Review by Choice Review
This rewritten and expanded version of a book published in Norwegian in 1983 is a companion to the author's Life among the Poor in Cairo (CH, Sep'81), a more general and analytical work on life and society in that megacity. Both works are based on Wikan's study of the urban poor in Cairo over a span of 25 years. Tomorrow, God Willing is an intimate account of one family's struggle to live, despite great economic hardship, in one of the world's largest, most crowded, and impoverished cities. A Norwegian social anthropologist with many years of residence and study in the Arab Muslim world (and other parts of the underdeveloped world), Wikan focuses her attention on the life of Umm Ali and her husband, many children, and extended family members. She wants to demonstrate how poverty and misery are experienced and how they are transformed by people's resiliency, defiance, and vitality. She notes that Islamic fundamentalists derive little support among those she has studied because, in her view, they want order, not revolt. Wikan appears not to have given pseudonyms to the people in the book, and she includes many of their photographs. Brief bibliography. All levels. L. Beck Washington University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Those of us lucky enough to live financially secure lives harbor certain assumptions about abject poverty, especially the sort found in Third World "megacities" such as Cairo. Wikan, a self-styled "anthropological investigator," wanted to challenge stereotypical assumptions by documenting the reality of specific lives. To that end, she spent more than 10 years in the poorest section of Cairo with a strong and wise woman named Umm Ali, her sometimes brutal husband, and their six children, studying every facet of their days and nights. In her novel-like chronicle, Wikan vividly describes the congested streets of Cairo, and Umm Ali's struggling household, tracking the myriad frustrations of their battle to earn money, buy food, and stay together. What emerges is a portrait of a resourceful, competent, spiritual, loving woman resistant to all the bitterness of her circumstances and grateful for the healing honesty brings. As Umm Ali says, "Talking together makes wise," and so does reading Wikan's noble narrative. (Reviewed Aug. 1996)0226898342Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
How does poverty shape the life of a Cairo housewife? In this extremely readable and often resonantly intimate book, Norwegian anthropologist Wikan (Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman) brings to life the everyday details and long-term effects of Third-World poverty. The fact that Wikan has known and visited her subjectthe vivacious, eloquent, ill-fortuned Umm Aliannually for 25 years gives the author a rare breadth and depth of understanding. Central is Wikan's notion that "poverty inflicts damage mainly through the stigma, failure, and hopelessness that go with it... one's value as a person is at stake." Umm Ali's husband's physical abuse causes heartache, but not as much as his inability to earn a decent living. Wikan paints a vivid portrait of Umm Ali's spacious but squalid apartment; her nine births and six surviving children, one of whom commits suicide; and the mayhem of "life without a schedule," a particular quality of being poor in which "the absence of plan and foresight wears on body and soul." Happily, however, Umm Ali's life improves in old age, when her husband finds a good job and they settle into relative comfort. Wikan eschews an academic writing style, wishing instead that the book "read as a story"and, refreshingly, it does. Perhaps her cogently empathetic narrative style was inspired by a belief in the importance of people talking about their problems. It is a belief shared by Umm Ali, whose motto is: "Talking together makes wise." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The ordinary life of a resourceful woman of Cairo makes for an illuminating and unexpectedly engaging study of women, poverty, and Cairene life. Wikan (Ethnography/Univ. of Oslo) has spent 25 years visiting and living in the poor quarters of Cairo with a woman named Umm Ali and her husband and eight children, chronicling their predicament-filled life. As members of the lower class, they know that life is relentlessly difficult: Money is scarce, space is cramped, violence to women is customary. Yet the family members' common refrain of ``Tomorrow, God willing'' suggests a hope for the future built on a link between God and their own initiative, an ``encouraging message . . . that by helping yourself, and only by helping yourself, life will bear fruit.'' Umm Ali is proof of such belief, constantly generating money for family necessities through loans or savings clubs, preparing her children for marriage, and enduring the self-destruction of a son and the beatings and lack of support of her husband. As Umm Ali sees it (Wikan is smart and caring enough to set the bulk of the book in her words), these incidents are part of life, and life, while it is often painful, is also often fraught with excitement and possibility. Wise, proud, giving, and volatile, she makes the book a page-turner, one of the few ethnographic studies to be fueled by the question, What happens next? Thanks to Wigan's skill, readers are plunged into the dense reality of a third- world society facing chronic poverty, yet maintaining a strong sense of family, community, and self-respect. By chronicling Umm Ali's family with compassion and leading readers to feel the same, Wikan has gracefully accomplished the book's goal--to begin to forge a better world. As Umm Ali would say, ``Talking together makes wise.'' (photos, not seen)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
