Beyond the Cayenne Wall

Book Description

Beyond the Cayenne Wall is a collection of stories by Shaila Abdullah about Pakistani women struggling to find their individualities despite the barriers imposed by society. Beyond the wall lie women of or from Pakistan, a region of shifting boundaries, who are eternally challenged by the looming traditional wall that separates the acceptable from the sinful. It captures the cultural chasm––and sometimes the collision between the East and the West––as the characters dare to go beyond the wall that divides their traditions and the world outside.

The characters draw the reader into their stories through their heartbreaking situations and inspiring decisions. Tannu is asked to give up her firstborn child to the caretakers of the temple of Shah Daullah in order to uphold the tradition of sacrifice. Dhool is a defiant, spirited woman who confronts the five mistakes in her life and ventures out among the wolves in human clothing to make the lives of her children better. In a striking account of alienation and the clash of two worlds, Mansi, a young mother, returns to her native land to bring her widowed mother back to live with her brother in the United States.

In these and several other stories, Abdullah weaves together a collection of events that spin around betrayals, confessions, lost opportunities, misunderstandings, revenge, acceptance, and denial, shaken in with exotic spices and flavor, a potpourri for the senses.

Reviews

“Abdullah takes us into the hearts and minds, realities and yearnings, and daily existence of women young and aged in and from South Asia. Her stunningly beautiful prose and elegant iridescent descriptions of the land that these women love is juxtaposed with the brutality and coarseness of their everyday existence.”
–Shirley Hord, author of Implementing Change

“Through Abdullah’s rich tapestry of stories, we get the sense of the shifting landscape for Pakistani women who are coming into their own. While trying to honor and hold onto the traditons of their rich culutre and breathtakingly beautiful land, we see the inner conflicts and the slowly bubbling voices that threaten to burst from within.”
–Dawn G. Prince (Surewoman)

“The female protagonists maybe rich and educated or illiterate and impoverished but one thing they all share is the courage to overcome their hardship. Like so many real Pakistani women they are not just victims, but also fighters — and perhaps more importantly, survivors. Shiwali’s epiphany seems to be the mantra of every female character, and indeed the underlying message of Abdullah’s work: “Life wasn’t a perfect place and would never be, and if her providence had dealt her a rough hand, it was up to her to alter it.”
– Saima Hussain (Dawn newspaper, Books & Authors magazine)

“Shaila’s book has pulled back the ‘exotic’ cultural curtain aside for a brief moment and directed the Western gaze on the unexamined life of South Asian women. What makes her writing so relevant today is her fearless and honest acknowledgement of the existence of such taboo topics as incest, rape, forced marriage, affairs, divorce and transvestites in the South Asian experience.”
–Khotan Shahbazi-Harmon, Writing on the Air, KOOP 91.7

“It’s an exotic series of stories that depict the lives of women in South Asia. Abduullah reveals women trapped in bad marriages or working out familial issues we well as deformed and mutilated children, nicknamed “rat children,” and a mother’s effort to keep her child from their ranks. Gripping.”
–Writers Notes Book Award

“A rich and entertaining collection of short stories from author Shaila Abdullah. Highly recommended!”
–USABookNews.com

“Shaila Abdullah places sympathetically realized participant-observer characters at the center of each story. These key figures are free of artifice and their responses to the circumstances they confront always feel genuine. Some of Abdullah’s plainly written tales expose brutal realities as in “Amulet for the Caged Dove” where Tannu a young mother faces the prospect of offering her first born child to a shrine in exchange for fertility. Other stories are carefully observed studies of the intersection of Southeast Asian conventions and modern, Western sensibilities. “Cayenne Wall” offers a unique view to a rich and fascinating culture.”
– Carolyn Patricia Scott (OnceWritten.com)

“Beyond The Cayenne Wall is the highly personal and deeply intimate collection of author Shaila Abdullah’s conceptual short-stories. Abdullah presents the cultural chasm between the east and the west with her intuitive writings of individuals finding themselves despite their socially set barriers that they inspirationally overcome throughout the eye-opening stories of fate, alienation and solitude. Beyond The Cayenne Wall is a superb read for students of literature, culture and sociology because of its deftly written engagement into the world and life of the alienated foreigner.”
–Midwest Book Review

“Texas-based Pakistani-American author Shaila Abdullah made a meaningful entry into the education of American audiences about social conditions for Pakistani and Islamic women in her October released book, Beyond the Cayenne Wall. Certainly in the mold of “a little book that could,” the collection released by iUniverse got an “indie” stamp of approval by winning a Norumbega Fiction Award, offered by the group “Media Darlings” (www.mediadarlings.org) annually to recognize new American and Canadian literary writers.”
–Stewart David Ikeda, Editor of IMDiversity

“Beyond The Cayenne Wall tells 7 short stories of women we think we’ve seen, but never really heard about. Shaila Abdullah introduces us to Pakistani society on a number of levels. She tells stories about urban women, rural women, pampered women, hardscrabble women, educated women. Ms. Abdullah uses simple but powerful imagery interspersed with Urdu to generate the inclusive quality of “being there”. At the root of the stories are the cultural burdens women bear. Although the setting appears exclusively eastern, oddly enough, the struggles, disappointments, joys, and sorrows of these women transcend borders. Pending marriage, difficult conception, in-laws, and tradition are issues we can all relate to, and doing so through the prism of eastern culture only makes us richer for it.”
– Angela Hailey (Black Butterfly Review)

“Although the book is considered fiction, Shaila portrays each woman “like it really is” living in a South Asian country where societal rules prevail. In one of the stories she talks about matriarchal control over the daughter-in-law where the daughter-in-law is expected to do all the work, where the daughter-in-law is not able to eat rice because money is short but she has to cook it for her husband because he is the only one that can embellish in the luxury of eating rice. In another narrative, Shaila tells us how the bride, who is not able to produce a male offspring within a short time of an arranged marriage, is ostracized and blamed. Life for many women, especially in the rural areas, becomes an existence that many of us in the Western world cannot relate to. Yet, deep inside these women clash with the realities of their existence and the knowing that things are different outside their realities, often yearning for a different way of life but being trapped within their culture.”
–Irene Watson, Reader Views

“Beyond the Cayenne Wall takes the reader to a foreign land, yet you walk on the familiar ground of the human condition and marvel at the resilience of womankind. Long after you close each chapter, the wording and stories linger among your repertoire of feelings playing haunting and memorable melodies of souls in complexities. Poignant, yet a delighting read. You will be glad you went beyond the cayenne wall. ”
–Carol Ikard, editor, writer, instructional designer

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