Close Reading 1-5

“There were other traumatic initiations, some of which illustrated …” to “became a constant reminder of it” (2)

1)      The passage talks about the reasons why Zaat’s parents wanted Zaat to remove a feminine organ. It really shows the difference in opinions between the two parents. While the dad wants to remove it so it doesn’t cause his daughter pain, the mother wants to remove it because she didn’t want Zaat to have something she didn’t have the chance to have.

2)      This passage mostly has long sentences instead of short sentences. Those sentences contain a lot of description which is the reason why it is so long.

3)      Some questions I have are why the mom would hurt her daughter just because she was hurt? I thought that mothers should protect their daughters no matter what, no matter their past because they need to give their daughter the best.

4)      I believe that this passage is very important for the book as a whole. What happens in this chapter, the decision to cut her feminine organ, is going to come back to Zaat in the next chapters when she is older and married. It will set the ground as to why Zaat and her husband’s sex life isn’t what it should be, that Zaat doesn’t get the pleasure she should get from sex.

 

“But then, why search so far afield when their street, which had been so peaceful and shaded when they moved into it, had filled with small stores and car mechanics’ workshops and was covered in sewage and rubbish. The adjacent spare land that had been planned as a garden was now a dump. The walls of the building itself had turned black …” (43)

1)      This passage talks about the new apartment Zaat acquired when she got married. It also talks about how different it was now that it was furnished, how horrible it had become.

2)      In this passage there are a lot of descriptions. This passage is also extremely short because it only described the loft, nothing more.

3)      I wonder why Zaat thinks that way about her loft now. I also wonder if she is going to change the wonder of the loft as the book goes on.

4)      I do not think that this passage is really important to the book as a whole. It could only describe Zaat’s new emotions on her marriage but that is the entire theme of the book so I do not think that this passage is particularly important.

 

“She stood there before him just as he had imagined her: captivating foreign perfume, a dress of expensive cloth in coordinated colors (although he would not have been at all surprised if, underneath all that, she had been wearing flip-flops as well), and a fair complexion (that Turkish fairness tinged with red, not the pasty European). She wore a sheer black scarf and two shy eyes peered coyly out, avoiding collisions with other people’s eyes. Apart from all that there was something else he had not expected” (85).

1)      This passage is about Zaat’s husband and his views on a woman that is not Zaat. It talks about how he looks like another woman the way he should look at Zaat.

2)      There are only three sentences in this passage. That is because the first sentence is so long because it describes how the woman looks like.

3)      I wonder why Zaat’s husband has never looked at Zaat the way he looks at this woman. I also wonder whether this will lead to him cheating on Zaat.

4)      I think this passage is really important to the whole book. It shows that Zaat and her husband do not have a good relationship and they do not find each others that attractive. This passage could also foreshadow an affair if Zaat’s husband starts cheating on Zaat.