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Critical Analysis Book Review of Zafar Samara “A Good Wife”
Samra Zafar’s memoir ” A Good Wife” explains about her childhood living in the United Arab Emirates, her young life arranged marriage to stranger eleven years her senior and the resulting high move to the nation of Canada. The memoir actively follows her marriage breakdown precarious, while actively outlining her berries and struggles to her dream of higher quality education. Through the biography, she highlights her experience in doing and navigating different roles she finds herself in as a teenage immigrant and wife, mother and daughter-in-law. She explains her development and growth as she is faster-torn form her known world and the significantly dropping in a new nation, culture, family culture and dynamics, while alone with her husband. He only has met in just a few moments. The new responsibilities came to her with the long list of non-communication expectations which actively present the strake of the contrast of the independent upbringing and personality. She quickly realizes that the appealing life she was promised before was a facade.
She begins narrating her story at her mehndi in a pre-wedding party where she explains herself being stricken with high stakes of panic of the thought of what she had agreed upon. From this, the book jumps around where she before the wedding festivities and back once more, at that point to her youth outlines how she was brought up in what might be viewed as an extremely liberal Indian family. Her childhood plays a key function in a considerable lot of her future cooperations. The exacting conventional gendered jobs were not appropriate in her close family. Zafar and her sisters were supported, especially by their dad, to be visionaries, play sports, guard themselves, seek after scholastics and conspicuous vocations or more all 158 Freund to have an independent mind and be autonomous. They were encouraged that they were equivalent to guys “I don’t have four daughters, my father said with a laugh. I have four sons” (Zafar and Meg 10). Difference to practically the entirety of their female friends. As Zafar enters her young years, she starts to take note of how people, in general, did not uphold these qualities. Although her folks were raising their young ladies like this, they, at the end of the day, were a piece of a conventional masterminded marriage. Zafar additionally saw her father’s physical and mental maltreatment toward her mom on numerous events all through her youth. She additionally diagrams multiple occurrences of being explicitly attacked by apparently trusted male figures in her family life as she develops. There is an away from of male predominance delineated, even inside this current family.
Zafar describes that when she was fifteen years of age, her family gotten a proposition to be engaged from another family in the territory. Their child was 26 years of age and lived in Canada. Even though her folks had raised her to be free, they compelled her to think about the marriage. Numerous relatives and friends savoured this proposition, driving her to think about just the positive parts of this game plan. Once more, her cutting edge of childhood was shown as opposed to the social standards of her friends. Only her foreigner British educators appeared to consider the thought horrifying and urged her to think about first her future and instruction. After initially turning down the proposition, numerous guarantees and consolations were made by the proposing family about her being permitted to proceed with her schooling, seek after a profession and the points of interest she would be managed in Canada. Ultimately Zafar yields and consents to the marriage, demanding getting support in her future schooling. After completing evaluation eleven, contacting her sixteenth birthday celebration, and with a couple of short experiences with her future spouse, they are a hitched couple alone in Canada.
Soon after showing up in Canada and having a couple of upbeat months alone together, Zafar’s in-laws show up and move in. Subsequently, starts the descending winding of her marriage. She before long learns the amazingly prohibitive and corrupting society of her male-centric family. The guarantees and façade of advancement are quickly dropped, and it is clarified her job is basic, docile belonging “Ahmed was telling the world that I was his property” (Zafar and Meg 129). At long last, little triumphs are refined, and Zafar expertly discovers approaches to arrange opportunities in her day to day existence, as long as they are veiled as being exclusively helpful to her kids or monetarily profitable. She slowly starts to assume responsibility for her life course without the information on her significant other or parents in law. After beginning to procure an unobtrusive pay with a childcare program in her home she is permitted to take some college courses such a long time as it doesn’t meddle with her obligations of home life, and she doesn’t interface with anybody at all external her home. After an especially strenuous clash with her better half, he disintegrates their marriage by saying “Talaq” (Zafar and Meg 263) three times which establishes separate in her religion (Freund 162). At last, after years of suffering maltreatment, she has discovered an exit from her marriage; nonetheless, her battles are not yet close the end. Zafar ponders her experience of progressing to single parenthood with two youthful girls close by, without the help of her way of life, religion, companions, spouse, and scarcely her own family. She finds another family in her college life. With the help of the budgetary guide division, college lodging, and understudy affiliation, she drives forward in her unprecedented excursion to independence. In her assurance, she continues to graduate at the top her class and discover her bringing in turning into an instrumental help and model for ladies in injurious connections.
Zafar is clear in her expectation of situating herself in this book as an overcomer rather than a powerless casualty. She exhibits how ladies in minimized circumstances can discover help and succeed, paying little mind to their restrictions. Her journal is one of expectation and support to ladies in harsh, oppressive circumstances (Bukuru 114). She is a living case of having pretty much every obstruction believable to getting autonomous in Canada. Still, she discovers her direction and far outperforms her objective of advanced education and independence (Bukuru 114). Zafar works admirably of sketching out different choices for ladies in oppressive circumstances in her unobtrusive stretches for freedom and inevitable break. Her biography is partaken to be a motivation, to show that help is accessible, and ladies are not surrendered to the conditions they are given.
“A Good Wife” memory as it is presented is an exciting and exceptional book, and I would recommend any other person to consider reading it and get the personal enjoyment I got from reading it myself. The memoir would be of much significance and beneficial to studies that are highly focused on the abuse cycle and the effects of abuse on mothers and women within their family set up and different situations. The book would offer extended benefits to any person interested in the struggles faced by other people within arranged marriages. Apart from the abusive aspects of relationships, the book also gives some insights to the learning of the couple and their families where any other filed of studying and researching the family or abuse family would benefit from the work of this book.
Works Cited
Bukuru, Gloria. “Book Review of Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters)(2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose.” Canadian Journal of Family and Youth/Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse 12.3 (2020): 115-119.
Freund, Amanda. “Book Review of Zafar, Samra (with Meg Masters)(2019). A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose.” Canadian Journal of Family and Youth/Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse 12.3 (2020): 158-162.
Zafar, Samra, and Meg Masters. A Good Wife. (2019): 2-200.