6 - Nasmiya (1996) and Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938): Fear of the Other (Woman)

Summary

Nasmiya is about one family in a community of Spanish converts to Islam living in Madrid. It focuses on the emotional fall-out occasioned by Khaled, the husband of Nadra, the narrator, who precipitates the central storyline by deciding to take a second wife. Nadra is his first wife and the mother of three children of this still supposedly happy union. The new wife, Nasmiya, unlike Khaled or Nadra, is a second-generation Spanish Muslim; she is young, beautiful, and appears to have no difficulty with the idea of sharing her husband, just as her own mother shared her father with another wife. Nadra, on the other hand, is tortured by jealousy and self-doubt, which eventually drive her to such a state of anguish that she moves out, taking the children with her. Her absence, however, leads to problems between Khaled and Nasmiya, who plead with her to come home and eventually win her over. The novel ends with a new harmony in the family: the children are back in their old beds and the three adults share an embrace during which, however, Nadra's thoughts recognize that there will still be difficult times ahead.

One of the most striking features of this extraordinary novel, as it comes to the reader, filtered through the consciousness of Nadra, is the characterization of Nasmiya, a fact to which attention is drawn from the outset by the choice of naming the book after her and not, say, the narrator or the triangular family structure. Nadra tries to understand what she finds to be the entirely alien character of this other woman and to measure herself against it. How, she wonders, does Khaled feel about the two of them relative to one another? Why does Nasmiya seem not to have these thoughts? At 421 pages, the novel is longer than any other that García Morales has produced to date, giving her the space to delve deep into the evolving feelings and developing relationships of Nadra herself and those she imputes to others, but ultimately this narrative can be reduced to a profound insight into the insecurities of a woman as she discovers more and more about herself, her husband, and the other woman whom, she greatly fears, he is perhaps right to love more than her.