Hope

“Everything had ended. It would be incorporated into the family history and forgotten. How did her heart fit in with all this? She did not have a heart. No one imagined she had one. So in reality it did not exist. How alienated she felt. She was lost and abandoned. They were not part of her. She was not part of him. She was alone, banished, disowned. How could she forget that a single word bestowed by her father’s tongue would suffice to change the face of the world and turn her into a new person? Just one word, the expression “yes” would be enough to produce a miracle. It would not have cost him a tenth of effort that went into the long discussion leading to his refusal. Yet he had willed otherwise and had been pleased to let her suffer all this torment“ (160).

Naguib Mahfouz uses short simple sentences to express the emotions felt by Aisha. Its complicated for Aisha to wrap her head around her lost dream and the short sentences reflect how she’s trying to understand it all. Words like “alone” “banished” and “disowned” suggest Aisha is losing the connection with her family feeling like an exile because she feels like they don’t understand what she’s going through. However they do understand. Later the her older sister expresses her sympathies and her brother understands because he experienced the same thing with the dejection of his marriage proposal. Khadija even gives her a bit of hope to hold on to when it seems to Aisha all hope is lost. Her family makes her feel that she belongs by showing they understand. Even young Kamal shows his deep love for sisters when their feeling depressed. She interprets the no from her father as if a part of her died. Her life is not in her own hands. She has no control over her future. Her heart does not get to chose what it wants, her father, who knows nothing about her, does.
Ahmad’s cruelty to his children destroys their hope. Because of her father’s inconsiderate decision Aisha “ bade farewell to the last of her hopes, regret became an inseparable part of her” (160). She is forced to accept the future laid out by a man that doesn’t even know her. Her personal desires and goals doesn’t matter much because she will always have to submit to the man of the house. When hope dies so does ambition. However it is different for the men of the house. Although Ahmad can squander the hopes of his son, he can only do it for so long. Fahmy knew,“…how happy he would have felt about the present, how hopeful he would have been about the future, how content he would have been with life as a whole, had it not been for his father’s stern will” (151). He is at least allowed to think this way because he will not have to submit to his father’s will forever. Soon he will be grown and allowed to make his own decisions. In contrast, his sister, Aisha, does not think one bad thing about her father because she submits to him in love and fear. In her very thoughts, she doesn’t curse him in any way when he takes away all her hope. This is so because she and most women in Islam are so accustomed to submission that its not in her spirit to do such a thing.