Nadia, Captive of Hope (PDF)

A rare feminist perspective on a people and culture in one of the most tumultuous regions in the world, Nadia is the autobiography of Fay Afaf Kanafani, an Arab Muslim woman born in Beirut in 1918. Kanafani is frank and passionate as she recounts her difficult life. Engaged at thirteen to a distant cousin, Kanafani was married by age seventeen and living with her husband's family in Palestine. Her recollections provide fresh insight into Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine from 1935 to 1948, the year Kanafani's husband was killed by Israeli soldiers as they advanced to occupy Haifa and the family became refugees in Lebanon. As a widow with three children, Kanifani, who learned early in life how tradition and custom circumscribed women's rights, broke free of all of those traditions and defiantly resumed her college studies. Struggling against social norms and family tradition, Kanafani became a successful and respected career woman. During the early years of her profession, Kanafani met the man who was destined to become everything in her life. Each faced obligations imposed on them by their families but finally, in 1965, they were free to marry. Their happiness lasted only a decade, until the Lebanese Civil War erupted. The last chapter of Kanafani's book focuses on the period 1975 to 1985 and provides a personal account of the civil war in Lebanon. As the story of this powerful woman's journey to independence unfolds, Kanafani offers a fascinating glimpse into the constraints placed on women in traditional societies and the opportunities available to them in newly emerging countries. She also tells of the devastation wrought by fifty years of war, including intimate details of marriage and family life. The reader is left inspired by Kanafani's strength and perseverance and her strong feminist outrage, expressed long before her exposure to Western feminism.