i'd be lying if i said that i didn't struggle with reading this book. the story is complicated, intentionally so, but as a reader was really really frustrating trying to wrap my mind around what was going on. had it not been for my french professor's interesting analyses and discussions i would most likely have never come around to appreciating this book, but thanks to her the story became much more profound.
long story short, the story is based in morocco, a muslim family. an 8th daughter is born and the father decides it will be a boy. they raise her like this, but once he dies she is left confused. at first she continues with their illusion and lives with the 'unjust privilege' of being a man, but then tries instead to find her way as a woman, which she finds to be impossible as she no longer knows who she is. (a lot of interesting discussion here about identity and answering the question 'qui je suis' - who am i?) the story is much more twisted and complicated than that, with many different 'story tellers', a couple of which provide their own 'ending' to this story. but we never actually hear what happens to the character. which was meant intentionally so, as the story was written to frustrate western readers who are looking for a storyline with a clear problem and resolution as we are accustomed to.
when we talk about what the book is actually talking about, this is where things get more complicated. as my professor described it, we have to look at it on different 'levels'. we have the basic story of girl becoming boy and losing one's identity (and then the difficult/impossible task of trying to find that identity again), then we can see it as a critique of the muslim world and how woman are unjustly treated and are shown to be so inferior, and then finally - what completely takes the cake (and was only revealed to us on our last day after finishing this month and a half of reading) is that the character of our book is actually symbolic of morocco and the 'father' is france. and the back and forth of trying to find her identity is morocco trying to survive in their post colonial world once they get their freedom from france. (the father's death being symbolic of their liberation, and then the resulting conflict of the character being symbolic of the difficulty of morocco and moroccans finding their identity in this post colonial time).
besides me being completely blind sided by where that came from, it kind of redeemed the story for me and made it something so profound. it felt even more relatable to me as i drew parallels from my own family history and the oppression they faced under the soviet regime - and the sadness and confusion you think of when you see these countries and these people who get pushed out by bigger and stronger countries and then lose themselves, and in my opinion never being able to go back to who they really were.
overall, this book made me feel all the emotions. a lot of frustration and confusion of not understanding what could be happening, and really struggling to stay open minded and thinking of the story. in the end, i am happy to have made it through it, and i don't exaggerate when i say it feels like an accomplishment to have finished it.