Memoir Journal # 2

In these last recent chapters I've read, I find Carmen Bin Ladin to be struggling still with her identity in Saudi Arabia, and the pressure to be a "good" person in terms that her family ( the Bin Ladins), define. The conflict in her life becomes increasingly more unbearable, as she tries to become this perfect wife and try to impress her new family. The atmosphere is very hostile, and at first, Bin Ladin really tries to fit in, and is naive in thinking that the way women are being treated will get better. She is basically struggling with this internal conflict on what's right to her, and what's right to the family she is trying to fit in to.

She soons hits a stage where she has gone past being naive and really sees the effects of how men are treating women, and how they are actually nothing to men, in society. Saudi Arabia it seems, symbolizes the women as being useless, nothing, and non-important, while the men are symobolized as powerful, controlling, and always right. Carmen Bin Ladin soon realizes that and becomes more nervous that modern society will never hit Saudi Arabia. She first encounters how men are disrespectul to women on page 99, where she tells her husband's driver to turn off the car, because the motor was burned up, but he ignores her. She continues to tell him that it will overheat and burn up, and in response he says, " I don't take orders from women". But as soon as her male neighbor came out to tell the driver to turn the car off, he automatically did what he was told. There soon becomes this dramatic tone in the way she tells her story, when she finds out, she is virutally powerless in her own country and home. Another thing she is completely powerless over , is if her husband dies, any of her brother-in -laws can take over her family, and even execute them, if he feels they are being disobedient. The mood in that particular chapter becomes steadingly panic-filled and Bin Ladin starts to write in a way where she is always paranoid of what bad things may happen.

If you like impowering or dramtic stories, this is one for you.