Was she really a woman? Fatima contemplates, as her grandmother walks inside the tent, covered in a large dark-blue garment that absorbs every atom in the air, and carries the vastness of the desert with it. The desert’s landscape is only a natural extension of the incomparable space she controls; no human cell ever moved freely under her watch. Grandmother Hakima is the great demon. The tent is akin to an ant she steps on wherever she walks. She clasps every human heart in her hand as though they were nothing more than dead flesh that can be either kept or sold. For her, the other women in the family are either wretched, crippled, possessed, or demented. Their lives are like silent, motionless seas without waves, and every now and then, a sea creature — a husband — shatters the surface by leaping through it. The Tent (1996) is a novella written by Egyptian author Miral Al-Tahawy, which dives into the heart-wrenching experiences of Bedouin women and how the difficulty in their lives leads them to suffer from mental illnesses. Through the eyes of Fatima, the reader enters the hidden…
