" 'Darling,' she said painfully, ' I thought you would never do this. I almost gave up hope of you.' I pressed down the daggar with my chest until it had all disappeared between her breasts...I began crushing my chest against her as she called out imploringly: ' Come with me. Come with me. Dont let me go alone.' " (136)
What this passage is giving us plain and simple is that Mustafa is killing his wife after he finds out that she has had an affair and wasnt planning on telling him. He doesnt do this immediately after he finds out but does wait. He enters their bedroom finding her ready to make love for the first time in the 2 year period they had been married. Mustafa doesnt want any of this and cant forgive her for what she put him through so decides that it is time to kill her.
If you unpack this phrase, or most of that page you can see that he was almsot doing her a favor. Its like when people today make mistakes and want to find the easy way out, I feel like that was what Mustafa was doing for her. She never had any objection to him killing her as she lay on their bed and throughout the story she always tells him that he would never have the guts to kill her. It also reminds me a little of Romeo and Juliet. It is a love story in a sense during that part of the book when he lusts for her so badly and she feels nothing toward him. Once he decides to kill her she wants him to die with her. She thinks that this will bring them closer together. We can see that Mustafa was never a romantic in this book, far from it actually and we can tell that he never truly loved any of the wives he married.
In a way you almost feel empathetic towards those women who were thrown into marriages that they didnt want to be a part of. I can definately feel for this woman because she wanted nothing to do with marrying Mustafa that is why she never wanted to have sex with him. You can see that also with Bint Mahmound and Wad Rayyes. The same thing happens in that marriage except its the reverse partner who does the killing. I think that there is alot underlying what Salih is trying to get at, and putting this passage at the end of the book makes the reader think about how this would tie into the rest of the book.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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This is a really interesting interpretation of this scene, because my own interpretation was completely different. Where you felt empathy for the woman, I felt empathy for Mustafa. It's ironic that I couldn't feel any empathy for Mustafa until he killed his wife, but the whole book he just seemed like an average womanizer, so I couldn't connect with him. It wasn't until I realized how much of a bitch Jean Morris was that I felt bad for him. She had more control over him than he had over any of his women: He loved her and she ran away. She commanded him to marry her and then she wouldn't sleep with him. She slept with other men and said "whatcha gonna do about it, kill me? Yeah right." She told him he wasn't man enough to kill her. Poor Mustafa! She drove him to insanity.
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