Evil Eye: Stories that Subvert Colonialism
By Kirthi Jayakumar
The impact of colonization, occupation, and apartheid is an imprint that is transmitted across generations, manifesting in the form of pain, grief, behaviours, and patterns – all originating from the common root of unhealed trauma. Etaf Rum’s Evil Eye leaves you smarting as she brings to attention what this looks like in the life of a woman and her family. On the surface, Evil Eye comes across as a story of domestic violence, racism, relationship challenges, complex mother-daughter dynamics, and intergenerational trauma. Scratch deeper, and bear in mind events unfolding in the news as we speak, and it hits you that this is an allegory for Palestine.
The book tells us the story of Yara, a young Palestinian-American woman. She is qualified to work as an art lecturer, but is subject to institutional racism, where she is relegated to taking photographs for the university’s website and social media, and isn’t allowed to deliver lectures. This racism is ruthlessly normalized, to the point that she is forced to take counselling for asserting her agency in the face of a deeply racist statement by her colleague. Yara’s marriage is in trouble – as she senses her husband growing distant and hostile. Interspersed with stories of her past, we see Yara as the granddaughter of a woman who survived the 1948 Nakba only to lose her home to the colonizers in Yaffa.
We see Yara as the daughter of a mother struggling with her own trauma and mental health challenges while facing domestic violence, and of a father who is out of touch with his emotional side to the such an extent that he turns to violence. We see Yara as the sister who takes care of her brothers and shields them from the full import of the violence her parents expose her to. We see Yara growing up into a silent woman, with a simmering undercurrent of unprocessed trauma, anger, and grief rolled into one. We see Yara carrying this heavy burden within herself, doing everything she can to check her behaviour to protect her daughters and preserve her marriage, while making sure not to feel ungrateful for anything she has going for her. Though not as superstitious as her mother and grandmother, Yara begins to wonder after she loses her job, whether her mother’s belief in a family curse might be true afterall. For as long as Yara remembers, her mother wore a necklace bearing the hamsa, or the evil eye, as a pendant, which Yara continues to wear. Her mother attributed misfortunes to the evil eye, and wore the hamsa as a way to ward it off.
When push comes to shove and the university makes Yara taking therapy a precondition for her to remain employed, she gives therapy a shot. Soon, she discovers that the rigid one-size-fits-all approach in Western therapy practices does not work for her. Through her own agency, she identifies a path to therapy that transcends the colonial mindset, and brings about her healing in a way that centres her agency, and sustains and liberates her.
Yara’s journey as Palestine’s journey
In Yara's story, we see a powerful allegory that tells the story of colonization, trauma as a result of it, and the violence that unfolds in the continued, ongoing occupation of Palestine. The belief in the evil eye is a coping mechanism, one that explains away difficult, painful, catastrophic events that happen repeatedly. As Yara processes her intergenerational trauma, we see the allegory come alive. We see the unfairness of the reality of the people of Palestine – to be occupied, bombed and razed to the ground, driven out in large numbers, to be subject to genocide and ethnic erasure, and to find no support in institutions that are intended to safeguard people’s rights, security, and wellbeing. In Yara’s story, we see it manifest as a racist institution that won’t condone racism, but would call out her mental wellness and make counselling mandatory for her to continue remaining employed.
In Yara’s parents’ story, we see how colonization and occupation robbed a people of their agency and capacity to control their own lives and journeys. We see how displacement forced them into a foreign land, where reputation and honour among a displaced community became more important than human life. We see how Yara’s mother’s attempt to assert herself is met with violence. While this violence may have some support in certain interpretations of culture by those within it, it has more to do with the colonial political economy that enables occupation, structural and systemic violence, and apartheid. We see how Yara’s mother and Yara are silenced into compliance: Any deviance is met with aggressive violence because in a community that has to hold onto memories of a motherland after displacement and that is struggling with the broken pieces of a displaced life, honour, reputation, and shame become more important than much else. In these narratives, we see how the colonized is demonized: They are the “conservative” brown men who harm their women, and therefore, the brown women are in need of emancipation. From Yara’s colleague’s racism to her institution’s apathy to it, we see the full spectrum of the femonationalist enterprise that cleverly appropriates the rhetoric of women’s rights to pursue a campaign of racial superiority.
In Evil Eye, we also see the trope of racializing sex and gender unfold. The men in Yara’s world sit across a spectrum: A violent father, aloof brothers, a husband oscillating between aloofness and folding under pressure while coping with his own parental pressures, and a gay friend grappling with family-related courtroom drama. All the men are victims of a system: Yara’s father’s choice of violence is clearly informed by the trauma of displacement. Her brothers’ aloofness is a product of growing up in a turbulent home. Her husband’s challenges of being his parents’ son is a product of his own intergenerational trauma. Her gay friend is dealing with systemic violence that is laced with homophobia. These men show up in their individual capacities in Yara’s life, each representing a thread in the fabric that constitutes their collective lives within and under the yoke of a system that has made no place for their wholesome existence and participation.
At its heart, Evil Eye also looks at the theme of curses as a cultural metaphor to explain catastrophe. Palestine has gone through decades of occupation and apartheid, and at the time of writing, the settler colonial enterprise is continuing its aggressive violence. Yara’s life is a personal manifestation of that metaphor: She holds in her the stories of her grandparents’ displacement and violence at the hands of the colonizer, her parents’ displacement and the violence that became intertwined in their lives after being uprooted, and her generation’s powerlessness in a system that expected deep conformity from them – a system that kept and keeps the original colonial occupation alive, no less. In Yara’s turn to the exercise of her agency, we see liberation come alive.
Yara knows that the Master's tools won't dismantle the Master's house. It takes her no time to see that the imposition of mandatory counselling as a condition to remain employed is a way for the system to keep her under its control. Eventually, her job is the first to go, reminding her that she was dispensable for the system. Yara subverts the curse by taking charge of her story. She journals, writes out her story, keeps her memory alive. She brings to light the truth in its raw fullness, and it gives her the courage to rise out of erasure and silence. She realizes the full power of her truth: because it is, like all truth, actionable. Just before she actions her truth, she takes off the pendant.
The closing scene brings her full circle: Yara remembers a conversation with her mother, one of the few ones that her traumatic past did not dictate. She asks her mother if she could wear the pendant one day. The memory unfolds as follows, starting with her mother’s response to Yara’s question:
“Why do you want it?” “What if I need it one day? To protect myself.” Something passes over your face—discomfort, maybe. Or fear. “You don’t need a charm for protection,” you say. “I don’t?” Your eyes well up and you don’t respond.
“Will you protect me, then?” I ask.
You shake your head, touching the end of the wet rag. In a near whisper you say, “I’m sorry, habibti, but I’m afraid I can’t.” As you pick up another spoonful of rice, I can feel my face burn beneath the harsh kitchen light. In the sudden silence, while we continue to roll the leaves, you say quietly, “I’m afraid I can’t teach you the things you need because I haven’t learned them myself.
My mother couldn’t teach me because she’d never learned either and . . .” You pause, your face crumpling. “That will always be my biggest regret. Not knowing how to protect you. Instead, I only know what it is to be cursed.”
That moment when you look down into your lap, discreetly wiping tears from your eyes—I have an urge to put my arms around you, but I can’t move. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I wish I could go back and do things differently.” You pause for a moment, then look at me. “But I know you will. I can see it in your eyes, ya binti. In those deep, dark eyes of yours, there is so much goodness ahead. I feel it.” “Really?” You nod, a faint smile brightening your face.
“One day you’ll do things better than we did. Inshallah you will.”
