Something Out of Nothing

Our book group recently read The Faith Club, a collaboration between an Islamic woman, a Jewish woman, and a Christian woman who were searching for answers within their faiths after the events of September 11th, 2001. The women met regularly and worked through their stereotypes and misconceptions of their own and each others' faiths while exploring the common links between these major world religions.

I lost interest in the book fairly early on, when it became clear to me that none of these women had taken the time to study and explore her own faith tradition. This lack of knowledge enabled them to embrace the "feel good" portions of their religions while discarding anything that made them uncomfortable. Since I sort of think that the whole point of religion is to make you uncomfortable, I was hoping for more from them and from the book.

The positive result of reading this book is that it made me curious to learn more about the culture of Islam. With a minor in religious studies, I am vaguely familiar with the basics of Islamic doctrine, but I have never heard much of the stories and music of the Muslim world. It helped that a couple of local women have written engaging books on the subject.

The first book I read was Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher, a young adult novel which takes the famous tale of Shahrazade and embroiders it with the engaging characters and vivid scenery of ancient Persia. Everyone has heard Shahrazade's famous tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba, but who has paused to wonder how the young herione of 1,001 Arabian Nights learned all of those stories in the first place? Although the plot sort of falls apart at the end of the novel, it's a quick and rewarding read.

The second book I read was Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber. Set in turn-of-the-(21st)-century Los Angeles, the story focuses on Sirine, the daughter of an Iraqi father and an American mother. Sirine's parents were aid workers who died when she was a child; since then she has lived with her bachelor-professor uncle and inhabited his world of Middle Eastern academics while making a living cooking at a Lebanese cafe. Perhaps inevitably, Sirine falls for Hanif, an Iraqi exile who teaches Arabic literature at UCLA. Their love story is observed and complicated by a plethora of characters including Sirine's co-workers at the restaurant and Hanif's students and fellow faculty members.

My favorite part of this book was the interwoven tale narrated by Sirine's uncle, following the fantastical exploits of one Abdelrahman Salahadin as he falls under the spell of a mermaid, is pursued by his mother, and ends up... well, I don't want to give it away. Let's just say that my favorite movie unexpectedly plays a minor role in the story.

Based on these two very engaging books, I am looking forward to seeking out more literature that focuses on Middle Eastern culture.

Winter Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

As the snow enthusiastically covered Boston on Wednesday, I devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This book is not one I would normally have chosen to buy and read, but my graduate program just started a book club. One of my favorite things about book clubs is that I end up reading books that I would not have picked on my own. Sometimes this is good (like ‘Henrietta Lacks’) and sometimes this is bad (like ‘Julie & Julia’ -sorry SaraHS). But, as my mother used to say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Image taken from LibraryThing Catalog

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is one of those books that leaves a niggling sensation in your stomach after you turn the last page. It sticks in the corner of your brain and hours after reading it, while staring out the window at a snow-scaped paradise, you wonder about the story and the characters. It is as if they come alive in a world halfway between reality and history. They jump off of the pages and into your life, and it is only as you turn your gaze away from the snow that you remember that they belong in a story.

What has lingered in my mind goes beyond the provocative questions about medical ethics and racial injustices that this book so deftly raises. These questions certainly deserve more thought, but the ‘something else’ that lingers started with this quote (placed just before the prologue of the book):

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.” 

-Elie Wiesel from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code.

The infamous HeLa cells that were taken from Henrietta Lacks became her identity. Once her soul departed and her body was laid to rest, her name and her dreams, faded into oblivion. She became an abstraction, a person who had never quite lived. Her cells, tiny pieces of herself that she unknowingly left behind, were to assume an identity of their own. 

We too unwittingly leave pieces of ourselves behind every day, like a trail of breadcrumbs that follows our footsteps. What becomes of the pieces that we leave strewn behind us? A lost glove in the supermarket, a digital footprint in cyberspace, cells in a doctor’s office. 

As we turn our gaze to the world around us, to strangers passing us on the street, we begin to see them as pieces. They become another tired face on a busy commute; a dropped coffee cup, now half-covered in ice. 

Perhaps we do not have enough room in our minds and hearts to see the universe that resides within every person. But, it would behoove us to reflect, now and again, on the pieces we leave behind us. For, if we see others as pieces, how must they see us?

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Reading is a joy, a delectable pleasure. Not only do books, fiction and non-fiction alike, create new worlds for us to explore, but, at times, they cause us to rub our eyes and view our own world differently. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has assumed its place on the bookshelf, to be re-read at a later date, and I am already opening the pages of another.