Under Her Wing

The family's life and behavior always revolves around the father’s presence. But when he is gone they feel a huge relief and feel like they can act like themselves. “They would cluster under their mother’s wing with love and all-embracing affection” (52). I really like how Mahfouz compares the mother’s comfort to a wing. It really reminded me of pelicans. Pelicans are birds that will bite chunks of flesh off of their chest in order to feed their babies and if there isn’t any food. In the Catholic Church pelicans are also compared to Jesus Christ because He gave His body and life to his children. The mother of the family gives so much to her children to protect, feed, and make them feel comfort just like a pelican would. Under her wing they feel safe and protected from anything, even if it’s their father.

Page 52: Paragraph 2

I've been down this road before.

Many families have dinner together, take road trips, attend family parties together and have a great time. Now in the modern time families can get along very well without any worries of being given an ugly look for simply speaking to one another. On the first page of chapter nine the family gathers for their coffee time. When this family time is presented something else is also mentioned that in a sense takes away from the whole family bonding feeling. When we hear the word family many of us think the entire family: mom, dad, brothers, and sisters. In the chapter the first three words are, "Except for the father,..."(52). The family is gathered but not the father. These three words somehow made the feeling of the paragraph a bit more relaxed. Judging from the way the family is when the father around this is like a mini-vacation before it is time to return to work. The tension of the house seemed to be shut out for them just for that simple moment. I have been down this road before and know exactly how this feels. When my dad is around I have come to notice I watch my every move. My father is very strict and it only takes one word from him to make my entire day go downhill. It is a terrible feeling when I come home everyday and the first things you hear are complaints. I would much rather be asked about my day. Without my mother around the house is full of tension all the time. My father basically picks us up, takes us home and locks himself in his room. In a way that may seem like freedom, but the truth is its scary. My sisters and I have to make sure we are at perfect noise level and not disturb my father. If he calls for us we have to make sure we hurry to his room before he yells a second time, because then you are in trouble. As a daughter I love my father but I have to admit the tension is always there. When my sisters and I are with my mom we still watch our actions but the atmosphere is much more relaxed. The family time here is a way of viewing a broken family within the same home on a daily basis, which I have also experienced. Just reading this one paragraph can really sum up the atmosphere the families live in at the time and it is clear that it is not an easy one. The beginning of this chapter is important and its placement just shows that this can be mentioned anywhere in the story. This could have been brought up in another chapter for another day, but the fact that it is in the story somewhere near the beginning but also not at the very end gives the reader a break from all the names and tasks being done and gives the reader a taste of the loving nature of a mother. Amina's love and kindness is emphasized in this chapter to represent that her role in the family is just as important as Ahmad's , "They would cluster under the mother's wing with love and all-embracing affection" (52).

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.

Knowing Family

“Perhaps it was the way his mother spoke about her husband that put him in such awe of him. He could not imagine that any other man in the world could equal al-Sayyid-Ahmad's power, dignity, or wealth. As for love, everyone in the household loved the man to the point of worship. Kamal's small heart absorbed its love for him from this environment, but that love remained a hidden jewel, locked up inside him by fear and terror”(50).

In Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, the way Ahmad, the father of the main family of the book, treats his family continuously comes up. The level of disrespect that he gives his family, his wife especially, is immense. One finds it especially disturbing after reading the passage quoted above.
Ahmad has the gift of a successful family that loves him, but because he can he chooses to act the way he pleases. He disregards the effects that it will have on his family. His daughters will think that it is alright for their husband to treat them like that. His sons may treat women the same way.
It does not seem that that is so with the way the boys and girls are betrayed in the book. Fahmy adores women and respects his sisters. Kamal loves being around the women of the house and is highly influenced by the feelings that they have. The passage tells us that Kamal probably loves his father because he is influenced by the love that his mother has for Ahmad. Khadija does not let her brothers disrespect her even though they are men. We, the readers, don't know too much about how Aisha feels about men, besides that she is flattered by one. All of these examples show that Ahmad may not be having a negative effect on how his children think of the opposite sex. So the problem may not be the effect he has on them. The problem may be that he is not having an effect on them.
This passage tells us that Kamal's love for his father is “locked up” and “hidden.” This is the exact problem. He is not really being involved in the lives of his children because they have shut him out due to fear. While at the breakfast table, the children do not discuss anything with their father because they are afraid to speak around him. They developed a life that excluded him from any fun that they had. They would become a different person while he was around. Thus, he does not know who his children really are. Amina refrains from telling Ahmad about the things that Kamal has done at school and at home because she fears what he will do to him and sympathizes with Kamal. Because Ahmad continues to treat his family with disrespect, they continue to exclude him from truths about certain family members. Ahmad probably does not know how his daughters act because they are never around him. When they are in his presence, they are not allowed to express themselves. Because of Ahmad's actions, he has become, unbenounced to him, the ostracized one in the family. The family has a life and each member has a distinct and specific personality. He does not know the difference between their personalities, besides that Kamal likes to play around. The family has an alliance against him in a way. They don't tell their father about how each other really acts and they don't do anything to let them know their true characters. Ahmad seems to not care about the true characters of his family as long as they don't disgrace his name.
It is a pity that Ahmad is excluded from the real life of his family. He won't know what kind of person has been growing up in his house. He does little to raise them besides instilling fear in them so that they won't disrespect him or be comfortable around him. He wants them to be good citizens and not stick out in society. But he seems to not care about their characters.