I can’t believe its the end of the semester already. Coming to the end of this course, I keep thinking about how every book we’ve read felt so different on the surface, yet somehow kept circling back to the same questions. At the beginning, I thought I would be reading a series of unrelated novels. […]
Posted in Blogs, Conclusion | Tagged with the end, Uncategorized
Looking back on this course as a whole, I feel like one of the biggest things that stuck with me is how much these texts resist being pinned down. At the beginning, I thought we were just going to read a bunch of novels and analyze them in a pretty straightforward way, but instead it […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with betrayal, gender, identity, narrative, power, Uncategorized
One of the biggest things I learned in this course is that literature is not just about what happens in a story, but how and why it is told. For example, when the class first started I was so lost and was not able to read or understand the books. I felt like it was […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Uncategorized
The book was very uncomfortable to read and honestly left me feeling unsettled in a way I was not expecting. The book follows the story of three women who are trapped in terrible marriages, and each one of their stories is different yet it connects in a painful way, which shows the reality of a […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Uncategorized
The Impatient follows three women, Ramla, Hindou, and Safira, as they navigate life inside a polygamous marriage in northern Cameroon, Africa. In this novel, every time a woman tries to stand up for herself or say that something is wrong, the fault is always put on her behaviour rather than what’s actually being done to […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Uncategorized
I really enjoyed this novel and am happy to end off the course with a good read! Despite the book being often quite sad and oppressive, it kept me intrigued the whole time and was very readable. I was especially interested in how it gave insight into the inner-workings of a Cameroonian Muslim society with […]
Posted in Amadou Amal, Blogs | Tagged with The impatient, Uncategorized
I read *Love Me Tender*, and to be honest, it’s not like a regular book. It feels a little messy, but also very real, like you’re in someone’s head instead of reading a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Reminds me a lot of some of the other books we have read. The […]
Posted in Blogs, Debre | Tagged with freedom, Uncategorized
I feel like The Impatient hit me in a way I didn’t expect, it’s not just sad or it’s exhausting. And I think that’s kind of the point. The idea of munyal which is this constant pressure to be patient, starts to feel less like a virtue and more like a trap. The lecture really emphasized how patience […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Uncategorized
In The Impatient by Djaïli Amadou Amal, one of the main ideas throughout the novel is that women are constantly told to be patient, but patience does not actually improve their lives. Instead, patience becomes a way to control women and force them to accept forced marriage, violence, and polygamy. Through the stories of Ramla, […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with Uncategorized
“If you were able to tame a lion, then your husband, a mere man, does not exceed your powers” (pg. 115) This was the story told to newly wed brides, to reassure that one does not need love potions to “tame” their husband if they can “tame a lion”. First of all, the fact that […]
Posted in Blogs | Tagged with power, reality, relationships, The impatient, trauma, Uncategorized, women, wordpress
