Ibtisam Abdullah (The Nursery and The Other in the Mirror) - Essay Example

The single mom who likes most other women fell in love and got married. The couple decides to have an inseparable family but all their dreams are shattered with the calamity of drought. Her husband is forced to move abroad in search of better wages as the domestic situation is in desolated. That he could provide for the family but he has been unsuccessful in doing so. The single mom with her little kid had to move in with her father, into a nursery after her husband sold most of their belongings to move abroad.

Instead of watching her family nourish, our central character is preoccupied most of the time by the thought of the scarcity of ration. She keeps herself busy in two jobs. The total salary of the family is hardly enough to make both ends meet. She normally tries to delay the lunch time so that the meal could serve both as lunch and dinner. Now when only a handful of rice is left, she even thinks of putting stones and water in the pot to make her child believe that the food will be served as soon as it is ready but then realizes that it will not work as she will have to deploy this technique over and over again.

She finally cooks the last bowl of rice for lunch and places it on the table when her kid and pet dog accidentally spill the rice all over the place. The dog starts to eat the dust covered rice from the floor and her kid joins it soon after. The single mom, now frail and famished, is forced to see her little kid turn into an animal. She faints, not able to maintain her balance after witnessing her most precious possession in such wretched condition. She has always been haunted by this notion of concentrated acid corroding away the metal surface and borrowing its way down and across till it seeps through.

Now she feels the acid on her body. The war made her happiness abandon her. In the story “The Other in the Mirror” the marriage of an Iraqi housewife is falling apart because of the war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. She is used to killing time with silence after all she spends her life in solitude since her husband left for the war. The terrors and horrors of war have completely changed her husband and left her as the most immediate victim of this change. She and her husband had a very idealistic life before her husband was drafted.

Now without her husband she spends time talking to herself, pretending that her love is still around. Whenever her husband would come back home she would notice some changes in her husband. These changes grew further and made her husband completely disconnected from the surroundings. He would come back home on leave and spend time in front of the mirror trying to see how he has changed. His wife would shower him with love and tell him that she will love you no matter the change. All her husband would talk about was war.

During his last visit home, her wife tries to convince him that he is exaggerating his own condition by trying so hard to find the change through the mirror. Her husband tells her that it is not just a mirror, it is the truth. He gets agitated and throws the mirror at his wife when she tries to take the mirror from his hand. Question 2: In the stories by Libyan-American author Khaled Mattawa ("First Snow") and Sudanese-British author Leila Aboulela ("The Museum"), what are some norms and values of the Arabic-speaking characters that are in conflict with those of their host societies?

The subjects of these stories are Arabs living in non-Arab societies. The personalities of these subjects are widely