Abstract: Fadia Faqir’s
The Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014) narrates the journey of Najwa, a
young Jordanian woman who traverses geographical, cultural and ideological
borders in search of the father who abandoned her for jihad. This paper
examines the novel’s exploration of identity fluidity, hybridity, and
cosmopolitan subjectivity as strategies for negotiating displacement and
unbelonging in a world fractured by religious fundamentalism, secular
absolutism and geopolitical violence. Drawing on postcolonial theory,
diaspora studies, and cosmopolitan thought, the analysis argues that Faqir
constructs Najwa’s identity as inherently fluid- shaped by the competing
pulls of her mother’s secularism and her father’s fundamentalism, yet
irreducible to either. The novel critiques both religious extremism and
secular intolerance, exposing how absolutist ideologies foreclose the
possibility of authentic belonging. Through its dual narrative structure,
which interweaves Najwa’s first-person account with her father Omar’s diary,
Faqir creates a dialogic space that resists monolithic representations of
Islam, gender, and Arab identity. Ultimately, the paper contends that The
Willow Trees Don’t Weep advances a cosmopolitan ethics grounded in
vulnerability, cross-cultural encounter, and the refusal of easy
allegiances- an ethics that, while precarious, offers a pathway toward
transnational solidarity in an age of intensifying borders.
Keywords:
Identity fluidity, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, Arab diaspora,
postsecularism.
In the decades following the attacks
of September 11, 2001, Anglophone Arab women’s writing has acquired
unprecedented visibility in Western literary markets. As Susan Muaddi Darraj
observes, Western readers turned to this literature seeking “to understand
the ‘Arab mind’ and the Arab world,” granting it a special importance
“because it bypasses the need for translation and, poised between East and
West, speaks directly to English-speaking audiences about the world on the
other side of the divide” (120). Yet this visibility carries significant
risks. Writing from what Homi Bhabha terms the “Third Space of enunciation”-
a liminal, hybrid position that allows subjects “to approach their tradition
from a transcultural perspective”- Anglophone Arab writers may inadvertently
recycle Orientalist stereotypes even as they seek to critique their own
societies (Bhabha 38). Fadia Faqir’s The Willow Trees Don’t Weep
(2014) exemplifies both the possibilities and the perils of this position. A
Jordanian-British author who lectures in English Literature at Durham
University, Faqir has established herself as a significant voice in
contemporary Arab diasporic fiction. Her fourth novel, The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep, is a work of considerable ambition, covering a wide sweep of
geography and time while engaging with some of the most contentious issues
of our era: jihad, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, secularism, gender
oppression, and the fractured politics of belonging.
The novel tells the story of Najwa, a
young Jordanian woman whose father, Omar Rahman, abandoned her and her
mother when she was four years old to join the global jihad in Afghanistan.
Raised by her secular mother, Raneen, in a household that explicitly rejects
religious observance, Najwa grows up acutely aware of her difference from
the pious society around her. Upon her mother’s death, Najwa embarks on a
perilous journey that takes her from Jordan to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
finally Britain, in search of the father she barely remembers. The narrative
alternates between Najwa’s first-person account and excerpts from Omar’s
diary, which traces his trajectory from a jazz-loving, alcohol-drinking
nursing student to a committed jihadist. As Susannah Tarbush notes in her
review, Omar “adores his little daughter but has a difficult relationship
with his ‘uptight, frigid wife’,” and his narrative reveals a man torn
between competing loyalties (Tarbush). At the heart of the novel lies a dual
narrative structure that resists simplistic moral judgments and
stereotypical representations, enabling a nuanced exploration of Najwa’s and
Omar’s motivations, vulnerabilities, and transformations as they navigate
the complexities of history, faith, and belonging.
This paper argues that The Willow
Trees Don’t Weep offers a profound meditation on identity fluidity and
cosmopolitanism as responses to the violence of ideological absolutism.
Najwa’s journey is not merely geographical but epistemological—a process of
unlearning the certainties imposed by both her mother’s militant secularism
and her father’s religious fundamentalism. In this sense, the novel
participates in a broader tradition of diasporic Arab women’s writing that,
as Layla Al Maleh observes, is “feminist in scope, diasporic in sensibility,
and political in its modes of representation” (13). However, Faqir’s novel
distinguishes itself through its willingness to hold competing worldviews in
tension without resolving them into a facile synthesis. The cosmopolitanism
that emerges from Najwa’s ordeal is not a comfortable universalism but a
precarious, hard-won stance of openness to otherness that acknowledges the
irreducible particularity of individual experience. As Ayham Abu Orouq
argues, Najwa “develops a fluid identity and a cosmopolitan subjectivity as
a unique means of acquiring agency amidst several disempowering
counter-cosmopolitan forces” (15).
The paper proceeds in three main
parts. The first examines the novel’s treatment of identity fluidity,
hybridity and diasporic selfhood, drawing on theoretical frameworks from
postcolonial and diaspora studies to illuminate how Najwa’s identity is
constituted through movement, displacement, and the negotiation of multiple
cultural affiliations. The second part analyses the novel’s critique of
secularism and fundamentalism as competing absolutisms that both foreclose
the possibility of authentic belonging, exploring how Faqir complicates easy
binaries between religious and secular, East and West. The third part
considers the novel’s cosmopolitan ethics, examining how its narrative form-
particularly its dual structure and intertextual engagements- enacts a mode
of transnational solidarity that resists both nationalist sentiment and
neoliberal multiculturalism. The conclusion reflects on the novel’s
implications for contemporary debates about identity, belonging and
solidarity in an era of resurgent borders and intensifying cultural
conflict.
From its opening pages, The Willow
Trees Don’t Weep presents identity not as a stable essence but as a site
of contestation, fracture, and becoming. Najwa’s sense of self is
fundamentally undermined by her father’s abandonment: as one reviewer puts
it, “his abandonment has undermined her sense of self and she must find him
to discover her place in the world” (Independent). This formulation is
significant- Najwa’s identity crisis is not simply psychological but
ontological. Without knowing who her father is and why he left, she cannot
know who she is. The search for Omar is therefore also a search for self, a
quest that propels her across borders that are at once geographical,
cultural, and ideological.
The novel foregrounds Najwa’s
experience of otherness from her earliest childhood. Raised in a secular
household in a predominantly Muslim society, she recalls: “I stood out as if
I had a birth defect with my unruly hair, western clothes and uncovered
legs” (Faqir 14). This striking simile- comparing her difference to a “birth
defect”- captures the visceral experience of not belonging, of being marked
as aberrant in one’s own society. Najwa’s mother, Raneen, after being
abandoned by Omar, removes her veil and becomes avowedly secular, forcing
Najwa to help burn Omar’s religious books. She forbids Najwa from covering
her head, wearing long clothing, or participating in Koranic recitation
(Tarbush). In this household, secularism becomes not a neutral stance but a
militant counter-ideology, one that renders Najwa a stranger among her
peers.
The concept of hybridity, as
theorised by Homi Bhabha, offers a productive lens for understanding Najwa’s
predicament. Bhabha’s “Third Space of enunciation” describes a liminal
position from which colonial and postcolonial subjects can challenge the
binary oppositions imposed by imperial discourse. For Bhabha, hybridity is
not simply a matter of cultural mixture but a disruptive force that exposes
the instability of all cultural identities (Bhabha 37-39). Najwa inhabits
precisely such a third space: she is neither fully secular like her mother
nor religious like the society around her; neither fully Jordanian (her
Palestinian ancestry marks her as other within Jordan) nor fully Western (in
Britain, she is seen as Muslim and, by implication, terrorist). This
in-betweenness is a source of both suffering and possibility. As Abu Orouq
argues, Najwa “is exposed to various forms of gendered, cultural, social,
ideological, religious, and political stereotyping- constructed prejudices
across different locations” that “push her into a rootless existence,
leading to a state of alienation and unbelonging” (7).
Yet it is precisely this rootlessness
that enables Najwa to develop what Abu Orouq calls “a fluid identity and a
cosmopolitan subjectivity as a unique means of acquiring agency amidst
several disempowering counter-cosmopolitan forces” (15). Fluidity here is
not an evasion of identity but a strategy for survival in a world that
demands fixity. Caught between competing cultural and ideological demands,
Najwa can neither embody her mother’s secular aspirations, nor fulfil the
role of the pious Muslim woman prescribed by Jordanian society, nor fit the
image of the assimilated immigrant expected in Britain. She must, instead,
craft an identity that is responsive to context, adaptive, and open to
transformation. As Fazel Asadi Amjad and Sarmad Albusalih observe, “Najwa is
caught in a state of hybridity and unhomeliness” as she navigates “the
heaviness of dualism between the Western and the Islamic worlds” (Amjad and
Albusalih 15). This condition, while painful, becomes the ground for a new
kind of subjectivity- one that refuses the false choice between East and
West, secular and religious.
Najwa’s identity formation is
inextricably linked to her diasporic condition. The term “diaspora”- from
the Greek diaspeirein, “to scatter”- captures the experience of
dispersal, displacement, and the maintenance of connection to an imagined
homeland. Faqir’s own biography is relevant here: born in Amman to a
Jordanian father and Circassian mother, she moved to Britain in 1984,
embodying the very crossings her fiction depicts. The Willow Trees Don’t
Weep reflects what critics have identified as the characteristic
features of Anglophone Arab women’s fiction: “feminist in scope, diasporic
in sensibility, and political in its modes of representation” (Al Maleh 13).
Najwa’s diasporic consciousness is
shaped by multiple displacements. Her father’s abandonment constitutes an
original displacement from family and belonging; her mother’s secularism
displaces her from the religious community of her peers; her journey to
Afghanistan and Britain displaces her from her homeland; and in Britain, she
is displaced again by the suspicion and hostility directed at Muslims. As
Abu Orouq notes, the novel reflects “the contemporary situation of
fragmentation, rootlessness, unbelonging, and disorientation in a world
where a man/a woman finds himself/herself suspended in a void of meanings”
(7). This sense of suspension is not merely psychological but structural- a
condition produced by the intersecting forces of globalisation, migration,
and ideological polarisation.
Yet diaspora is not merely a
condition of loss. It also enables new forms of affiliation and
identification. Najwa’s journey exposes her to encounters that challenge her
preconceptions and expand her capacity for empathy. In Afghanistan, she
meets veiled women who are “self-determined and emancipated from within,”
forcing her to reconsider the veil as a symbol of oppression (Abu Orouq 12).
This unexpected revaluation of the veil- a garment that in Western discourse
has become a metonym for Muslim women’s subjugation- exemplifies the novel’s
commitment to complicating easy judgments. The veil, for these women, is not
a sign of submission but a marker of agency and dignity. Najwa’s encounter
with them disrupts the secular feminist framework inherited from her mother,
opening space for a more nuanced understanding of religious practice. As Abu
Orouq observes, “this might be an unexpected re-consideration of this
garment as a symbol of freedom” (12).
Critical analyses of the novel have
emphasized Najwa’s embrace of hybridity as a response to the competing
demands placed upon her. As one study notes, “the novel’s critical analysis
indicates that Faqir’s protagonist, Najwa, supports the practice of
hybridity” (Abu Orouq 8). This is not an abstract theoretical commitment but
a practical necessity: “Other characters in Faqir’s novel force Najwa to
adopt their chosen kind of identity, putting Najwa in a state of hybridity
and unease” (Abu Orouq 8). Hybridity is imposed upon Najwa by the
conflicting expectations of those around her, but she also actively chooses
it as a mode of self-preservation.
The metaphor of the willow tree
itself is significant in this context. As Hussein Alhawamdeh argues, Faqir’s
novel “establishes a new Arab Jordanian feminist trope of the willow tree,
metaphorically embodied in the female character of Najwa, who does not
surrender to the atrocities of the masculine discourse” (1). The willow
tree, with its flexible branches that bend without breaking, becomes an
emblem of a femininity that is resilient precisely because it is adaptable.
Unlike the rigid, upright trees that symbolise patriarchal authority, the
willow survives by yielding. Najwa’s identity, like the willow, is not
brittle but pliant—capable of withstanding the pressures exerted by
fundamentalism, secularism, patriarchy, and xenophobia. Alhawamdeh further
notes that Faqir’s novel “warns against mimicking the Bard’s feminine models
and offers a liberating space” for the Arab Jordanian woman (1).
This is not to suggest that Najwa’s
hybridity is unproblematic. The novel does not romanticise displacement or
present fluid identity as an unalloyed good. Najwa’s journey is marked by
trauma, including a drone attack in Afghanistan that precipitates a mental
breakdown. Her naïveté leads her to be drawn into “the fringes of
international terrorism” (Tarbush). Hybridity, in Faqir’s rendering, is not
a comfortable cosmopolitanism but a precarious existence on the margins,
always vulnerable to co-optation or collapse. The novel’s title- The
Willow Trees Don’t Weep- suggests both resilience and stoicism, a
refusal to capitulate to despair even in the face of overwhelming odds.
The novel’s dual narrative structure-
Najwa’s first-person account intercut with excerpts from Omar’s diary-
complicates any simple reading of identity as either fixed or fluid. Omar’s
diary traces his transformation from a secular, Westernised young man who
“drinks alcohol and goes to western-style nightclubs” to a committed
jihadist (Tarbush). His radicalisation is not presented as a simple slide
into fanaticism but as a complex process shaped by friendship, political
repression, and ideological conviction. His friend Hani is detained and
tortured by the Jordanian secret police, who knock out his upper teeth; as a
result, Omar reads Palestinian-Jordanian Abdullah Azzam’s jihad-promoting
work Join the Caravan, and, although he initially dismisses it as
“drivel,” he nevertheless accompanies Hani to Afghanistan (Tarbush).
Omar’s diary reveals a man who is
himself divided, torn between his love for his daughter and his commitment
to jihad. His narrative, like Najwa’s, is characterised by fragmentation and
self-contradiction. He adores his little daughter but has a difficult
relationship with his “uptight, frigid wife” (Tarbush). He dismisses
jihadist ideology but embraces it through action. Is he both a “murderer? A
baby-abandoner? A wife-jilter? Or a revolutionary? A chaser of dreams and
wider horizons?”- as Najwa herself wonders (Faqir 127). The novel refuses to
resolve these contradictions, presenting Omar as a figure who is at once
sympathetic and reprehensible, understandable and unforgivable.
This refusal of easy judgment is
central to the novel’s treatment of identity. Neither Najwa nor Omar is
reducible to a single identity category- secular or religious, victim or
perpetrator, hero or villain. Their identities are constituted through their
relationship to each other, a relationship that is itself defined by
absence, longing, and misunderstanding. Najwa’s quest is not simply to find
Omar but to understand him, to reconcile the father she has imagined with
the man he actually is. The novel’s structure-the interweaving of their two
narratives- enacts this process of reconciliation, allowing the reader to
see both sides of a story that, in Najwa’s experience, has been defined by
silence and abandonment. As the Independent review notes, “The differences
between Omar’s version of events and his motivation for the life choices he
has made, and those imagined by Najwa, drive the story along as, inexorably,
their two narratives converge” (Independent).
At the heart of The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep lies a profound critique of ideological absolutism in both
its religious and secular forms. As Amjad and Albusalih observe, “the choice
of Najwa’s father, Omer Rahman, of Jihad and also her mother’s secular
thoughts and ideas considerably aggravated Najwa’s state of life toward a
fragmented state of identity” (15). This “torn” condition is not merely a
plot device but a structural principle that organises the novel’s
exploration of belonging and its impossibility. Raneen’s secularism and
Omar’s fundamentalism are presented as mirror images- each an absolutist
system that demands total allegiance and brooks no dissent.
Raneen’s secularism, as the novel
depicts it, is a reaction to Omar’s abandonment. After he leaves, she
removes her veil and becomes “avowedly secular,” forcing Najwa to help burn
Omar’s religious books (Tarbush). She forbids Najwa from covering her head,
wearing long clothing, participating in Koranic recitation, or taking part
in school activities related to Ramadan. She wants Najwa to study French
because France is “the most secular country on earth” (Tarbush). This is
secularism as counter-religion- a militant, intolerant stance that
reproduces the very absolutism it purports to oppose. Raneen’s secularism is
not a neutral commitment to reason or tolerance but a weapon deployed
against the memory of her husband and everything he represents. As the
Bookbag review notes, Faqir “demonstrates that there are many routes to the
concept we conveniently bundle into ‘Muslim fundamentalism’,” and in doing
so, “opens our minds to concepts and occurrences that today’s media skip
over” (Bookbag).
The novel does not, however, present
religious fundamentalism as merely the inverse of secularism. Omar’s
trajectory is traced with considerable nuance, showing how political
repression and personal disillusionment can lead a secular, Westernised
young man toward jihad. The Jordanian secret police’s torture of his friend
Hani is presented as a turning point, a moment when state violence pushes
Omar toward a worldview that offers clarity, purpose and community
(Tarbush). As Faqir demonstrates, fundamentalism is not simply a matter of
religious conviction but a response to political and social conditions-
conditions that include state repression, economic marginalisation and the
erosion of traditional forms of belonging.
Faqir’s critique of secularism is
noteworthy for its refusal to endorse either religious or secular worldviews
as unambiguously liberatory. In much Western discourse, secularism is
presented as the necessary condition for women’s emancipation, religious
freedom and democratic politics. Faqir complicates this narrative by showing
how secularism can function as a form of coercion, particularly for women
who are pressured to abandon religious practices that may be meaningful to
them. Raneen’s imposition of secularism on Najwa is presented as a form of
violence- not physical, but no less damaging for that. Najwa grows up
feeling different, “as if I had a birth defect,” because her mother’s
secularism has marked her as an outsider in her own society (Faqir 14).
This critique resonates with broader
postcolonial and feminist arguments about the relationship between
secularism and gender. As scholars such as Saba Mahmood have argued,
secularism is not a neutral framework but a historically specific formation
that has been instrumental in colonial and neo-colonial projects. The demand
that Muslim women unveil, for example, has often been a demand that they
conform to Western norms of modernity- a demand that reproduces the very
hierarchies it claims to challenge (Mahmood 1-5). Faqir’s novel participates
in this critical tradition by presenting Raneen’s secularism as, in its own
way, as oppressive as the religious fundamentalism it opposes.
The novel’s treatment of the veil is
particularly instructive in this context. In Afghanistan, Najwa encounters
women wearing the burqa who are “self-determined and emancipated from
within” (Abu Orouq 12). This representation challenges the dominant Western
narrative in which the veil is invariably a symbol of oppression. As Abu
Orouq notes, “this might be an unexpected re-consideration of this garment
as a symbol of freedom” (12). The novel does not romanticise the burqa or
endorse religious fundamentalism; rather, it insists that women’s
relationship to religious practice is complex and cannot be reduced to a
simple binary of oppression versus liberation. Some women may find meaning
and agency in practices that appear, from the outside, to be subjugating.
Belonging, in The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep, is always conditional, always precarious. Najwa cannot
belong in Jordan because she is a single woman without a male guardian,
raised in a secular household that defies social norms. She cannot belong in
Afghanistan because she is a foreigner, an outsider to the codes of jihadist
society. She cannot belong in Britain because she is seen as a Muslim and,
by implication, a terrorist. In each location, she is marked as other,
subjected to stereotyping and suspicion. As the Independent review observes,
“Najwa has been raised in a secular household, yet all the other children
she grew up with were Muslims. She is a single woman living in a household
without men in a patriarchal society. When she arrives in Afghanistan and
England, she becomes a cultural outsider, too; in the latter, she is seen as
a Muslim, and by implication, a terrorist” (Independent).
This experience of unbelonging is not
unique to Najwa but is presented as a structural condition of contemporary
life, particularly for those who move across borders. The novel reflects
“the contemporary situation of fragmentation, rootlessness, unbelonging, and
disorientation in a world where a man/a woman finds himself/herself
suspended in a void of meanings” (Abu Orouq 7). This is a diagnosis of a
world in which traditional sources of identity- nation, religion, family-
have been destabilised without being replaced by viable alternatives. The
result is a pervasive sense of disorientation, a feeling of being “suspended
in a void.”
Yet the novel also suggests that this
condition of unbelonging can be the ground for new forms of solidarity.
Najwa’s encounters with other displaced and marginalised people- the veiled
women in Afghanistan, the immigrants she meets in Britain- create
possibilities for connection that transcend the boundaries of nation,
religion, and culture. These connections are fragile and contingent, but
they are also real. They suggest that belonging need not be rooted in a
single identity or community but can be forged through shared experience of
marginalisation and struggle.
Any discussion of The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep must engage with the critique that the novel recycles
Orientalist stereotypes even as it seeks to challenge them. As Ikram
Elsherif argues, “Anglophone Arab writers write from what Homi Bhabha calls
‘the Third Space of enunciation,’ a hybrid space of liminality,” but “their
representations of their cultures and traditions are, thus, bound to be
influenced by Western perspectives which still perpetuate orientalist,
colonial/postcolonial views and ideologies about the East” (Elsherif). The
novel may, “taken at face value and given the fact that Faqir is preoccupied
with problems of gender and patriarchy, be read and interpreted as
reiterating neo-Orientalist stereotypical preconceptions of Arab/Muslim
oppression of women” (Elsherif).
This is a serious charge, and it
points to the difficulties inherent in Anglophone Arab women’s writing. The
market for such writing is largely Western, and as Rachel Bower explains,
“authors who must ultimately sell their books may bend to ‘market
imperatives’” (qtd. in Elsherif). There is a risk that in seeking to appeal
to Western readers, Arab writers may reinforce the very stereotypes they
seek to challenge. The novel’s focus on jihad, terrorism, and the Taliban,
for example, could be seen as catering to Western fascination with the
“dark” side of Islam.
However, a more sympathetic reading
might argue that Faqir’s novel resists this reduction. As Elsherif contends,
“on a deeper level, Faqir appears to be more concerned with her two main
characters’ (a father and daughter) expression of human agency as they
embark on Odyssean heroic journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment” that
“humanize and help them to heal and be reconciled to self and other”
(Elsherif). The novel’s commitment to complexity- its refusal to present
either Omar or Najwa as simply good or evil, its insistence on showing both
the violence of fundamentalism and the violence of state repression, its
nuanced treatment of the veil- suggests a writer who is aware of the risks
of Orientalism and actively works against them.
Ultimately, The Willow Trees Don’t
Weep occupies an ambivalent position. It is a novel written from within
the diasporic third space, aware of its own complicity in the structures it
critiques, yet committed to telling stories that complicate rather than
confirm Western preconceptions. This ambivalence is not a weakness but a
strength- a recognition that there is no position outside the structures of
representation, only the possibility of using those structures to open space
for alternative narratives.
The concept of cosmopolitanism has a
long and contested history, stretching from the Cynics and Stoics of
antiquity to contemporary debates about globalisation, human rights, and
transnational solidarity. For the purposes of this analysis, cosmopolitanism
is understood not as an abstract ideal of world citizenship but as a mode of
being in the world that is open to otherness, committed to dialogue across
difference, and critical of parochial loyalties. As Abu Orouq defines it in
relation to Faqir’s novel, cosmopolitanism is a “concept relevant to
marginalised groups in the diaspora” that enables the formation of “a fluid
identity and a cosmopolitan subjectivity” (7-8).
Najwa’s cosmopolitan subjectivity
emerges from her experience of displacement and marginalisation. Excluded
from belonging in Jordan, Afghanistan, and Britain alike, she is forced to
develop a sense of self that is not tied to any particular place or
community. This is not a comfortable cosmopolitanism- the easy, consumerist
multiculturalism of the global elite- but a precarious, hard-won stance that
is always vulnerable to collapse. Najwa’s cosmopolitanism is, in this sense,
a cosmopolitanism from below, born of necessity rather than privilege. As
Abu Orouq notes, Najwa “does not fully reject either secular or religious
frameworks. Instead, she reinvents a hybrid and pragmatic identity that
accommodates multiple, even opposing worldviews, allowing her to challenge
anticosmopolitan forces in both gendered and cultural terms” (17).
The novel’s representation of
cosmopolitan subjectivity challenges the notion that identity must be rooted
in a single culture, religion, or nation. Najwa’s identity is multiple,
fluid, and context-dependent. She is Jordanian, but also Palestinian
(through her father’s ancestry); she is secular, but also curious about
religion; she is Arab, but also shaped by Western education and values.
These affiliations do not cohere into a stable identity but exist in tension
with one another, creating a subjectivity that is always in process, always
becoming. As Abu Orouq observes, Najwa’s “dynamic engagement with
cosmopolitanism” allows her to “challenge both patriarchal norms and
exclusionary cultural ideologies” (17).
The novel’s dual narrative structure
is not merely a stylistic choice but a formal embodiment of its cosmopolitan
ethics. By alternating between Najwa’s first-person account and Omar’s
diary, Faqir creates a dialogic space in which competing perspectives are
held in tension without resolution. The reader is forced to see the world
through both Najwa’s eyes and Omar’s, to understand both the daughter’s
experience of abandonment and the father’s experience of radicalisation.
This does not mean that the novel endorses Omar’s actions- it clearly does
not- but it does mean that Omar is not reduced to a monster or a stereotype.
He is a human being with his own history, his own motivations, his own
capacity for self-deception and self-justification.
This dialogic structure is a form of
cosmopolitan practice because it requires the reader to engage with
otherness, to see the world from a perspective that is not one’s own. As Abu
Orouq notes, “the novel as a literary genre becomes the subject of critical
interpretation with the rapid development of the major kinds of the
twenty-first-century fiction,” and Faqir “attempts to indulge in every
experimentation of the narrative technique” (3). This experimentation is not
merely formal but ethical: it reflects a commitment to representing the
complexity of human experience in a way that resists simplification and
stereotyping.
The intertextual dimensions of the
novel further reinforce this cosmopolitan project. As Alhawamdeh
demonstrates, Faqir “appropriates a direct text from Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline and an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello” to “dismantle
the Shakespearean dramatisation of the submissive woman” (1). This
engagement with the Western literary canon is not an act of cultural
submission but of creative appropriation- a way of claiming a place within
the tradition while simultaneously challenging it. Faqir’s novel “warns
against mimicking the Bard’s feminine models and offers a liberating space”
(Alhawamdeh 1). It establishes “a new Arab Jordanian feminist trope of the
willow tree” that stands in opposition to the passive femininity of
Shakespeare’s heroines (Alhawamdeh 1).
This intertextual strategy is
cosmopolitan in the sense that it refuses the opposition between “Western”
and “Arab” culture. Faqir draws on Shakespeare not as a representative of a
superior civilization but as a resource that can be reworked and repurposed
for new contexts. The novel’s cosmopolitanism is thus not a matter of
transcending cultural difference but of engaging with it creatively,
producing new meanings through the encounter between different traditions.
As Alhawamdeh puts it, in Faqir’s novel, “Shakespeare has been ‘Arabized’”
to “revise and redefine new roles of the Arab Jordanian woman” (1).
One of the novel’s most striking
features is its insistence on the vulnerability of all its characters,
regardless of their ideological commitments. Najwa is vulnerable as a woman,
as a foreigner, as a secular person in a religious society, as a Muslim in a
secular West. Omar is vulnerable as a political dissident, as a torture
survivor, as a man caught between competing loyalties. The veiled women of
Afghanistan are vulnerable as women under Taliban rule, yet also, in their
own way, agents of their own lives. Even the jihadists are presented as
vulnerable- not in the sense that their violence is excused, but in the
sense that their radicalisation is shown to be a response to conditions of
political and social vulnerability.
This emphasis on vulnerability is
central to the novel’s cosmopolitan ethics. Cosmopolitanism, in this
rendering, is not a matter of asserting universal values or claiming a
privileged position above particular loyalties. It is, rather, a recognition
of shared vulnerability- the recognition that all human beings are subject
to suffering, loss, and death, and that this shared condition creates the
ground for solidarity across difference. This is a cosmopolitanism that does
not deny the reality of power and inequality but insists on the possibility
of connection even in their presence.
The novel’s treatment of the drone
attack in Afghanistan is exemplary in this regard. Najwa experiences the
attack not as a distant political event but as a visceral trauma that
shatters her sense of safety and order. The drone is a symbol of the
asymmetrical violence that characterises contemporary geopolitics- the
violence of the powerful against the powerless, of the West against the
Muslim world. Yet the novel does not present this violence as simply
one-sided. It shows how jihadist violence emerges in response to state
violence, how cycles of violence perpetuate themselves across generations
and borders. This is not moral equivalence but moral complexity- a refusal
to reduce the politics of the Middle East to a simple narrative of good
versus evil.
The novel is also aware of the limits
of cosmopolitanism. Najwa’s journey does not end in a comfortable resolution
or a harmonious synthesis of East and West. She does not find her father, at
least not in the way she hoped; she does not achieve a stable sense of
belonging; she does not transcend her condition of displacement. The novel’s
conclusion is, as one reviewer notes, “underwhelming”- not because Faqir
fails as a writer, but because the novel refuses the false comfort of
closure (Independent). The problems it addresses- religious fundamentalism,
secular intolerance, geopolitical violence, the politics of belonging- are
not solved by the end of the novel. They persist, as they persist in the
world.
This refusal of resolution is itself
a cosmopolitan gesture. Cosmopolitanism, in Faqir’s rendering, is not a
destination but a process- a perpetual negotiation with difference that
never achieves finality. It is, as the novel’s title suggests, a matter of
not weeping, of maintaining resilience in the face of loss and
disappointment. The willow tree bends but does not break; it survives but
does not triumph. This is a modest cosmopolitanism, one that does not claim
to have found the answer to the problems of our time but insists on the
importance of continuing to ask the questions.
The willow tree that gives the novel
its title functions as a complex symbol that ties together the novel’s
various themes. As Alhawamdeh argues, the willow tree becomes “a new Arab
Jordanian feminist trope” that embodies Najwa’s resistance to “the
atrocities of the masculine discourse” (1). But the willow is also a
cosmopolitan emblem. Willows are found across the world, in diverse climates
and cultures; they are adaptable, resilient, and capable of thriving in
conditions that would defeat more rigid species. The willow’s flexibility-
its ability to bend without breaking- is precisely the quality that Najwa
must cultivate in order to survive her journey.
The willow’s association with weeping
is also significant. The title- The Willow Trees Don’t Weep- suggests
a refusal of grief, or at least a refusal to be defeated by grief. Najwa has
every reason to weep: she has lost her mother, her father, her home, her
sense of self. Yet she continues, she persists, she does not give up. This
is not stoicism in the sense of emotional suppression but resilience in the
sense of continued engagement with the world despite its pain. The willow
does not weep because weeping would not help; the willow survives by
adapting, by bending, by finding ways to continue living in conditions that
are not of its choosing.
This resilience is, finally, what the
novel offers as its answer to the problems it poses. In a world fractured by
fundamentalism, secular absolutism, geopolitical violence, and the politics
of exclusion, the only viable response is a cosmopolitan ethics of openness,
flexibility, and persistence. This is not a comfortable answer, and the
novel does not pretend it is. But it is an honest one, and it is perhaps the
only answer available to those who, like Najwa, find themselves suspended
between worlds, belonging fully to none.
Fadia Faqir’s The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep is a novel of considerable ambition and complexity, one that
engages with some of the most pressing issues of our time- religious
fundamentalism, secular intolerance, geopolitical violence, gender
oppression and the politics of belonging. Through the story of Najwa’s
journey across geographical, cultural, and ideological borders, the novel
explores the possibilities and limits of identity fluidity, hybridity and
cosmopolitanism as responses to a world fractured by absolutist ideologies.
The first part of this paper examined
the novel’s treatment of identity fluidity, hybridity and diasporic
selfhood. Drawing on postcolonial and diaspora studies, the analysis showed
how Najwa’s identity is constituted through movement, displacement, and the
negotiation of multiple cultural affiliations. Her hybridity is both imposed
and chosen- a strategy for survival in a world that demands fixity. The
novel’s dual narrative structure, which interweaves Najwa’s first-person
account with her father Omar’s diary, complicates any simple reading of
identity as either fixed or fluid, presenting both characters as divided,
self-contradictory, and irreducible to single identity categories.
The second part analysed the novel’s
critique of secularism and fundamentalism as competing absolutisms. Raneen’s
secularism and Omar’s fundamentalism are presented as mirror images- each an
absolutist system that demands total allegiance and forecloses the
possibility of authentic belonging. The novel’s nuanced treatment of the
veil, its refusal to reduce religious practice to a simple binary of
oppression versus liberation, and its insistence on the complexity of
women’s relationship to religious tradition all contribute to a critique
that resists easy alignment with either secular or religious worldviews. At
the same time, the paper acknowledged the risks of neo-Orientalist reading,
recognising that the novel’s focus on jihad and terrorism may inadvertently
reinforce Western stereotypes even as it seeks to challenge them.
The third part considered the novel’s
cosmopolitan ethics, examining how its narrative form- particularly its dual
structure and intertextual engagements- enacts a mode of transnational
solidarity that resists both nationalist sentiment and neoliberal
multiculturalism. The novel’s cosmopolitanism is not a comfortable
universalism but a precarious, hard-won stance of openness to otherness that
acknowledges the irreducible particularity of individual experience. The
willow tree, as a symbol of flexibility, resilience, and refusal to be
defeated by grief, encapsulates the novel’s modest but persistent
cosmopolitan vision.
In the final analysis, The Willow
Trees Don’t Weep offers neither easy answers nor false comfort. It does
not resolve the tensions it explores or provide a blueprint for a more just
world. What it does offer is a way of seeing- a way of holding competing
perspectives in tension, of refusing the comfort of simple binaries, of
persisting in the face of loss and disappointment. This is, perhaps, the
most that literature can do: not to solve our problems but to help us see
them more clearly, to expand our capacity for empathy and understanding, to
remind us of our shared vulnerability and our shared humanity. In a world
that seems increasingly defined by walls and borders, by fundamentalisms of
all kinds, by the refusal of otherness, Faqir’s novel is a reminder that
there is another way- a way of bending without breaking, of weeping without
giving up, of continuing to seek connection across the divides that separate
us.
1.
Abu Orouq, Ayham. “Fluid
Identity and Cosmopolitan Subjectivity in Fadia Faqir’s The Willow Trees
Don’t Weep.” Arab World English Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2022,
pp. 3–18.
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Alhawamdeh, Hussein.
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2014,
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-willow-trees-dont-weep-by-fadia-faqir-book-review-9788181.html.
Accessed 25 June 2026.
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www.banipal.co.uk/book_reviews/95/the_willow_trees_dont_weep/.
Accessed 25 June 2026.