The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

“Too ambitious, too violent, utterly inappropriate, and well…old! A mother, if you can believe it! […] Women’s stories are expected to dissolve into a fog of domesticity…if they’re told at all.

[…] Indeed, we may only have Amina’s story because she was a mother. In our time together, she spoke constantly of her daughter. […] She spoke to her daughter. So that her child might come to understand the choices her mother had made.”

The first unnamed chapter directly lays out the challenges that Amina will face for the rest of the book. She will constantly be striving against social assumptions because she is a middle-aged mother. This quote also addresses the theme of The Conflicting Worlds of Domesticity and Adventure and provides a clue as to how Amina’s psychology will change over the course of the book. Indeed, this idea of speaking to her daughter only manifests over the second half of the book as Amina shares ideas with other women and learns how to feel about her ambition and need for adventure.

“When watching the winds come and go and not follow them filled my soul with a blazing grief that made me take to my bed. […] And then Marjana reappeared. And if the fires did not disappear, it did fade.”

Early in the novel, Amina admits that her love of sailing, the sea, and adventure is deep. She misses it so much that she is sad, and while her daughter makes the domestic life better, The Conflicting Worlds of Domesticity and Adventure is difficult for Amina to handle. With this type of longing, it is clear that Amina will accept Salima’s proposal, and Raksh will play on this same desire and conflict as the novel progresses.