{"id":1754,"date":"2022-07-06T09:13:42","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T13:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.alumni.ncsu.edu\/?p=1754"},"modified":"2022-07-06T09:13:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T13:13:42","slug":"memory-serves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.ncsu.edu\/2022\/memory-serves\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory Serves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. \u2013 The memory came flooding back that night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It had been a rainy day. Etaf Rum \u201911, \u201912 MA, was taking some of her students from Nash County Community College on a field trip. Maybe it was the bus, maybe it was the rain. That night, as she began to write a journal, she remembered getting off a bus on another rainy day. She was a schoolgirl, back in Brooklyn. As her mother waited on the sidewalk, Rum and some friends waved goodbye to one another. Some were boys. When she got off the bus, her mother called her a sharmhouta\u2009\u2014\u2009the word for \u201cwhore\u201d in Arabic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was writing down my thoughts and my memories of my early life, trying to understand why I was sad, why I could not seem to feel that I fit in,\u201d Rum says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That first journal entry eventually became a scene in Rum\u2019s 2019 novel, A Woman Is No Man<\/em>, which follows three generations of Palestinian women as they navigate a culture that does not allow women many choices in life. The book and its characters are fiction, but Rum relied heavily on her experiences growing up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where she was part of a tight-knit Palestinian community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rum’s bestselling A Woman Is No Man.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The novel quickly garnered accolades. The New York Times<\/em> called it \u201ca dauntless exploration of the pathology of silence, an attempt to unsnarl the dark knot of history, culture, fear and trauma that can render conservative Arab-American women so visibly invisible.\u201d Jenna Hager Bush chose it as a selection for her book club. Rum appeared on the Today<\/em> show, and A Woman Is No Man<\/em> climbed to the top of The New York Times<\/em> bestseller list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The universe wanted me to have that memory in that moment, to open up all the other gates.
\u2013 Etaf Rum \u201911,\u201912 MA<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Her journey to the current moment\u2009\u2014\u2009she is now newly married, a best-selling author about to publish her second book and owner of a popular coffee shop\u2009\u2014\u2009began with writing down her memories. It was an act that gave Rum, 32, a release she didn\u2019t expect. \u201cThat happened,\u201d she says of her memories of her mother\u2019s harsh word. \u201cAnd I wrote that it happened. And it was as though God came down from the sky and into my body. The universe wanted me to have that memory in that moment, to open up all the other gates.\u201d The memories kept coming, and she kept writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rum loves nothing more than to read a good book.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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She is shown in front of the wall of books for sale at Books and Beans, the coffee shop\/bookstore she owns with her husband.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

When she was 18, Rum began sitting with suitors in the living room of her parents\u2019 home, serving them hot Chai tea accompanied by roasted watermelon seeds. All the young men were Palestinian-Americans whose families had approached her family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the suitors, who lived in a small Palestinian community in Rocky Mount, was also a distant cousin. \u201cOur fathers grew up together in a Palestinian refugee camp,\u201d Rum says. \u201cI knew him from family visits. So when his father told my father he wanted to ask for my hand in marriage, I guess I was comforted\u2009\u2014\u2009he was not a total stranger, so in my mind I was moving to North Carolina with my family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Rum had insisted on one condition. She told every suitor that she intended to continue her education, and she would not marry anyone who did not agree to that. Many of the young men wanted a wife who did nothing but take care of the home and children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rum stands in front of the Rocky Mount Mills\u2019 old water tower.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Landing in Rocky Mount was a bit of a shock. No longer surrounded by a community of immigrants as she was in Bay Ridge, she found herself missing the smells of the food and the variety of people from different cultures on the street. The Palestinian community in Rocky Mount was mostly her husband\u2019s family, so it did not feel like her own. \u201cAnd it was very clear to me that there was such a thing as an American lifestyle,\u201d she says, \u201cand I was not participating in it.\u201d Growing up, she had attended an all-girls Islamic school and seldom left the house without her parents. \u201cWe didn\u2019t hang out with Americans. The only time I ever saw them was on television.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was soon pregnant with her first child, a daughter, and enrolled in nearby Wesleyan College. But even with financial aid, the tuition at a private school was too high. NC State was about an hour\u2019s drive away. She started school in 2007, taking courses online and trying to adjust her schedule so she only had to commute two days a week. \u201cI did not have the college experience,\u201d she says. \u201cI was trying to get my degree and then come home and cook dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rum thought about going to law school. But after she gave birth to her daughter, she says, her husband cut off that possibility, saying he didn\u2019t think being a lawyer would leave her enough time to take care of their children. Rum majored in philosophy, then added English as a double-major after taking a course on 19th century American novels with Anne Baker, who remembers her as an exceptionally curious student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe was open to all kinds of books, really interested in what other people had to say, and interested in books as a way of imagining being in another world,\u201d Baker says. \u201cI did not realize until the semester was almost over that she had a family. And I did not know she was writing a novel until I saw it. But it made perfect sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was open to all kinds of books, really interested in what other people had to say, and interested in books as a way of imagining being in another world.
\u2013 Anne Baker, NC State English Professor<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After getting her undergraduate and graduate degrees from NC State, she began teaching at Nash Community College. Between taking care of her two children and her household and teaching, she continued to write. \u201cI needed to understand ways my past was influencing my life in Rocky Mount as a wife and a mother and a person,\u201d she says. \u201cI think I was hoping to understand some dark truth\u2009\u2014\u2009why did I feel like this? Why did I feel so out of place in the world, and not on the path that I needed to be on?\u201d She was teaching literature and realized she didn\u2019t see a lot of Arab-American voices on the bookshelves. \u201cAnd I began to realize that stories like mine are not there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point she enrolled in an Arab-American literature class at Duke. Then she began to think: Do I want to study Arab-American literature? Or do I want to write Arab-American literature?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rum then knew that her journal entries were going to spark a novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rum met her second husband, Brandon Clarke, in the most American of meeting spots\u2009\u2014\u2009the gym. Their children played together in the day care at the YMCA, and the two became friends. He helped her through her struggles as she went through a separation and divorce, and the two became business partners, opening Books and Beans and two restaurants\u2009\u2014\u2009a beer and burger joint and an artisan pizza shop\u2009\u2014\u2009in Rocky Mount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rum usually talks fast with a hint of a Brooklyn accent, but she slows down for a minute and looks away when she talks about Clarke. \u201cHe\u2019s really sweet and kind and loving,\u201d she says. \u201cI had never had a man treat me like a person in my own right. I was always less than, somehow inferior.\u201d They were married in Books and Beans last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has taken some time for Rum to feel at home in Rocky Mount. Even when she was teaching, she often felt like \u201cthe foreign girl on campus,\u201d she says. But today, people know her as a best-selling novelist who owns three restaurants. \u201cI feel like I am part of this community and I am giving back to this community,\u201d she says. \u201cI am not looking at it from the sidelines and wondering why I am here. Now, I see, oh, yes, I do belong here. I see the paths in my life that brought me to this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rum, her husband, Brandon Clarke, and the couple\u2019s three children on the banks of the Tar River across from the mill. Children are Reyann, 12, Isah, 10, and Mallory, 7.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rum\u2019s life today includes raising her two children, ages 12 and 10, and helping parent Clarke\u2019s 7-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. She is making sure the children know that women are never to be treated as second-best, and if she is sheltering them, it is mostly in trying to cut down on screen time and keep them off social media. They attend public school and are obsessed with Hamilton<\/em>; the family recently took a trip to Mount Vernon to see history for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of Rum\u2019s novel comes from something she often heard her grandmother say when, as a child, she would ask why she couldn\u2019t do something her brothers were doing. \u201cA woman is no man,\u201d was the reply. The themes of A Woman Is No Man<\/em> are dark\u2009\u2014\u2009domestic violence, arranged marriage, and a preference for sons over daughters. As she wrote, she feared that she would face a backlash from the Arab-American community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was worried I would be seen as a traitor,\u201d she says. \u201cI am talking about very taboo subjects. I have to be very careful in interviews that A Woman Is No Man<\/em> is not the single story of what it means to be Arab-American.\u201d She did receive hateful reactions on social media and in emails, but found strength in insisting that the story be told. And she found that her story connected with many women, from a variety of cultures, who had experienced domestic violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the men in her novel are capable of horrific abuse, she has also painted them as human and products of the trauma suffered by the Palestinian people. That trauma, she says, is often not acknowledged by the outside world, and it \u201ctrickles down from a political scale to a very domestic scale. From my parents who grew up in war to the way they raised me. It trickles down to the way I am with my children. It trickles down from generation to generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn order to process the trauma,\u201d Rum says, \u201cit has to be verbalized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n