<\/p>\n
The Harem <\/p>\n Safia Fazlul tackles the huge issue of contrasting cultures in her debut novel, The Harem<\/em>. The narrator and main character, Farina, tries desperately to reconcile a desire for freedom with conflicting value systems. At eighteen, she is determined to get away from her controlling parents and make her own way in the world. Farina was born in Bangladesh, but her parents immigrate when she is a small child, so all she really knows is her new home. Farina and her two girlfriends, Sabrina and Imrana, are at odds with the conventions of their Bangladeshi parents and neighbours in the fictional suburb of Peckville.<\/p>\n The girls are frantic to taste freedom, to live on their own, and to do what they want. They rail against the strictness of their parents who are devout Muslims. And because they are girls, their lives are even more circumscribed than those of the boys they know. All three make a series of bad choices in the mistaken belief that they are exercising free will. Their rebellion takes the form of alcohol, drugs, and sex. Fazlul pushes them to an extreme when Sabrina decides to start up an escort agency\u2014The Harem–and talks her friends into helping her in the business.<\/p>\n Sabrina argues that selling sex is a choice that women can make to exert their own power and autonomy. While the plan is for the three friends to run the agency and to hire other young women to be the escorts, Farina is deeply conflicted about the Harem, recognizing the essential hypocrisy of the business endeavour. It\u2019s clear that choice is not what drives the escorts. They are generally young women with no marketable skills. They can make more money selling their bodies than they can any other way, and so they are caught in a financial trap. Farina thinks, \u201cGirls pimping girls\u2014there\u2019s something really disgusting about that. I could and should back out right now, but I need the money. Money is freedom on this side of the world, you either milk or get milked.\u201d She is not happy with either situation.<\/p>\n Fazlul does a good job of showing Farina\u2019s confused feelings. Sabrina and Imrana respond to their circumstances in different ways and appear more as ciphers than as fully realized characters. Adding to the cast of characters are various parents, neighbourhood \u201cAunties\u201d who keep an eye on everything, Farina\u2019s predatory boss at the deli, and Farina\u2019s friend Ali, a good Muslim boy who hangs out unbelievably with a pack of vulgar guys.<\/p>\n The language used is raw. The world the friends inhabit is emotionally cold and essentially nasty, and the invective reflects that. Sabrina, in particular, is foul-mouthed. She is also emotionally scarred and so far down a dark path that it\u2019s unlikely she can turn her life around. Fazlul tends to write short, choppy sentences with tough language. All three girls are in need of love, but only Farina seems to realize that her parents, especially her mother, love her. But parental love comes with the ties of discipline, and Farina needs to learn what is valuable in her life and what is not.<\/p>\n The Harem<\/em> is a bit rough in places and occasionally sentimental and melodramatic, but the subject matter is gripping. The question of what freedom is infuses the novel with an engaging gravitas. And trying to understand the cultural conflicts that immigrants must face is essential. Lingering Tide and Other Stories <\/p>\n The twelve stories in Lingering Tide and Other Stories <\/em>by Latha Viswanathan have all been published in various literary magazines, but hunting down these publications can be a challenge, so it\u2019s a pleasure to have them collected in one volume. Viswanathan has a consistently delicate touch with her characters, managing to show their flaws with understanding and sympathy.<\/p>\n The title story, \u201cLingering Tides,\u201d opens the collection. Surya\u2019s wife, Uma, dies after forty-five years of marriage, and Surya decides to take her ashes home to India. The story is deceptively slight. Little happens except that Viswanathan delves into the challenges of culture clashes. Surya\u2019s son lives in New Jersey and his daughter in Vancouver. They enjoy comfortable lives, and Surya feels unable to connect with his grandchildren: \u201cFor the past few years, he\u2019d watched the grandchildren. They came home from school it seemed only to go out. They were busy miniature adults. They had so many illusions to break. What could he, an old man from another country, offer in the way of enlightenment when it came to ice hockey, baseball, and track?\u201d This story sets the tone for the collection\u2014a reflective and sensitive examination of people caught between ways of life.<\/p>\n The lives of Indian women are often circumscribed by convention in Viswanathan\u2019s work. In \u201cBrittle,\u201d a young girl makes friends with Ammini, an old woman who is married when she is nine years old. Ammini loses both her childhood and any chance at a normal adult life when her father-in-law dies and the rest of the family gangs up on her, even denying her proper food. The narrator tries to understand her elderly friend\u2019s life, but both of them are controlled by men who in turn are controlled by patterns of behaviour established over years.<\/p>\n Struggle is ingrained in these stories, emotional and physical. In \u201cBat Soup,\u201d a family faces poverty in Cambodia. The mother is pregnant, the father is in jail, and one of the daughters, Sitha, has been wounded by a land mine. She uses a crutch and is confused when she meets a woman with two legs and a crutch. But the woman\u2019s crutch is a tripod, and she\u2019s taking pictures at Angkor Wat. The woman gives the girl Toblerone, and at the end of the story, the girl throws her bat soup away and imagines the next day when she would \u201cpress a milky triangle to a secret pocket of her mouth. Sucking slowly, all warm and syrupy, she\u2019d forget everybody, making chocolate soup all by herself.\u201d Sitha\u2019s family is in dire straits, and there\u2019s little joy in the girl\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Viswanathan uses sensory detail exquisitely to transport readers to various settings. In \u201cTravelling,\u201d a couple move to the Philippines for a year for the husband\u2019s job. Pauline tries to cope with her new home as she wonders about her husband and how well they know each other. Everything is destabilizing. At a temple, her husband Ray has a snake wrapped around his neck while Pauline\u2019s response to the interior of the temple and the incense is much less relaxed: \u201cThe movement of the smoke, curls thinning out, gave the impression of moving snakes, slithering darkness rushing to feet. It was like vertigo, the ground flying up to your head on the twelfth floor, pulling you down. You fell, a stillborn scream in your mouth, the plunge your only awareness for the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n These stories have a variety of characters and settings, but each one examines problems in culture with quiet, steady reflection. The conclusions tend to be open-ended, leaving the reader to imagine how the individuals carry on. Lingering Tide and Other Stories <\/em>pushes readers to consider the power of culture from several angles. And Viswanathan reveals her troubled characters while consistently showing great respect for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction Reviews The Harem by Safia Fazlul, Toronto, ON: TSAR, 2012 180 pp, $20.95 Safia Fazlul tackles the huge issue of contrasting cultures in her debut novel, The Harem. The narrator and main character, Farina, tries desperately to reconcile a desire for freedom with conflicting value systems. 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\n<\/em>by Safia Fazlul,
\nToronto, ON: TSAR, 2012
\n180 pp, $20.95<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Latha Viswanathan
\nToronto, ON: TSAR, 2012
\n155 pp, $20.95<\/p>\n