41 pages • 1 hour read
Hanan al-ShaykhThe Story of Zahra
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Pages 171-215Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Torrents of War”
Part 2, Pages 171-191 Summary
Zahra, struggling with her guilt over continuing a relationship with the sniper, resolves to marry him once the war is finished. She realizes that she would not be able to continue her affair with him if her parents return home and he remains a sniper. She wonders whether he really is a sniper and decides to ask him about it bluntly and to offer her hand in marriage. However, the day she decides to do so, she feels fatigued and dizzy. Instead of having sex, they talk about the sniper’s childhood and how he lost his virginity. She leaves, and once she is home, she finds her mother has returned.
Exhausted and perturbed by her mother’s questions, Zahra goes to bed to rest. She wonders whether she might have cancer like her late friend Soumaya. She falls asleep, and once she awakens, she eats tomato kibbé (a ground meat dish) that her mother has prepared. She leaves to visit the sniper, telling her mother she has been calling on a female friend she met during the war. As she approaches the building, she wonders whether people know where she’s going and imagines she can pass safely because of her relationship to the sniper.
The sniper and Zahra begin to make love, but Zahra throws up. Hoping he can find a mop, she asks whether he lives in the empty building. He tells Zahra that his parents live in the building and that his name is Sami, though Zahra suspects these could be lies. She still hopes she can begin a life with him, as their relationship has given Zahra access to a womanhood she once felt estranged from.
When Zahra returns home, her mother tells her she seems pregnant. Zahra has been taking birth control pills, so she remains more worried that she might have cancer, even though she hasn’t had her period in two months. When she goes to visit the sniper again, he points out to Zahra that her stomach is swelling and that she might be pregnant. Convinced that her sickness could be cancer, she decides to visit a doctor far from her neighborhood. Once she arrives, she sees multiple young boys undergoing circumcisions and suspects that the doctor is not a real doctor.
Part 2, Pages 191-215 Summary
The doctor tells Zahra she is four months pregnant. She says that he must be mistaken and then begs for an abortion, telling him she is about to divorce her abusive husband. He denies her, telling her she is too far along and dismissing her worries. Zahra leaves the doctor’s office, reviewing her choices before landing on suicide. She wonders if the sniper will look for her when she does not come and thinks about how everyone will learn of her pregnancy once she is dead. Zahra wants to be rid of the child, but she also wishes her mother to suffer from the news of her pregnancy, just as she made Zahra suffer as a child.
That evening, Zahra decides not to die by suicide but rather to tell Sami she is pregnant: They could marry and have a life together. At this thought, she realizes she cares for the child growing in her stomach. When she goes to see Sami the next day, she tells him about her pregnancy. He tells her to visit a midwife, saying he’ll give her the money for an abortion, but she refuses, crying. To console her, he promises he will marry her. She feels ill, and Sami tells her to stay. He tells her that tomorrow he and his parents will call on her family, and together they will announce their plans. Zahra asks Sami whether he is a sniper. Sami responds with amazement, telling her he is not.
Zahra leaves, thinking about telling her mother of her marriage. As she dreams of her future with Sami, she feels a sharp pain in her leg followed by a wetness that seeps down to her foot. When she touches it, she realizes it is blood. She falls down, screaming for help, and hears someone say that there is a sniper. She feels another sharp pain in her neck and realizes she’s been shot. When another shot hits her stomach, she wonders whether Sami kept her there until dark so he could kill her. As she closes her eyes, she wishes she could be with Ahmad and her mother. She accepts the pain she feels, wondering why she is alone as she dies.
Part 2, Pages 171-215 Analysis
Zahra’s experience at the doctor is the culmination of the poor and misogynistic medical treatment that she’s received throughout the novel. When she says she can’t be pregnant, the doctor not only dismisses her anxiety but also voices sexist stereotypes, remarking, “Women never believe they’re pregnant […] First they can’t wait to be pregnant, and then, when it happens, they go all coy and say, ‘I really didn’t want this to happen’” (193). This experience, along with the multiple hospitalizations in which she received electroshock therapy, reveals the institutional mistreatment of women in many patriarchal cultures.
Of course, Zahra’s experience of gendered oppression does not end when she leaves the doctor’s office. Her contemplation of suicide when she realizes she cannot have an abortion flows directly from the societal scorn she faces as an unmarried pregnant woman: It is merely the latest impossible choice she has had to make, developing the theme of Gender, Oppression, and Violence in 1970s Lebanon. Though she ultimately rejects suicide, Sami ends up shooting her anyway—an ironic twist that further illustrates how little agency Zahra has and how deep misogyny runs.
In embodying the hopelessness present throughout the novel, Zahra’s end also underscores the senselessness of the war. The narrator reflects on the seeming futility of Zahra’s life, questioning, “Poor Zahra, what a wasted youth. Why did you end it like this?” (196). Just as all that Zahra’s life could have been goes to waste due to the obstacles she faces as a woman, Lebanon’s promise ends in division, death, and ruin.
One of the few things that mitigates the bleakness of the novel’s ending is Zahra’s growth as a character. This culminates in her decision to ask for the sniper’s hand in marriage even before she realizes she is pregnant; despite all the abuse she has suffered, she resolves to become a wife on her own terms. She thinks, “I will speak frankly. We will discuss everything concerning sniping and marriage. Tomorrow will decide my future. There’s nothing I don’t want to know” (174). The discovery that she is pregnant spurs her to even greater honesty, and she poses the questions to Sami that have weighed on her throughout their affair. She realizes, “I’m fully conscious at this moment. My thoughts are clear, my movements no longer paralyzed” (211). In her final moments, Zahra finds a way through the paralysis that plagues her throughout the novel. At the same time, her belief that she can reform Sami through marriage is deeply naïve. Though Zahra gains agency in the novel’s final pages, it is not enough to undo the violence of the society in which she lives.
