Book review: Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye compassionate if procedural telling of a mother of two finding her own way

Evil Eye

By Etaf Rum
Fiction/Harper/Paperback/336 pages/$25.30/Amazon SG (amzn.to/408vx6B)
3 stars

There is hope and courage in this second novel by Palestinian-American author Etaf Rum, which follows a Muslim mother of two as she gains the confidence to finally leave a stifling and loveless marriage.

The interest comes in Yara’s wrangling with her own guilt at feeling discontented, despite her improved circumstances in America. Her mother was a bitter victim of domestic abuse and her grandmother lives in the refugee camps of Palestine.

The Gothic conceit of having been cursed, as a fortune teller informs Yara’s mother, holds the three generations of women together.

Without the vocabulary for depression – or at least having been taught to internalise a deep suspicion of psychiatry – Yara clutches a hamsa necklace given to her by her mother, meant to offer protection from others’ envy.

But Rum chooses a tone firmly tuned to the realistic and the scientific. The evil eye charm is less effective for Yara than finally peering into her mother’s eyes and coming to terms with her past.

Rum’s message is practical and empowering, if presented unimaginatively. With self-awareness and help from others, the cycle of abuse can be broken. Curses exist mostly in the mind.

Rum’s debut, A Woman Is No Man (2019), was a New York Times bestseller.

The book’s success gave Rum the mettle to divorce her then husband. Writing it helped articulate her ardent indignation that in her Arab community, men and women are forced to live by very different standards.

In Evil Eye, Yara also writes, at the behest of her therapist, and it is in these italicised snippets that some magic can be found.

As a child, her mother was taught that bad luck lurked everywhere. “If you spilled something, you threw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder to protect yourself. You knew that scratching an itchy palm meant you were going to lose money and if you looked a black cat in the eye a jinn would possess you,” Yara writes.

But after these, Rum returns to the procedural. Yara’s chronological and gradual awakening includes large chunks of verbatim conversations with her therapist and repeated television viewing with her distracted husband.

It is a realistic and claustrophobic way of telling Yara’s story, but unlike, say, Jessica George’s Maame, it lacks a certain cutting edge and humour.

The utterly delicious descriptions of foods from tzatziki to musakhan, though, will whet the reader’s hunger, though the point is also that cooking is a joy when voluntary, a time-consuming chore when mandated.

By only lightly embellishing her own life experiences, Rum adds to the underrepresented voices of Palestinian and Middle Eastern writers telling their stories in the mainstream. Hopefully, it inspires more to come forward.

If you like this, read: Maame by Jessica George (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, $22.58, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3SwCeOf). A black girl growing up in Britain deals with racism and confronts grief in her reconciliation with her family.