CHICAGO: Award-winning Palestinian author and poet Sheikha Helawy’s “They Fell Like Stars from the Sky & Other Stories” is a celebration of the victories, and an exploration of the misfortunes, of Palestinian Bedouin women and girls.
Over the book’s 18 stories, Helawy, herself of Palestinian Bedouin descent, tells of coming-of-age events that shape the lives of young girls, of the patriarchal limitations placed on women, and of older women facing tragedies.
The original Arabic-language collection was published in 2015. It has now been sympathetically translated into English by Nancy Roberts, with illustrations by Anna Morrison.
Helawi’s lyrical writing takes readers into a Bedouin village much like her birthplace, Dhail El E’rj, near Haifa, from which the residents were displaced in the Nineties to make way for an Israeli railway.
The book opens with “Haifa Assassinated My Braid,” a story that demonstrates why “Helawy’s name has become uniquely associated with the feminist voice of rebellion against repression and tribalism” (as Roberts writes in the preface of this edition), and the deep insight into Bedouin life she provides. A young girl goes to the hairdressers to have her braid cut off. She now looks like the rest of her schoolmates, but her wish has consequences that she had not fully anticipated.
In “I’ll Be There,” a young girl must make peace with the fact that she is the bridge between the modern city and her Bedouin roots. Pinballing between the multiple facets that make up her life, she tells white lies to keep moving into the future.
Helawy’s stories offer a glimpse into the world of women restricted by societal norms as they navigate their lives with careful courage and resilience. They are asked questions that they don’t want to answer, forced into positions that leave them soulless — the abiding thread is the lack of control they have over their lives — but they continue moving forward, dealing with limitations and obstacles by making them their own.
Throughout, there is an emotional weight and moving power to Helawy’s work in these tales that, Roberts writes, she “penned as a process of reconciliation with her own Bedouin identity and past.”
