Product Description

When Salma becomes pregnant before marriage in her small village in the Levant, her innocent days playing the pipe for her goats are gone for ever. She is swept into prison for her own protection. To the sound of her screams, her newborn baby daughter is snatched away. In the middle of the most English of towns, Exeter, she learns good manners from her landlady, and settles down with an Englishman. But deep in her heart the cries of her baby daughter still echo. When she can bear them no longer, she goes back to her village to find her. It is a journey that will change everything - and nothing. Slipping back and forth between the olive groves of the Levant and the rain-slicked pavements of Exeter, "My Name is Salma" is a searing portrayal of a woman's courage in the face of insurmountable odds.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118587 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Andrea Kempf, The Library Journal
Told in the first person, the discontinuous narrative of Salma's life is as well constructed as a mosaic in which each tile is lovely in itself but helps to create a whole that is breathtaking. As Salma's life moves toward its inevitable climax, readers will be transfixed. Strongly recommended for all literary collections.

From the Author
In her village of Hima in the Levant, Salma has violated the honour code of her Bedouin tribe. The village decides to kill her to cleanse their honour and restore order.
Salma's days as the village gathered are severed completely. She can no longer play the pipe for her goats or swim in the spring. She ends up in prison for her own protection and separated from her new baby. She seems fated to a lifetime in protective custody, but when the men of the tribe have seemingly stopped their chase, Salma flees to a monastery on the shores of the Mediterranean then is helped to England to seek asylum.
Salma's journey out of Hima and through England, rippling with alienation, fear and humour, reflects my preoccupation with the fractured lives of exiles and immigrants caught up in a painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural encounter. From a rural life in Hima, to a monastery in Lebanon, to boarding a ship with a nun, to a British detention centre, to Branscombe in the house of a Quaker, to a hostel for asylum seekers in Exeter, to living with her landlady Elizabeth, a child of the British empire, to her own property in King Edward street, then back to Hima to look for her long lost daughter.
Away from the colours and smells of her Bedouin village, Salma finds herself culturally dispossessed in the middle of the most English of towns, Exeter. `Now Salma the dark black iris of Hima must try to turn into a Sally, an English rose, white, confident, with an elegant English accent, and a pony.' It is with her ancient landlady that she learns the mannered ways of the English. She attempts a social life at the local pub, but refuses to drink alcohol, and forms a friendship with a feisty young Pakistani girl, Parvin, who is also running away - from an arranged marriage.
Salma's escapes from strict morality of her village and ends up in a western society with few restrictions. If penalties are in place for sex out of wedlock in the Levant it is encouraged in the UK and without it she might not experience any intimacy or human contact. She is constantly drawn to her idyllic/cruel rural past in the old country, and is trying to grapple with an alien, indifferent, but liberal society in the new country. Salma is torn and is always trying to negotiate a new path. She ends up in England with a new composite identity, but with the same old, torn heart. It tugs her back to Hima, to her daughter.

A fugitive Salma, Sal, Sally, watches other Muslims practicing their religion and is unable to reconcile herself with the innocent shepherdess she once was. Has she managed to break away from the social and religious structures of her old country? Or by running away and moving further from the self has she moved even closer to herself and her old culture?
Living by her Immigrant Survival Guide, Salma settles down and falls in love with an English man. But deep in her heart she can still hear the cries of pain and the Bedouin keen and drums. One day, Salma decides to go back to her village to find her daughter. It is a journey that will change everything.

From the Inside Flap
As contemporary as today’s headlines, as timeless as love and hate – a young Muslim asylum-seeker in England runs from a brother who wants to kill her to save the family’s honour

When Salma becomes pregnant before marriage in her small village in the Levant, her innocent days swimming in the spring are gone forever. She is swept into prison for her own protection. To the sound of her screams, her newborn baby daughter is snatched away.

In the middle of the most English of towns, Exeter, she learns good manners from her landlady, and settles down with an Englishman. But deep in her heart the cries of her baby daughter still echo. When she can bear them no longer, she goes back to her village to find her. It is a journey that will change everything – and nothing.

Slipping between the olive groves of the Levant and the rain-slicked pavements of Exeter, My Name is Salma is a searing portrayal of a woman’s courage in the face of insurmountable odds.

Customer Reviews

My Name Is Salma: A Postcolonialist Reading
In her third novel, Fadia Faqir explores the themes of double consciousness and displacement in the postcolonial era. My Name is Salma is also an investigation of a Levantine's cross-cultural experience. Faqir foregrounds a minor incident from her previous novel Pillars of Salt to build her new novel. Salma gets pregnant out of wedlock and is consequently taken into prison as a protective measure to prevent her family from killing her. Salma gives birth to a baby girl who is instantly taken away from her. With the help of a Lebanese nun, she is adopted by an English nun and given the British nationality.

In the UK, the patriarchal oppression Salma has experienced in the Levant takes a new shape. As Faqir describes herself in "Stories from the House of Songs," Salma becomes "a hyprid, forever assessing, evaluating, accommodating" (53). In more than one occasion, she emphasizes her unworthiness, slamming herself as a "trash" (18). Elsewhere, she says "I deserve to be mocked, beaten, even killed" (38). Her sense of fragmentation becomes even a part of her daily life: she tells Parvin in their first encounter that she has several names "'Many names I. Salma and Sal and Sally'" (91); she perceives herself as "a sinner pretending to be Muslim, but was really an infidel, who would never be allowed to enter the mosque" (41). She expresses her alienation from the Exeter society by her inability to digest cream tea; the city's famous offering (20).

Salma is in a constant psychological abyss, believing that "[i]f she kept silent, [she] would slip slowly out of [her] like a snake shedding her old skin" (52). When she meets new people her indoctrination to believe in the inferiority of her Arabic origins comes to the surface: "If I told him that I was a Muslim Bedouin Arab Woman from the desert on the run he would spit out his tea. 'I am originally Spanish,' I lied" (27). The Pakistani shopkeeper Sadiq shows his disgusts at her attempts to assimilate into the English culture by saying "'Salma, Salma, you are becoming a memsahib. Soon you will be English also'" (110). In the pub, skinheads shout at her "'Hey, alien! You, freak! Why don't you go back to the jungle? Go climb some coconut trees! Fuck off! Go home!'" (34). Her landlady, a product of the British Empire who used to live in India, looks at her as a "servant . . . not her tenant who pays her forty pounds a week plus bills" (43-44). Salma feels happy "[i]n transit or public spaces like receptions, lobbies or waiting rooms . . . suspended between now and tomorrow" (138). In short, Salma becomes as "a coconut - white on the inside and black on the out. Hollow on the inside with no spine, substance or colour" (59).

Nevertheless, Salma secures a job as a seamstress and starts a part time English Literature course, where she meets her would-be-husband John, a northerner with feminist outlook, who shares Salma's sense of displacement. Her decision to go back to the Levant to see her daughter has tragic repercussions.

Relying on a narrative technique that constantly blends the past with the present, Faqir ascertains that Salma's current life is shaped by her past. Using English as a medium of expressing her thoughts and describing the daily life of a Levantine rural society, the Jordanian/British novelist manipulates the language and introduces some common Arabic expressions in a way that forces her English-speaking readers to familiarize themselves with them. Faqir's perfect employment of language, including the successful shift of register, allows her to "write her colours back into the predominantly white tapestry" (60) thus aligning herself with Chinua Achebe's and other writers, who occupy a post-colonial, cross linguistic and cultural position, and who use the English language to dismantle the imperial project.