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A Woman Decides: A Life of Submission in the Middle East or a Life of Freedom in the States
Pulled By the Heart is Nancy T. Wall’s direct and honest story of reshaping her life to fit two different cultures. When she leaves the United States to marry the man she loves in the Middle East, she discovers she has married the Middle East as well. Her life is far from a fairy tale, however. She moves from Beirut’s bloody civil war to the sand dunes, camels, and riches of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf. While she embraces and thrives in this culture of nomads and millionaires, a sudden change in her husband threatens her life and that of her two children. Her choice is simple —submit to her husband’s demands in the Middle East or find the courage to leave the very things she loves the most and seek her freedom in the United States.
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What The Critics Are Saying:
"This is a richly textured, compelling story, veined with sharp and striking insights. Pulled By the Heart invites the reader to bear witness to a story of courage, the struggle to follow the demands of the heart, and the hard-earned wisdom of distant roads."
Ellen Kort, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2000-2004
"This poignant love story of two cultures travels to areas of war and sometimes places of opulence. Nancy Wall lived the romance that carried both fantasy and fright. Here she brings to words the exotic glamour of the Middle East. From Wisconsin to Beirut and beyond this blue-eyed blonde transferred her strength and independence to a world that could demand submission. With a powerful will and aid from others, including a child of five, she chooses freedom over fear."
Richard Erickson
"Everybody's got a background. Every life has a complex warp of events, people, places, and dramas through which a person's individual history travels, forming the fabric of a biography. Of course, to each of us, these salient points loom large; the absent parent or the death of a loved one can echo in our personality and life choices for decades. The unfortunate fact for most autobiographies is that these things are rarely as interesting to other people. Why? We all face our own dramas: perhaps the static of our own life-experiences is so loud that it drowns out the tunes of others, no matter how much we might find them interesting. Perhaps it's just our natural first-person bias -- the story or incident that has been so formative for us, by which everything we do makes sense, simply might not mean as much to someone with a different context. The geography of all of our individual experiences is so pervasively rugged that, from a distance it takes a really extraordinary view to actually catch the eye.
"Ms. Wall's Pulled by the Heart does indeed catch the eye. Her autobiographical story of a Wisconsin girl who marries into a Lebanese Syrian family is the first book from a woman whose tale reads like a travelogue of an Arab world just coming to grips with the West in the post-colonial 1970's. From her first arrival in Lebanon, she recounts nuances of Arab life from the point of view of an intelligent but (in the beginning) somewhat sheltered American.
"It is, I think, a story that speaks most deeply to married women. What would be an otherwise relatively universal experience -- to 'fit in' and to try to make a happy life for her husband and children -- explodes into epic technicolor with her tense descriptions of ducking sniper fire in their home in Beiruit or the lonely helplessness of an Abu Dhabi jail cell.
"I confess, I'm not generally fond of autobiographies. Many are ultimately little more than an exercise in projected conceit: "I'm so important, my life MUST be interesting." And so usually untrue. Ms. Wall has an entirely different agenda, and one that provides her tale a poignant currency today. The story of a midwestern girl swept off her feet by a handsome dark-eyed foreigner is practically cliché; her effort to understand and adapt to her adoptive culture is not. In our post-9/11 world, the gulf of understanding between the Occident and Orient looms larger than ever before. The pundits and politicians with their Manichean oversimplifications seem incapable or unwilling to spend the effort trying to bridge a gap that none of us want, that we all recognize is dangerous, and seems to be growing. Nancy Wall's story puts the lie to its impassability (and inevitability). For all that her story unhesitatingly describes, the challenges she faced as a woman in an Arab world, her love for the people and the culture suffuses every chapter. Her compassion and effort to understand an alien culture provide a creditable example; no less is her unwillingness to compromise her fundamental rights when things eventually go badly. Writ large, I daresay it could even reasonably inform U.S. foreign policy.
"Pulled by the Heart's subtitle is 'Escaping the Middle East.' While Ms. Wall and her children dramatically left the Middle East, to be sure, it's equally clear that she had truly made that her home. It remains part of her. So she did in fact "escape" a marriage and situation that had gone very wrong, but she admits that nevertheless the peoples and culture of the Middle East will always … pull at her heart.
"I look forward to Ms. Wall's next work, hopefully a conclusion to her subsequent years in the U.S. which hint at even more interesting drama."
Steve Lieb More Reviews
About The Author
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Nancy Wall lived in the Middle East for 10 years, starting in Beirut, Lebanon, and later moving to Sharjah and Abu Dhabi on the Arabian (Persian) Gulf. She became a Muslim in marriage to her Syrian husband and embraced the culture and traditions of the local people, quickly learning to speak the language. She is remarried and currently lives near Chicago with her husband.
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