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?