By Annette Hinkle
Wafa Faith Hallam has been a lot of things in her life — a traveling bookseller, a waitress, a PhD candidate, a senior financial advisor, a wife and a mother.
And now, she is also an author.
Hallam’s new book “The Road From Morocco” is a memoir about being born into a traditional patriarchal Arab household and what happens when members of the family break out of the bonds of that society. Simply put, it’s a story of self-discovery, and what makes it so compelling is the incredible distance Hallam has come, both figuratively and literally, in just a single generation.
“The book came about at a time when I felt bewildered by the direction of my life,” explains Hallam. “My mother was married at 13 against her will. That was the precursor for everything. She did not submit to that life. She decided it was not the life for her and fought tooth and nail to choose a different direction.”
Though she loved her conservative Muslim father, after her mother successfully ended the marriage, it was hard for Hallam to resist her mother’s new and empowering way of life. Hallam’s mother raised her children in a liberal environment in Morocco, living in cities and sending them to French schools, while she built her own business, followed European fashion and enjoyed the nightlife — quite unusual for an Arab woman.
Had it not been the 1960s and ‘70s, Hallam’s story might have been very different. The Pill gave Hallam’s mother the freedom to decide she would have no more children after her fourth and the woman’s liberation movement opened up a whole new world to her, as well as her daughter.
Just 16 years younger than her mother and highly educated, Hallam in many ways took on a role that was far beyond her years. She enjoyed the party scene and freely experimented with sex, developing relationships with older men while still in high school. With little input from her mother, she dropped out of school in her senior year to travel extensively with a boyfriend selling books as part of his thriving business.
“As much as she loved me, I was so opinionated and mature in my ways,” recalls Hallam. “I had the better of her in our arguments. I was overwhelming her with my rationale. I took over, for better of for worse. We were friends, but we weren’t supposed to be friends.”
“I had so much fear and anxiety,” she adds. “I was running away from not being able to control it with a suicide attempt and was trying to get the answers no one could give me.”
“It took this book to put that in perspective.”
Hallam eventually found her way from Morocco to the United States and after studying at the University of Florida and New York University, she settled in New York. She brought her mother here to live and worked at Merrill Lynch as a senior financial advisor and vice president. But beginning in the late ‘90s her mother’s failing health, a market crash, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Iraq war, and rampant anti-Arab and Islamic sentiment in this country drove her to reexamine her life.
“My mother became sick and there was the tremendous market crash with the tech bubble,” recalls Hallam. “Clients were calling and crying and I started feeling their pain. I couldn’t detach. I felt that empathy — my clients pain, my mother’s pain, 9/11, Iraq. I was disintegrating before my own eyes.”
“I felt I had failed myself,” adds Hallam who had, over the years, slowly changed her name to sound more western —using the first name “Faith” (which is what Wafa means in Arabic) and her married name, O’Brien.
“Not only was I working in a man’s world, most of my clients were Jewish,” says Hallam. “They had no clue who I was. I had Christmas trees at home, my daughter’s name is Sophia. I said I spoke French, so I played off that. I couldn’t have clients fearing me.”
“But it was a lie. I was not French,” she adds. “I would have long therapy sessions and leaves of absence. Then my mom died in March of ’04 and I have no clue why she never got better. She passed away very quickly, that was horrendous.”
Hallam realized she was not being true to herself and walked away from it all — ready to tell her story. She also felt compelled to dispel the myths of what an Arab looks like. So she left New York and moved to Sag Harbor in 2009 to finish her book. It is now home for her.
“I had a feeling I was living a lie, I wanted to be true to myself,” she says. “I’m an amazing, beautiful, complex person, screwed up as I was, and it should matter. This was like coming out of the closet.”
“My mom had wanted to tell her story, but the book was never about her,” says Hallam. “To free yourself you have to dig out these things and look at them. Our tendency is to put it under the rug. But you need to accept it, mourn it, feel that again. It’s overcoming fear then awakening. It’s entirely about finding the truth about who I am and what I’m supposed to do with my life.”
Interestingly enough, Hallam’s personal journey is not unlike that the people in Arab countries in the throes of revolution will soon be embarking on themselves. Similar revolt is highly unlikely in Morocco, a country with strong political parties and a legitimate monarchy ruled by the democratically minded King Mohammed VI. But in neighboring Arab countries, Hallam sees the first steps of a citizenry finding its place in the new world order. She points out that in images broadcast of the protests, completely absent have been banners proclaiming hatred against America or Israel. The people, she notes, are saying “let’s start with ourselves.”
“Be the change you want to see, whether you’re an individual or country it starts by looking within. You can’t aspire to change from the outside,” says Hallam. “People have been abused for so long, I can’t say it’s going to happen smoothly. When you decide to change, there is suffering. You have to decide what’s not working and figure out how to solve it before you do change. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
On Saturday, March 5 at 6 p.m., Wafa Faith Hallam reads from “The Road from Morocco” at Canio’s Books, 290 Main Street, Sag Harbor (725-4926).
