The Girl Who Fell to Earth
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Award-winning filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a funny and wry coming-of-age memoir about growing up in between American and Gulf Arab cultures. Part family saga and part personal quest, The Girl Who Fell to Earth traces Al-Maria’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds. When Sophia Al-Maria's mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband's desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn't know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she'd only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places. The Girl Who Fell to Earth takes readers from the green valleys of the Pacific Northwest to the dunes of the Arabian Gulf and on to the sprawling chaos of Cairo. Struggling to adapt to her nomadic lifestyle, Sophia is haunted by the feeling that she is perpetually in exile: hovering somewhere between two families, two cultures, and two worlds. She must make a place for herself—a complex journey that includes finding young love in the Arabian Gulf, rebellion in Cairo, and, finally, self-discovery in the mountains of Sinai. The Girl Who Fell to Earth heralds the arrival of an electric new talent and takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home.
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O início é bastante interessante, à medida que vamos avançando as coisas começam a ficar um pouco chatas e repetitivas, e terminamos com mais perguntas do que respostas.
Não consegui perceber:
a viagem inicial do pai para os EUA, para estudar (através de uma bolsa de estudo) e acaba a viver na zona rural de Washington;
o relacionamento entre os pais de Sophia;
o regresso do pai ao Catar;
de onde aparece o dinheiro que a família, de repente, passou a ter;
a paranoia da mãe com a possibilidade de rapto ou com os olhares de outros homens;
a ida de Sophia para uma universidade no Egipto – porque não escolheu outras opções?;
a passividade perante a forma como as mulheres (incluindo ela) são tratadas –ela vai dos EUA para o Catar, alguma coisa deveria ter aprendido enquanto esteve na América...;
a opção de ir viver com um pastor de cabras....
Enfim, não é o meu mundo e tenho grandes dificuldades de lidar com este tipo de cultura.
By the end of that summer, I was conviced that all the women in my family had forgotten what it was like to be fearless and what it had once meant to be free.
44/198 – Catar
I found this book completely disjointed. There are some sections that are well crafted and readable but overall the narrative does not hold together across the various countries and characters.
