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��Being a woman in the greatest curse,�� a woman recalls her mother telling her at the start of Etaf Rum’s Mother Country, ��one day you will understand what I mean.�� A heartbreaking yet harrowing look at generational trauma and the struggles to escape from stifling traditions, Rum weaves the story of a second-generation Palestinian-American woman trying to assert herself while being packaged into a traditional life of marriage and motherhood told through a letter written to the mother she has long resented. While her attempts at discovering ��how to live an authentic, fulfilling life�� collide against cultural and expectations of gender and responsibility, our narrator still feels she must find a sense of self beyond following in her mother’s footsteps ��trying not to pass my pain along�� and break the cycle of trauma. A gorgeously written story, Mother Country is a stirring look at family and gendered expectations that reaches out a comforting embrace to both an understanding of the past and emboldening of the future.

��I would do important work, create something meaningful. I would make a difference in this dark, lonely world.
How? I wasn’t sure.
Why? Because I wanted the pain to mean something.��

First off, thank you to Liv �� and her wonderful review for recommending this one to me. Etaf Rum’s stories often focus on the experience of diaspora while centering the struggles of women and Mother Country is a swift yet devastating statement that the lingering traditional gender role and expectations in the present make women feel they must remain subdued and live their life as in sacrifice everyone else in their families. Our unnamed narrator spends the duration of the story trying to grapple with the pain of her past and a disdain for a mother that allowed it to happen. ��You make it sound like you were tortured, like I was some sort of monster,�� her mother counters, showing that from her perspective she ��gave you everything I had, sacrificed my life for you.�� Written in retrospect, we trace the course of the narrator’s deeper understanding into the suffering of her mother in an attempt to make peace with her memory but also to ��unlearn all the shame�� and break the mold towards a brighter future for her own daughter.

��My plan was to be the best mother I could be. That meant being the opposite of you. I was going to be present and tender and not sad all the time. I was going to set a good example of what it meant to be a woman. Less powerless, more hope. More fuck off. The problem was, I didn’t know how.��

Rejecting tradition, she wishes to chart her own path and in the solitude she feels confined into the role of mother and homemaker. Having departed from tradition, she has no role model herself in her life and finds her actions raise alarm in others. Even her success is met with a coldness from her mother for being outside expectations and she sees no map to self-actualization in her elders around her, ��no example of what it would look like for a woman to be free.�� We see how not only can tradition be stifling, but that only looking towards the past means ideas of the future will be dominated by those of the past.

��Growing up, the path of my future was already mapped out for me. All I had to do was look around…domesticated lives governed by marriage and motherhood. No one I knew dared defy tradition; I had no example of what it would look like for a woman to be free.��

Without guidance in her own life, I appreciate how she looks to the words of writers for guidance. As someone who also finds ��books had become my closest friends,�� in times of great uncertainty or loneliness, this hit hard. In her quest to discover a way of living that honors the words ��to thine own self be true�� from William Shakespeare, the narrator dives into the revelations she discovers in writers like Rainer Maria Rilke, Brené Brown, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christopher Ryan or René Descartes among others. I really felt for her, however, when she was told 'those books have gone to your head' and her frustrations at understanding how harmful the world can feel are dismissed.

��What do you think and feel?��
That we are doing this all wrong.

While we see her plight to escape from a life where her worth is entirely made up of serving family—��you’re useless to them unless you provide a son�� he own mother tells her—Rum also touches on how traditional gender roles can be harmful to men as well. Her husband, for instance, holds a lot of resentment towards his father who only offered him one path in life to take over running the family gas station and a life of education or outside the station was not permitted. The idea of a future without oppressive boundaries of expectations, however, also causes her to reassess her hatred for her mother and better understand the forces that cornered her into the life she led.

��Why am I writing to you now. To tell you that I understand. To say I'm sorry, to finally forgive you, to ask if you can forgive me.'

This has been my first foray into the work of Etaf Rum but certainly won’t be my last. Rum writes with such grace and poise, examining difficult and painful subjects in ways that unpack a lot of emotion and trauma but orchestrates the telling in a way that offers hope, understanding, and a will to break the cycle. Mother Country also reminds us that, though the past was difficult and even the narrator’s mother expresses that her hard life still seemed better than the refugee camps they fled in Palestine, that hardships of the past do not mean they should be perpetuated into the future. That we should look forward to find ways to unlearn the shame, to do better for the next generation, to find ways to offer a better freedom and brighter future. A lovely little read that delivers an incredible emotional blow.

4.5/5

��I wish I had understood what you endured back then, how much you sacrificed. I wish I had learned to reserve judgement. Dear Mama, I begin. Maybe this way I can reach you at last.��