Book Review - Before the Queen Falls Asleep
Huzama Habayeb’s evocative novel about a displaced Palestinian family neatly illustrates Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s epigraph to his 2002 memoir, Living to Tell the Tale : “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Before the Queen Falls Asleep , nimbly translated by Kay Heikkinen, is a layered exploration of memory, exile and survival. Offering parallels with her own life, Habayeb’s female protagonist is a second-generation Palestinian refugee, raised in Kuwait, who becomes a successful writer. Given a boy’s name, Jihad is treated like the eldest son by her parents. She does well at school, teaches English and shares the financial burdens of an expanding household with her father. Only later does she question his abdication of responsibility: “Perhaps he wanted me to make up for his many shortcomings; in the process I became much less.” At Kuwait University, Jihad starts writing fiction, but her brief independence and creative