The Red Tent

Esta novela de Anita Diamant es el segundo de los libros que compré en mi viaje a Londres el pasado mayo. Lo tenía completamente olvidado hasta que se me estropeó mi nueva tablet (arrrghh!) y no tuve más remedio que cogerlo para aliviar un viaje en autobús. Y ahí estoy, empezando con él una de mis propuestas para estas Navidades, leer, ver películas descargadas hace siglos,.. y Master stuff, como no! 

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The Red Tent is a beautifully written novel about Dinah, the daughter of the Biblical Patriarch Jacob. There is only a brief mention of Dinah in the Bible, a traumatic story of rape and vengeance but Anita Diamant has taken this and filled in the gaps. She has carefully woven silk into the rough wool that is the biblical story and created a rich luxurious tapestry of the life of the women.

In the prologue Dinah addresses us - the women of today: "And now you come to me - women with hand and feet as soft as a queen's, with more cooking pots than you need, so safe in childbed and so free with your tongues. You come hungry for the story that was lost. You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them."

The Red Tent is the place that Jacob's women retreat to once a month at the time of the dark moon. Apparently if living a natural life by the light of the heavens it is natural for women to bleed at the time of the dark moon and ovulate at the full moon. There, in the protective confines of the red tent, sitting on straw the women share their secrets, their stories, their joy and pain and take respite from the hardships of their everyday life.

As the only daughter of Jacob, Dinah is privileged to share the tent before her proper time and here she learns the stories of her mothers which she in turn tells to us. (Jacob had four wives and Dinah considers them all to be her mothers in some sense).

The first part of the book is My Mothers' stories, stories told to Dinah by and about Jacob's wives. These follow but beautifully embellish the biblical stories and take us up to the traumatic birth of Joseph who becomes Dinah's closest companion as a child.

The second part 'My Story' again loosely follows the biblical stories but because it is her story the rape of Dinah has a different perspective. In Diamant's version Dinah was not raped but was deeply and passionately in love with the Egyptian Prince of Shechem whom her brothers brutally slaughtered while she lay in his arms.

In the third part , simply entitled 'Egypt', Dinah, now estranged from her family after cursing them in hatred, goes to Egypt with her mother in law. This part of the story has no link with the biblical stories at all apart from a few loose references. There she discovers she is pregnant. As if she hasn't had enough pain already Dinah suffers even more when her child is taken from her to be raised as a prince. But her story continues and she strives to rebuild her life in a strange land with strange customs. The end of the story is poignant but even in her death Dinah continues to live.

The biblical stories and in fact most of history has been written and transmitted by men. This book is a testament from the other side. This is a herstory. The focus is almost entirely on the women the men are almost incidental in a way. 

In the red tent the women share womanly secrets of childbirth and contraception, herbal lore, despair and death. Birth scenes abound and some are thigh clenchingly graphic. Dinah's first menstruation is celebrated by a strange moving ritual. In Dinah's world, but not in all her contemporaries menstruation is not a curse but something to celebrate, childbirth also takes on a collective joy. Skills are passed from mothers to daughter and Dinah becomes an accomplished midwife.

No woman could read this book without being moved, Dinah expresses intimate emotions of a woman through all her ages. From the innocence of childhood, through stirrings of puberty, womanhood, and old age, passionate love, grief and hatred, compassion - nothing is omitted. It is more than a novel it is a celebration of every woman who lived and loved in a patriarchal society.