Month: April 2026

Categories
Conclusion

RMST 202: A Conclusion

I can’t say I’m not relieved that the school year is ending, but I still can’t believe how fast this term felt. I signed up for this class completely on a whim. I remember finding this course on a Reddit post at 2 a.m., and thought, sure, why not? I had no real idea what Romance Studies meant (I did not read the course description lol), and I definitely did not expect to spend a semester reading about stories from Paris, Cameroon, Italy, and all the way to colonial Indochina. And well, guess what happened…

This course was actually my first ever elective at UBC. The contract grading thing genuinely threw me off at first because I had never even heard of it existing, and lowkey didn’t believe it was true. The idea that I could decide upfront what grade I was working toward and then just do the work for it, without every single post being picked apart against a rubric, was just hard to believe (considering like, every other course I’ve taken in my life).

That said, I am not a big reader, so having weekly reading was genuinely something I had to make time for, as I am not a quick reader either. To be honest, some of these books I would never have picked up on my own in any universe. Nadja is not something I would have found myself reading on a random Tuesday night unprompted. Like, to give this course its credit, I don’t even think I would have known of the existence of some of these authors if it weren’t for it. However, going through such a wide range of authors, styles, time periods, and parts of the world gave me a much broader sense of what literature can actually look like and what it can do. Not every book worked for me but I think the variety was the whole point. You’re bound to enjoy at least one thing.

The course description talks about hoping students were affected by what they read, and I think that’s probably the most honest measure of whether a literature class actually succeeded in doing anything. Some of these books actually stuck with me. The Impatient is probably the one that stuck with me the most (recency bias, maybe?), but because it genuinely feels impactful and frankly, quite disheartening.

Thanks to Prof. John, the TAs, and everyone else I’ve met through this course. Wishing everyone good luck on their finals and a fun summer break 🙂

Categories
Amal

Thoughts on The Impatient

The Impatient follows three women, Ramla, Hindou, and Safira, as they navigate life inside a polygamous marriage in northern Cameroon, Africa.

In this novel, every time a woman tries to stand up for herself or say that something is wrong, the fault is always put on her behaviour rather than what’s actually being done to her. What Amal is showing is that the most effective way to keep a system going is to attach it to something no one can argue with, and then make the women who’ve already been through it the ones who pass it down. For example, Hindou’s mother was forced into marriage at 14 to replace her dead sister with one week’s notice. Despite that, she sends Hindou back to her abuser anyway, fully knowing the fate her daughter awaits.

Building on this, it’s also worth noting how little the men actually have to do to enforce the systems and traditions that entirely benefit them. As an example, the aunties are the ones steering the brides into the wedding cars. Goggo Diya is the one telling Hindou her screams during her assault were indecent and disgraced the family. Lastly, Safira spends most of the novel scheming against Ramla, not the man who has wronged them both. However, we cannot say that any of these women are acting out of pure cruelty either. After all, they’re just doing what they’ve been taught their whole lives to do. It just shows that over time, they become conditioned to take part in the same system that was used to break them. The system reproduces itself through the people it has already damaged, which is what makes it so hard to dismantle in the first place.

This novel was a hard read, especially compared to other books in this course. Even though the characters themselves are fictional, child marriages, domestic abuse, and misogyny are still very much alive and happening all over the world. It is also the fact that Amal herself lived through a version of this that makes it even more disheartening. Women shouldn’t have to survive something before anyone takes it seriously. For my last read of the course, I hesitate to say I enjoyed this book in the usual sense, but it reminded me that reading can bring you into lives and realities completely different from your own.

Discussion question: Was there anyone in this book who was ever really free to make a different choice?

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