adé: a love story. rebecca walker. (152)

i discovered "adé: a love story" via madonna's instagram:

and in the grand tradition of reading books endorsed on the instagrams of celebrities, i decided to check it out.  i mean it is madge, her recommendations have to be stellar.  or maybe not . . .

i love madonna but i didn't love this book. "adé: a love story" was beautifully written but being my usual the-grinch-that-stole-love self, i didn't believe in farida and adé's love.  their love felt too rushed.  walker tried to set up the idea of their love being desting by farida discussing the cosmic pull to adé before the reader meets him and adé saying it but i was buying it.

first, farida was too young.  she was 19 years old and just out of college.  she didn't have enough life experience to know what true love was.  and i know romeo and juliet were young but juliet wasn't a rich ivy leaguer and romeo from a third world country.  i hate to be classist but it just did not make sense.  as i read i couldn't not phantom how farida was fine with such drastic of a life change even if "love" was the reason.  she went from being in the lap of luxury in america to having to use a hole as a bathroom in africa.  and i am not saying that all americans are princess that can not survive third world conditions but farida came from money, she could afford to travel to africa (her father gave her a credit card, he also got her a seat on a plane out of a no-fly zone), she was privileged yet she quickly adjusted to adé's life.  it is one thing to manage because you are on vacation it is quite another to have it be your new life.  regardless of how open minded one is, there needs to be come inital culture shock and i know farida had difficulty adjusting but it still seemed a little too seamless of a transition.  

farida's conversion to islam and adopting of her new name, farida, was also done too quickly.  one thing was that farida was a feminist and i am not saying that there is no room for feminism in islam but  farida quickly became submissive in her relationship with adé.  i mean he renamed her.  i found nothing romantic about her renaming.  i saw it as a display of his power and dominance. i was disappointed that she gave in so quickly. feminism to me means not following gender roles and gender stereotypes and being an equal within relationships.  adé was the dominant partner, he defined how their relationship would work and she went along with it.  and though farida was not good at it, she quickly gave into the gender roles of adé's culture.  i understand that there was a reversal of gender roles in which adé ran the household but there was no reversal on with farida because she did not contributing outside of the home either.  she went from being an individual attempting to broaden her horizons by seeing the world to submissive housewife.

furthermore, i found it unbelievable how prudish (for lack of a better word) she was in the initial stages of relationship with adé.  i mean the beginning of the book is dripping with sex (so much that i almost considered not reading it.) the story opened with her discussing miriam, her quasi-lesbian lover.  then, there was the threesome.  fast forward to meeting adé and she is okay with their g-rated dates around his village?  really? she went from initiating sex with people still in the room at a party to secret handholding. i didn't buy it.

i understand that love makes you do crazy things and also changes people but it should not force you to be a completely different person.  i didn't believe in adé and farida's love because i felt like farida gave up too much of herself for their love.  and maybe it's just me, maybe i am too stubborn but i could have never done all she did for adé yet alone love.  and i get that farida was in a time of a self discovery but she wasn't really redefining herself but allowing adé too.

i believe her farida was a lost person looking for a home and she did all she could to try to find it in africa.  she justify her completely abandonment of her identity and culture by calling it love.  she realized the error of her ways and explained "i had done what i swore i would not do:  i had romanticized africa.  i had accepted adé's life before i realized what it might mean for my own."  so there was no love.  

in the end, farida's love is of a gratitude for adé's devotion yet it was not capital t true love.  in that sense, the subtitle of a love story is not a misnomer because there are so many definitions of love.  furthermore, i guess this is not a story of true love but rather more a of true story of love.  it's story of delusional love in which we see what want versus what is there.