Ismi Al-Haraki Farasha or My Nom de Guerre is Butterfly is hands-down
my favourite Arabic story for young adults. It is written by Ahlam Bisharat and
was published by Tamer Institute in 2009 as a chapter book of 54 pages divided
into 5 chapters. My Nom de Guerre is Butterfly tells the story
of a young Palestinian girl who remains unnamed throughout the book. While we never get to know her name, we,
as readers, really get to know her as
the book is rich with all the lovely details that give a literary character
depth. And like all the best
literary characters, our heroine is likeable but also complex and flawed. On
the one hand, she is intelligent, perceptive and very sensitive to what is
happening in her home, with her friends and in her society but she is also envious,
melodramatic and as she herself admits, laime
or devious. “There are those who sometimes call me laime, but I don’t know what that word means. Sometimes, I felt that laim means intelligent; at other times, I felt that it had a more negative connotation, meaning that someone who is laim is dishonest, but I am not like that”
The young girl observes the world around her and comes up with endless
questions that she keeps
in an imaginary bag.
“Yes, I have a bag where I hide the questions that I cannot find answers for or that I am too afraid to ask. I also hide there my secret dreams because I don’t expect that others would understand the meaning of someone having a dream. They will make fun of me.”
In
the story, we see her go about her daily life at home, with a father who works
in an Israeli settlement as an overseer, an older sister Zeinab who cries
herself to sleep and a younger sister Tala, who at times seems carefree and
oblivious but at others seems to have grown up before her time. The story describes her life at school
and her relationship with her two best friends, Mais a staunch patriot who
seems to know everything and Haya, the frivolous one who has started to shape
her eyebrows much to the alarm of her school teachers and the mothers of her
friends. The three friends bicker
and argue constantly, trying to outdo each other as if they were in a race to grow
up and enter the world of adults with all its secrets. Our heroine also falls in love and gets
her heart broken in the most terrible way possible.
