutching sense of yearning by getting what I wanted.  I had tools, I had means.  Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes not and that was the year I discovered that the opposite of yearning was sadness or, sometimes, despair.

I remember lying on a couch staring up at the ceiling, tears running, wetting my ears, my neck.  I remember the deep sense of loss and my brain spinning trying to figure out how to fix the brokenness, to rebuild the core that felt crumpled up on the inside.

Eventually I tackled it.  And it was the first of many massive emotional construction jobs -- building, demolishing, rebuilding, remodeling. Each time I left one home in sadness I comforted myself with reminders of the joy I felt when I was there, of the things I learned... a laundry list of life skills and talents developed in tandem with someone who was now leaving, now gone.  Or who I had drawn away from.  Had someone with a magic wand come and offered to take the pain away along with the memory of this past I would have declined. Experience was my Encyclopedia Brittanica.

To this day I still find that better than the oxygen-sucking sensation of yearning.  That bitch cuts like a knife, deep and bloody, and I have never mastered the fix for it.

But I am back by the river, having flowed in a circle like the water does, back again to watch the sun sparkle off green water, my gaze always, always pointed downstream to where the water runs.

Reconnecting with Myself

"We need to reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves… We need to reconnect with who we really are.” – Dan Phillips (Phoenix Commotion) from his TED Talk.

Lately I feel the urge to admit that I'm a weird person disguised as a normal person.

I come from a long line of weird people -- from both sides of my family.  My paternal grandmother wore Hawaiian muu muus and went barefoot in public.  Always.  My maternal grandfather lined his driveway with fake gargoylesque monsters made of twisted stumps and found-objects like bones and rocks.  I grew up thinking this was normal.  Well, in my world it WAS normal.

I recently watched a TED Talk by Dan Phillips who makes houses out of repurposed material, stuff that would normally go in the trash or to the landfill.  The houses are amazing.  Well, amazing if you like things that are out of the ordinary.  While his talk was very focused on worldwide waste, he touched a bit on how we as humans like to fit things into categories, ourselves included.  And it made me think again, more, about how the reality of me is that I'm a weird person who blends in really well with normal people.

For quite some time I thought it served me well. But lately I've been thinking I've done a great job of kidding myself.  Being normal is a habit.  It's not an onerous task -- about the same as getting dressed before leaving the house or using your napkin when you eat instead of wiping your hands on your clothes.  A habit borne of the quest for ease, like the film on a fish that makes it glide easily through the water.

A few years ago I was driving down Main Street of my little town, past a crummy, ramshackle building. The facade had peeled off and all that was left were remnants of the black cement that had held it together since, probably the 40's.  I called the owner of the building and without any formal niceties I launched in.

"Jack. I just drove by your place and had a vision -- you need to mosaic the front of that building.  It would be amazing."

"I need to what?"

"Mosaic the building. You know. Broken tile. In some kind of beautifully aesthetic configuration.  Art!"

"Okay. Yeah. Right."

About a year later, circumstances would arrange themselves such that my mother became owner of the building. She wanted to do something interesting to it.  I did a watercolor sketch of the vision I had that day.  And under a cruel summer sun in over 100 degree weather we worked at it, for weeks, until we got this:

And some details (click to biggify...)


I sit in front of the building sometimes and just look at it. Because it's pretty and I'm proud of it, sure. But these days more because it's a metaphor. It's a glimpse of naked flesh through a door left ajar.  It's the summer day you wore the sleeveless shirt, for once, not caring if your flabby arms were showing.  It's me giving myself permission to not care what people might say because it's the loudest building in town, that it's not orderly.

In fact, I went so far to go on a guerrilla artist mission and paint the neighbor's alley door. Bright, electric blue with a dripping faucet.  (It's the municipal water department. Humor!)  While I was back there a truck passed through the alley, the occupants staring at me as I stood in an artistic fugue covered in blue and white paint. I waved my big paintbrush at them as if it was a thing I did every day and that I had every right to be there instead of possibly violating a small handful of state and local laws.

And it was good.

And then I fell asleep again for a while and went back to being normal.

I admire self-restraint, yet I wonder lately what good it is.  Within the boundaries of the law and the proper function of society, what good is it?  What do we achieve when we hesitate to speak our minds, to laugh out loud in a quiet museum, to apologize for our desires? How much do we miss by not standing in the rain until we are soaked through? Does it matter in the big picture that anyone might see our bra under our wet shirt or that our hair sticks to our face?

I have a day job that requires me to be quite meticulous, confine myself to a lot of legal rules and codes of professionalism.  I have clients whose needs I must meet.  I am basically on call every day, including weekends and nights.  I am a mother, too.  My life is not my own -- not really.  In my office I don't wear my shoes because I don't like to wear shoes.  Sometimes I forget I don't have shoes on and a client or customer will come in and notice and remark on it.  I used to get embarrassed and apologize.

A couple of months ago I stopped apologizing.  Now I say, "I love not wearing shoes."  One part of me chastises the other part of me for being unprofessional.  That girl scolds me and purports that such behavior could be bad for business.

And I feel a little bit bad in case she is right.  But then I think... I'm in my 40's now and this is the only life I get. I'm not going to spend what time I have left apologizing for being authentic.

I hope you don't either.