Foreshadowing

Picture by
D'Arcy Vallance
"He had entered the nest of matrimony with no leftover desires and heart full of good intentions..." (308). Yasin imagined marriage this way. Little did he know what lay ahead of him.

Mahfouz says:

[Yasin] saw the similarity between his father’s character and that of his own mother. Both of them were sensual and pleasure-seeking. They ignored convictions…The relationship between them had ended quickly, because a man like him could not stand a woman like her, and vice versa. In fact, married life would have been impossible for his father, if he had not happened to upon his current wife. (298)

As I read this passage, I began to think more about Yasin than about his parents. Yasin himself is a lot like his father. As Dominique Hackett mentioned on one of his blogs, people inherit certain things from their parents genetically that affect the way they act. Here I’m not talking about eye color or height; I’m talking about Yasin inheriting his father’s lustful ways, and maybe even his mothers’ ways.

I kept this passage in mind as I read, and when I started seeing the way Zaynab behaves, I wondered if Yasin could have long relationship with her. Yasin and Zaynab reminded me about Ahmad and his first wife. All four of them are pleasure-seekers in different ways, but in the end they want to enjoy the pleasures of life, Yasin with women, and Zaynab with freedom, as she lived with her father. There is definitely a similarity between Yasin’s and Zaynab’s character. “Both of them [are]...pleasure-[seekers]” (298).

If his father and hi mother couldn’t stand each other because they were similar, why should Yasin and Zaynab be able to stand each other? Later we learn that Yasin cheats on Zaynab, and she decides to leave him. She is not Amina; she will not stand the humiliation. She managed to be patient for a little bit, but “she could no bear to be patient and forgiving any longer” (386).

Yasin thinks that if a woman like Amina hadn’t appeared on his father’s path, than “married life would have been impossible for his father” (298). As I said before Yasin is so much like his father, so how could we expect Yasin to last with Zaynab if she is basically the opposite of Amina? Yasin needs a woman like Amina, someone that will be submissive and obedient.

I thought about all this points, as I learned more about how different, or liberal, Zaynab is, and came to see that Yasin and her would probably not last. I feel like the author foreshadowed the separation of Yasin and Zaynab using the passage at the beginning of this blog. It doesn’t take much effort to see how masterfully he makes it all fit in like a puzzle.

NOTE: When I found that Zaynab had left her home, I wondered how did she have the courage to do that and if she even could do that. I will not lie; I thought that in the Muslim culture you got married and never had the chance to get divorced. You either stay married or died. That’s what I assumed, but I did a little research and found that it was somewhat this way in ancient Egypt. But in modern Egypt law have been changed to make it more possible for women to get divorced if they want to.

Bibliography
1. Mahfouz, Naguib. Palace Walk. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.
2. “Talking health to men.” 2000.Women’s Rights. March 3, 2010.
<http://library.thinkquest.org/C001142/countries/egypt.php>