Josiah's Reviews > Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind

"Phulan, your beauty is great. But beauty holds only part of a man, and that for just so long. Keep some of yourself hidden. You can lavish love and praise on him and work hard by his side...But the secret is keeping your innermost beauty, the secrets of your soul, locked in your heart so that he must always reach out to you for it."

—Sharma, Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, P. 217

You can add Suzanne Fisher Staples to the list of authors I've discovered whose writing I absolutely love. Her style is sprawling and spacious, relaxed when that is the tone called for but able to turn on a dime and become very intense, too, within a surprisingly short space. There were times in Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind that the beginning of a paragraph seemed perfectly languid and calm, but by the paragraph's end all chaos had broken out, and Shabanu's serious, highly structured world descended into disarray. Suzanne Fisher Staples writes with moving compassion and total respect for her Pakistani characters, not holding up their behavior to American cultural standards, but rather recognizing that the way society works in the Middle East is very different. There are no overtones of judgment on the actions of the characters, even when those actions seem uncaring, cruel or overtly oppressive by American sensibilities. It may be hard to swallow the lack of appreciation, objectified personal status and absence of any real control over their own lives that the female Pakistanis have to endure in deference to their male counterparts in this book, but I think that we can all identify to some extent with being controlled and mistreated, and this sympathy allows us to draw closer to the characters and better understand their feelings about the strict Muslim culture in which they live. Regardless of the vast differences between American life and that of the Pakistani Muslims of which Shabanu is a member by birth, I found that this book resounded deeply in my soul, the echoes of its sweet strains reminding me even after turning the final page just how much I have emotionally in common with Shabanu. This life can be rough no matter where one is born, managing everyone else's expectations for you while trying to keep in stride with where you think your heart's calling you to go, and there are times when outside pressure coalesces to push you down a path that's wrong for you before you even get a chance to find out what you really wanted. Shabanu's life is almost destined to proceed down such an incorrect path, in a culture that expects her to be married by the time she turns thirteen and has no intention of letting the choice of who the bridegroom will be fall to her. It's a hard thing to be valued by society only for the productivity of one's body, the pursuit of one's own happiness pushed aside as something that should be no more than an afterthought. Yet this is the culture in which Shabanu lives, a paradigm that many of us can relate to at least partly in our own lives, and there's little to do but work within the culture and try to pursue one's dreams and happiness in its framework. It's surprising, the places in which a happy ending can be found.

Though she is but eleven years old and her older sister Phulan thirteen, Shabanu (pronounced "Shah-bah-noo") is nearly at the stage of life when a girl in her culture begins serious planning for her wedding day. Phulan is already set to be married within the next several months, and Shabanu's own bridegroom has been chosen long ago: he is the younger brother of the seventeen-year-old who is to marry Phulan, and Shabanu wonders what he looks like now. All she remembers from what she saw of him years ago is that he was a boy with funny-looking ears poking out from beneath his hat, as if he hadn't yet grown to fit them. The boy is fifteen now, though, and surely grown taller and stronger, but will Shabanu's future bridegroom have finally grown into his physique, or will he still have the bodily awkwardness that marked his earlier years?

Life in the Cholistan Desert can seem grueling and very unfair, as can growing up in a strict Muslim family that never gives Shabanu much slack (even though her parents' treatment of her is actually quite permissive in comparison to that of most Muslim families), but Shabanu learns to live with the severe restrictions surrounding her and blossom nonetheless. Life for an eleven-year-old girl in Pakistan isn't all serious, after all; Shabanu is given the opportunity to play and to take the family's animals out on short excursions, exercising both herself and them as the volatile desert weather permits. Even Phulan is sometimes allowed to join Shabanu, though Phulan is considered a growing young woman now and no longer a child who needs to frolic and play to be happy. Nevertheless, it is when Shabanu and Phulan are riding camels out on their own that they finally run into trouble too serious to be sidestepped or ignored, trouble that could undo all the careful preparation of the last dozen years for the girls' futures and put their entire family in the path of grave danger. The trouble could hardly be called Shabanu's fault, but in Pakistani culture these matters are viewed so differently than in America, and it can be very easy for a young girl to be saddled with the blame when well-laid plans go awry and her family's future is placed in major jeopardy. Is it possible that the future for which Shabanu has waited so long has already gone up in smoke, drifting out of her grasp and fading to nothingness before she ever had the chance to hold and cherish it?

"No matter what happens, you have you. That is the important thing. And as long as you have you, there is always a choice."

—Sharma, P. 217

While there is good to point out about virtually every area of this book, I think that what will stay with me most indelibly years after having read it is the influence of Sharma on the story. In a Pakistani nation and culture that seems to downplay the value of females as anything but potential wives and mothers, Sharma exists freely on the outskirts of society with her daughter, Fatima. Sharma may live by her own rules, operating outside the boundaries of traditional Muslim culture that bind most Pakistanis so intransigently, but she has a surprisingly keen understanding of that culture, and of what it means to be a girl under such conditions. Her advice to Phulan on the morning of her wedding, though it appears to go over Phulan's preoccupied head, is as heartfelt, genuine and affecting as I could have imagined, as if they were words spoken right to me just when I needed to hear them most. Sharma has a way of speaking truth at the exact moment when it needs to be heard, whether or not the listener is prepared to accept and internalize it. "Fold your happiness deep in your heart," she tells Shabanu, as the troubled girl awaits the day that will change both her and Phulan's lives forever. Sharma speaks not merely to pacify, or to feed into stereotypes about gender roles and the marriage system in Pakistan, but to prepare Shabanu for the battle coming up just ahead, not worrying about future struggles that may or may not occur after that point. Shabanu's options within her family's Muslim society may be limited, but Sharma's wise council shows her that it's a life that can be managed if she's willing, and though the many tomorrows to come will undoubtedly bring their own worries, Shabanu can be ready for whatever happens by using her intelligence and making good choices today. And if all else fails, Sharma's unconventional lifestyle is always right there for Shabanu to run to, offering protection and comfort from an uncertain world.

I'm not sure what goals Suzanne Fisher Staples had in mind while writing Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. Whatever they were, though, I have to believe that she was supremely successful in accomplishing them. A book that sensitively introduces readers to the ins and outs of a vastly different culture, tells a well-plotted story with plenty of twists and turns to keep even those with very short attention spans satisfied, and gracefully leads us in a procession of wisdom and understanding toward a greater realization of the meaning of our own lives, is a book that I would read anytime, and one surely deserving of the Newbery Honor bestowed upon Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by the 1990 Newbery Committee. I'm left with a strong desire to read the author's other books, as well as the feeling that I got even more out of the experience of reading this book than I realize. I highly recommend Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, and would consider giving it three and a half stars.