The Cry of the Dove, by Fadia Faqir

The book is about Salma, a Bedouin Arab woman who is now called Sally and lives in Exeter, England. She was forced to emigrate after bringing dishonor to her family by having a child out of wedlock. She turned to her teacher for help, who saved her life only by turning her over to the police. In prison for her safety, she gave birth to a girl who was immediately taken away from her. She learned to sew and stayed in the prison for six years. An English nun who rescues girls like her offered to take her to a convent in Lebanon, to live and be safe from her brother who intends to kill her to absolve the stain on their family’s name. She is happy in Lebanon, but word comes that her family has traced her there, and she is persuaded to flee to England under a new name, Sally Asher. There she works as a seamstress and lives struggling for existence, for a way out of poverty and ignorance and fear.
The author, Fadia Faqir, tells the story as a mosaic, showing us small parts of Salma’s life in seemingly disjointed order. Some of the parts are pages long, others just a brief paragraph, a glimpse of a scene We see her in the hills herding goats, as a love-struck teenager, and then are abruptly brought back into the bleakness of her present circumstance. In Exeter, with her pidgin English and work as a seamstress for low wages, Salma is driven by loneliness to venture into pubs, looking for companionship. The juxtaposition of the different times of her life works by capturing our engagement in our present while being carried by currents of the past.
Salma’s particular tragedy and its pain speak to us, as we in the West seek to discover how these new neighbors of ours are like us and not alike. Faqir shows us the suspicion and misguided ideas that confront Salma regarding her identity, as an Arab and a Muslim, and in tandem with these we see our Western culture with her eyes, helping us to see what is strange to her and to other foreigners.