Book - The Girl Who Fell To The Earth

The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

Harper Perennial 2012

from goodreads.com

"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. 
Both family saga and coming-of-age story, 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 .... takes us on the most personal of quests: the voyage home."

image & summary

From The Week, January 9, 2013

"Despite some rough edges, Sophia Al-Maria’s new memoir offers “much to beguile you,” said Marie Arana in The Washington Post. The child of a devoutly Muslim Saudi Bedouin and a wannabe Rockette from rural Washington state, Al-Maria has chronicled her parents’ ill-fated marriage as well as her own upbringing “with an undeniable urgency.” As she shuttles between American and Qatari cultures, she seems to be “vacillating between worlds that are never entirely her own.”"

Sophia Al-Maria’s website

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JHT comments & observations 

It would have been interesting to hear more about the Muslim/Bedoin/Arabic cultures and religion. Which behaviors, values, and choices resulted from religion (or lack thereof) and which because of culture? Many religions have a culture (or more than one) that surrounds them and it’s very possible for someone to be culturally part of a religious group without believing in the doctrine (and often not even knowing the doctrine). I would have liked to learn more about Sophia's feelings about Islam. Did she "put it on and off" as she did the clothes when she moved from Qatar to Washington? What parts of which cultures did she internalize? Guess that's the next book! 

How did information about a school in Seattle, Washington come to be in the office of the Ministry of Education in Doha, Qatar? Matar, Sophia's father, picked up a pamphlet for an “English school in Seattle, Home of the Space Needle.”  Did Matar really come all the way to the States without having a contact at the school? He seemed totally lost as to what to do when he got to the States. Did he ever connect with the school and what about the scholarship money he was given to attend school in Seattle?

Why did Matar choose Seattle over the many other cities with brochures in the office - and places with other Arabian students? Matar was interested in space and the picture of the Space Needle; he wanted to ride “a rocket through the snowy mountains” he saw on the pamphlet. 

It would be interesting to talk about the lives of the women in Sophia’s two cultures - her mother and grandmother in western Washington and the women in Qatar - their relationships with each other and with the men in their lives (or absence thereof). 

Sophia discusses issues around various Arabian tribes. Her father was a Bedouin and part of a tribe that was transitioning from a nomadic lifestyle to one that was more settled. As they mixed with other families and tribes in the city, rules and expectations changed for family members, especially the women whose dress changed as they came in contact with males who were not of their family or tribe - very interesting. The tribe's attempts to retain parts of their nomadic culture had consequences in terms of education and jobs - and how the group was perceived by other tribes. What do "arbitrary" national borders mean to a nomadic tribe? 

At the end of the book Sophia climbed to the top of Mount Sinai along with tourists representing a multitude of languages, cultures, and nations. She sat down and searched the sky as she tried to figure out who she was. She felt she’d “left the orbits” of her American mother and Arab father; rejected their worldviews. She wanted to figure out her worldview. Then she realized - “I didn’t care anymore where I came from or where I was going; all I wanted was to be on my way. After all, the universe, this planet, my two homelands, and even I would come undone.... The possibilities of this life were simply too rare and precious to spend another moment or a million light-years floating around weightless and wayward in the wait. I pulled myself up and, taking giant leaps, made my down the small steps off the mountain.” 

Home, the sky and its stars, clothing, women, family, relationships - all these weave throughout the author's story of her two worlds, two cultures, and two families.