Evil Eye: A Novel

Yara addresses her journal entries to her mother. In this first proper entry, Yara recounts an experience her mother had before Yara herself was born. Yara’s grandmother—her teta—passed on many of her superstitions to Yara’s mother, Meriem. Teta was particularly skilled at the practice of tabseer, or divining the future from coffee grounds. Just before Meriem married Yara’s father and left for the US, Teta read her coffee grounds. She saw “many nests,” signifying babies, but also signs of coming difficulties that Teta refused to discuss in detail. She told her daughter that she did not have to go, but Yara’s mother had already made up her mind. She saw no future for herself in Palestine. Teta gave Meriem a necklace with a hamsa charm—an amulet depicting an open hand that, in Middle Eastern culture, is believed to provide protection from the evil eye—when they parted.

It is Sunday. Yara’s husband, Fadi, has taken the day off of work, and Yara has prepared a large meal for Nadia and Hasan, Fadi’s parents. Yara has struggled to please Nadia since marrying her son, but at best she is simply doing what is expected of her. More often, Yara feels like she disappoints Nadia. In the kitchen, Nadia questions Yara’s cooking choices, finds the single cobweb in Yara’s otherwise spotless kitchen, and criticizes Yara for not participating in community events. Nadia would prefer that her daughter-in-law quit her job, wear a hijab, and play a greater role in the small Arab community in their North Carolina town. Yara tries to remain calm and sympathize with what she knows of Nadia’s difficult past, but she does not want to be bullied into quitting her job. The dinner with Fadi and his parents is tense as usual, and Yara is overwhelmed by the feeling that she’s incapable of doing anything right.

Yara quickly prepares her daughters, Mira and Jude, for school and drops them off before heading to her job at Pinewood College. She is a part-time art professor and the school’s graphic designer. She was promised a full-time teaching position several years earlier, but the opportunity never materialized. Her department chair observed one of her early classes and criticized her for including too many artists of color at the seeming expense of more canonical, mostly European artists. She does not enjoy the graphic design work as much as she does teaching but nevertheless strives to approach the position with an eye for detail, photographing striking campus images for the college’s social media pages. As she takes photographs that day, she reflects on how “lucky” she is to be in the US and to have been able to pursue higher education and a career.

Yara teaches the first day of her introduction to art course. She perceives boredom in the eyes of some of her students but provides them with a detailed introduction to the class, including the fact that she will be introducing them to artists of color in addition to the “usual” suspects like Monet and Van Gogh. After class, she absentmindedly scrolls through Instagram while remembering stories that her parents told her of their expulsion from Palestine during the Israeli occupation and their childhoods in refugee camps. She has opportunities that her mother and father did not and is grateful for the chance to pursue a career, even though it is not exactly what she had dreamed of doing.

Yara runs into Amanda and Michelle, two white female colleagues, on her way out of her office. They comment on how early Yara is leaving campus and ask questions about Yara’s parenting and home life that seem rooted in stereotypes. All three of them receive an email from the college administration seeking faculty chaperones for a student cruise through Scandinavia. All three of them would like to participate, but Yara knows that it is out of the question for her. Still, she tells the others that she plans to apply, thinking that to say otherwise would only reinforce stereotypes about being oppressed.

On the way to pick up Mira and Jude, Yara contemplates her position as a Palestinian American woman. Her parents will always consider Palestine home, but Yara does not feel at home in either Palestinian or American culture. Growing up in a conservative Arab American community in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, Yara felt alienated from much of American culture, particularly as it relates to “hypersexualized” women. At the same time, her visits to Palestine leave her ashamed of her relative privilege.

Yara talks to her daughters about their school days. Mira is exuberant and enthusiastic, while Jude is more sensitive and quieter, expressing an inarticulate sadness that makes Yara worry about passing down her own traumas to them. The girls ask about her childhood. She does not like to share details with them, so she focuses on how much she enjoyed learning to cook with her grandmother. Her parents’ marriage had been fraught with tension, and she still has upsetting flashbacks to many of their fights. Yara feels rushed through the portion of the day she spends with her children, even though these are some of the happiest times she has.

Fadi comes home from work to an elaborate Palestinian dinner. He is thrilled and tells their daughters that their mother is “perfect.” Yara still does not know how to react in moments like these. She recalls their courtship. They had bonded over a shared resistance to following the path laid out for them by their parents. Yara had not even been sure that she wanted to marry. She wanted to finish college more than she wanted to be a wife. Fadi had not wanted to take over his father’s gas station; rather, he wanted to start his own business. However, though Fadi had seemed receptive to Yara’s commitment to being her “own person,” she has found herself compromising to support the marriage. Later that night, she mentions the cruise to Fadi to gauge his reaction. He is unwilling to watch their children over the 12 days of the trip, and he thinks that it is inappropriate for wives to travel without their husbands. He tells her that the idea is “unreasonable.”

Writing to her mother in second person, Yara remembers how beautiful she was and recalls time that the two spent together cooking, using Teta’s recipes.

Yara’s five brothers are scattered all over the US, and she keeps in touch with them primarily through social media. She mulls over how different their childhoods were. The boys in the family had as much freedom as they liked. Yara’s movements were strictly controlled; she went back and forth between home and her all-girls school but knew very little beyond Bay Ridge. She scrolls through Instagram, wondering what her brothers are up to, but she suddenly remembers that she has a faculty meeting to attend. There, the talk centers on the cruise. Amanda asks if Yara applied, and when Yara tells her that she didn’t, Amanda openly asks if she was forced not to apply because of the “misogyny” of her country. Yara snaps that she grew up in Brooklyn and calls Amanda a “fucking racist.” Then, she storms out of the meeting, perplexed and disturbed by the intensity of her response. She imagines what she would tell her mother about the situation. Her mother would ask if Yara was wearing the hamsa that had been passed down from Teta. Yara’s mother believed that her life turned out poorly because of the curse of the “evil eye” that brings misfortune on those who are the objects of envy. In her mind, Yara pushes back, but her mother would have been adamant that this is what happened. Yara greets her daughters after another school day. She is still so shaken that she pulls the car off the road to collect herself, concerning her children.

Yara tells Fadi about her outburst at the faculty meeting, and he is upset. He cautions her to control her temper. He asks how the confrontation started, and she admits that Amanda had guessed that Yara’s husband was the reason that she couldn’t apply for a spot on the cruise. An argument ensues in which Yara asserts that she does not have enough independence and that she’s lived her entire life according to other people’s ideas: first her parents and then Fadi. He points out that she has much more independence than most Arab women, and she agrees but points out how problematic that is. The two continue to argue, and she loses her temper and shatters a glass. This is not the first time Yara has experienced this sudden rage, but she thought she had brought those feelings under control.

Yara’s department chair, Jonathan, calls her into his office. He expresses concern about her behavior, suggesting that calling Amanda a racist is symptomatic of other issues. He tells her that he’s enrolled her in the employee assistance program for counseling and, in the meantime, is reassigning her course. She asks if Amanda will be punished for her racist statement, and Jonathan tells her that is confidential. She realizes that she must comply with the suggestion that she attend therapy if she wants to keep her job.

Yara tells Fadi about her meeting with Jonathan that night at home. Fadi agrees with Jonathan that she needs counseling and tells her that perhaps she’ll finally be able to control her temper. He is dismissive about her work, and Yara recalls that this is a longstanding habit of his. At the beginning of their marriage, she had thought about pursuing a law degree, and though Fadi hadn’t told her not to do it, he had insinuated that the long hours would take away from her family and suggested that she was more creative than analytical. At the time, she’d taken that as a sign that Fadi really understood her. Now she isn’t so sure.

Yara has her first counseling session with William. When he invites her to tell him about herself, he asks her how long she’s been in the US; once again, Yara has to establish that she was born in Brooklyn. She does not want to share details from her childhood, and although she agrees that she needs to work on her anger issues, she doubts that therapy will help her. She is combative with the counselor and bristles at his suggestion that her issues run deeper than controlling her emotions. She is particularly attuned to any comments he makes regarding her cultural background and her marriage. She balks when he tells her that based on their interview and her responses to the intake questionnaire, he thinks she is experiencing serious depression and would benefit from medication.

Yara speaks to her mother in her head as she drives home, telling her about the counseling session. Yara’s mother dismisses the idea that Yara could be depressed, given the relative ease of her life. Rather, she attributes any suffering to Yara having been cursed by the evil eye because Yara has drawn attention to her success. Just like Teta’s vegetable garden attracted the evil eye in the refugee camp, Yara’s Instagram pictures—at least, according to her mother—have made her vulnerable.

Yara recalls a trip to a fortune teller with her mother and brothers. The fortune teller told Yara’s mother that she had been cursed and that there was nothing that could be done about it. Yara recalls the “hopelessness” on her mother’s face after hearing this news and how her mother screamed afterward in despair.

Yara moves through her daily tasks like a sleepwalker, unable to get the memory of the visit to the fortune teller out of her mind. She is able to take care of her daughters, cook, and keep their home clean, but she struggles to complete her to-do lists at work. She is often lost in thought about her parents’ difficult marriage, her mother’s assertion that she’d been cursed, and the whispers of “like mother like daughter” that she’d endured from people in the community who judged her family for its dysfunction (106). However, Yara also remembers happier times, before the visit to the fortune teller, when her mother would play Arabic music and sing along with it.

Yara returns for another counseling session. On her way in, she runs into Silas, a culinary arts instructor who has an appointment just before she does. William asks Yara to speak further about her confrontation with Amanda. Yara thinks about the complexities of misogyny and wonders if she should try to explain that sexism is not unique to the Arab world; in the US, it takes the form of hyper-sexualization and the pressure to conform to unattainable beauty standards, and this kind of misogyny is also damaging to women. She decides that he would not understand and keeps quiet. The counselor then asks about her childhood, and she refuses to speak for the rest of the hour.