What does it mean to be ‘an unnecessary woman’?
The aspect of Rabih Almeddine’s An Unnecessary Woman: A Novel (2014) that most powerfully strikes me is the seamless movement across time, across micro places (i.e., the bookstore, apartments, etc.) within the macro, overarching place, Beirut. Almeddine’s ability to tell the story of one particular woman through “her” voice, while encapsulating the essence of Beirut before, during, and after its civil war, is remarkable. That the main character and narrator is an older woman, who translates literature and has been inhibited by her environment and the people and ideas circulating in it, renders this work so powerful. Aaliyah’s voice is distinct, her tone both musing and amusing despite the fact that she is supposed to be–by society and by readers of the title of this book–“unnecessary.”
This prodded my thinking toward what is necessary: what experience? What person is actually “necessary”? What does it mean for a person to be considered “unnecessary”? Is Aaliyah unnecessary? If so, to whom? Others? Herself? By the end of the book, we find that it is okay to be “unnecessary” and that is the paradox of life. Her translations were necessary: in the act of translating, and in their threatened destruction, because they brought her and the Macbethian “weird sisters” above and below her apartment together. Without the wreckage of the flood–conjuring the archetype of the flood, i.e., Noah’s ark et al–Aaliyah wouldn’t have “needed” these other women, friends in her old age as she pondered things like “Why did my mother scream?” in her perhaps over-intellectualizing manner (to which I, a fellow writer, relate).
To that end, in my imitation it was important that I convey a link between women, who are paradoxically both unnecessary and necessary in the “grand scheme” of things, and that I convey this friendship that has occurred in the “micro” areas of Metro Detroit such as Macomb County, Oakland University, and has also jutted out to explore and backpack Europe together. The way that Almeddine takes Aaliyah’s literature, so important to her, and weaves it through her present, past and future and in her social interactions, would help me to show how my interiority interrelates to exterior events, and how they inform to build into my writing process in much the same way this worked for Aaliyah’s transcendent experience translating to create a multi-layered approach/narrative.
