Book Review

Title: Cry Of The Dove

Author: Fadia Faqir

Publisher: Harper Collins

Released: September 2007

Pages: 294

ISBN-10: 0-00-200834-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-00-200834-1

$29.95 

3 ½ Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

Fadia Faqir weaves an interesting story about life, love and heartache. Salma is a young girl living in a Bedouin Village when she falls in love with a local boy and ends up pregnant. The boy ends the relationship and Salma is put into a women's prison for five years as a way of protecting her from being stoned by her relatives for the shame she has brought to the family. Salma is snuck out of the prison one night and given to a kind lady to bring to England where she must begin her new life. From being a young and inexperienced girl, Salma has a harrowing journey through pain, hurt and a new life forced upon her. Salma becomes ‘Sally' a name she resists, but is forced to take on if she is to gain citizenship in England. Salma gets a minimum wage job and rents a room from a British woman who is an alcoholic and still thinks she is India as a child, bossing around Salma as though she is the house slave as opposed to renting a room.

Cry Of The Dove (yes reference is made to Prince's ‘When Doves Cry') is a heartbreaking tale of change being imposed on someone who doesn't want to be where she is and neither do the people around her. Most of all, the reader is kept in suspense as to what happened to the baby Salma had that was torn from her arms after childbirth? Salma, after spending many years in England, and establishing a new life, decides that it is important she return and see if her child is still alive.

Salma's story is threaded beautifully and effortlessly back and forth between the past and the present without any chapter changes, or paragraph changes sometimes. Faqir tells Salma's story so intimately that Salma becomes a real life, flesh and blood, person to the reader. A sense of defined realism to the main character of Salma allows the reader to identify with her reactions when learning a foreign language and observing a huge amount of subversive racism that streams everyday of her life when living in a foreign country. Salma appears to be thrown into her life, almost against her will; and her only purpose, defined by Salma, is to think constantly about the daughter she had and to make a life up within her imagination of a happy family with herself, her daughter and a new life.

Faqir has a great sense of language and uses it to the full body that it can be. One example is when Parvin, Salma's friend says to her ‘You know Salma. We are like shingles, invisible, snake like. It slides around your body and suddenly erupts on your skin and then sting, sting.' With such story telling Faqir manages to make us feel sympathy for the most pathetic and racist of people like Elizabeth, Salma's owner of the rented accommodation. Even Elizabeth has her story of grief intermingled with love that will cut to the core of the reasons why she is so acidic. Faqir also gives a head-nod to a great writer before herself when she quotes a poem of Khalil Gibrans'.

Overall, the book was a pleasure to read; the ending was infuriating and was supposed to be. Cry Of The Dove leaves an unbalance in your soul, which I think can be more powerful in helping people to understand one another then most means of action; Faqir makes her point clear.