Evil Eye: A Novel

Published in 2023, Evil Eye is the second novel by Palestinian American author Etaf Rum. Her first novel, A Woman Is No Man, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. Evil Eye focuses on the work and family life of protagonist Yara, a Palestinian American woman who, like Rum, was raised in a family of Palestinian immigrants in Brooklyn and then moved to North Carolina after her marriage. It examines themes of the mental and emotional toll of misogyny and racism, the challenges of navigating multiple cultural displacements, and the process of confronting ancestral trauma.

This guide refers to the 2023 hardcover edition by Harper Collins.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of domestic violence and emotional abuse, as well as discussions of the Nakba, generational trauma, anti-Arab racism, mental health conditions, suicidal ideation, and anti-gay bias.

Plot Summary

Yara, the novel’s protagonist, is a Palestinian American woman living in North Carolina. She is a wife to Fadi, who runs a small business with a friend, and a mother to Mira and Jude, as well as a graphic designer and part-time art professor at a local college. Yara grew up in a traditional family in a close-knit Arab American community in Brooklyn and moved to North Carolina shortly after her marriage. The older members of both Yara’s and Fadi’s families were displaced from their homes in Palestine and spent substantial portions of their lives in refugee camps. Although Yara is a hard worker, a dutiful wife and mother, and a skillful household manager, her mother-in-law, Nadia, disapproves of her attitudes toward family, career, and Islam. She doesn’t understand why Yara would want to work when she could dedicate herself to her family and her community.

While Yara values her career, it is also another source of stress. She has never been offered a full-time teaching position at the college where she works, and she has been criticized by her department chair for including too many artists of color in her introductory courses. She experiences racist microaggressions from many of her white coworkers, and she does not regularly participate in the social and professional development events organized for faculty and staff on campus, often because they conflict with her other roles as wife, mother, and household manager.

Yara’s childhood home had been deeply dysfunctional. Her father was abusive, and her mother had mental health conditions. Yara’s mother also had an affair that caused their family to be ostracized from their community. Yara understands that compared to her own parents, her relationship with Fadi is a relatively happy and stable one. Yet she perceives an ever-widening gulf between herself and her husband. She feels as though there is no room in the marriage for her needs to be met—she would like to travel and focus more on her career—and that Fadi does not truly see her identity beyond her roles as wife and mother. She makes repeated attempts to address these issues with Fadi, but his responses are defensive, and he only grows angrier each time she brings up their problems.

When a white, female colleague makes an offensive comment during a faculty meeting, Yara snaps, calls the woman a racist, and curses. Yara’s department chair suspends her from her teaching duties and makes seeing an on-campus therapist a condition of her return. At the counseling center, she makes an unlikely friend in Silas, a gay culinary arts professor. Although she does not initially see the point in talk therapy, she eventually comes to the conclusion that her childhood has always been (and continues to be) a source of trauma in her life. She tries to explain this to Fadi and begs him to take a vacation with her in celebration of their 10-year wedding anniversary. He scoffs at her, replying that he and his father also have issues but that he doesn’t go around wallowing in self-pity like Yara. He compares her to her mother, who is seen by everyone in their community as “crazy,” and Yara feels her despair mounting.

Her situation reaches a crisis point when the college declines to renew her teaching and graphic design contract. At Silas’s urging, she finds a new therapist, Esther. Esther explains to Yara the concept of “ancestral trauma,” and Yara realizes that her own mental health struggles are rooted in her mother’s pain, which is in turn rooted in the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians that uprooted their family in 1948. Understanding the complex sources of her own unhealed pain and renewing her appreciation for the parts of her culture that she does value empowers Yara to look more critically at her own life. She resolves to leave Fadi, but just as she is about to announce her intention to divorce him, Fadi tells her that he lost his job. Yara struggles to understand how her husband, who owned part of the business, could be fired. However, a chance encounter with Fadi’s business partner reveals that Fadi had been lying at work and misusing company money. Yara goes through with her plan to end her marriage and moves into a nearby apartment with her daughters. She plans to open an artists’ center for people of color, and the novel ends on a hopeful note. Yara, who has long felt oppressed, is free.