The Road Less Traveled

In Ruth Knafo Setton’s novel The Road to Fez (Perseus Books, 2001), 18-year-old Brit Suleika Lek goes on a journey, both literally and figuratively, to search for herself—her past and her future. In this sense, Setton’s heroine traverses the familiar path of the bildungsroman—and in so doing, she follows the tradition of Huck Finn in his travels down the Mississippi and Pip in his quest to become a gentleman in Great Expectations. However, if at its root the “novel of development” is about an individual’s growth within the context of a defined social order, Setton’s novel both fits the definition and casts off its limitations. While Brit does conduct her search for self within a defined social construct, she also questions and transcends its boundaries.

Brit’s search—which takes her from the U.S. back to her birthplace of Morocco—expands the scope of the traditional coming-of-age novel, giving readers a young female character who must negotiate her path through both Western and Arabic rules of society. In her quest for love and a sense of freedom from the mores that contain and define her, young Brit both embodies and redefines what it means to be a woman of two disparate cultures. Not only is Brit a young person searching for self within two cultures, but as her father warns her, “Remember, you have two things working against you: You are a Jew and a woman.” These distinctions add another dimension to her sense of isolation from the male-dominated Christian and Muslim societies she belongs to.

Like Brit, Setton has her early roots in Morocco, and she was raised and educated in America; she received her Ph.D. from Rice in 1981. In an interview, she describes growing up feeling a part of and apart from two cultures: “Arabic and French [were] the first languages I heard, my mother’s tales of growing up in a small town on the North African coast my bedtime stories. I lived in a Morocco of memory, image, dream, and longing—the land all exiles and immigrants inhabit. . . . I am definitely American . . . but my nights—where inspiration takes root—my nights are Morocco.” This sense of being connected to several cultures while simultaneously feeling exiled from them, along with the desire to move beyond the constraints of those cultures in order to be free to be one’s whole self, is a theme that surely flows from Setton’s own life to that of her first novel’s heroine.

Setton has said that she wanted to write a work that came from a place of desire, “that is the road to the heart awakening.” With the story of Brit and Brit’s uncle, Gaby, she does just that. Brit returns to Morocco to fulfill her recently deceased mother’s desire that she travel to Fez and the grave of Suleika, a historical figure from whom comes Brit’s middle name. Suleika’s life story is woven into Setton’s fictional tale, thereby blurring the lines between fact and fiction. A 19th-century Jewish martyr revered by both Arabs and Jews, Suleika fell in love with an Arab man, converted to Islam, and then was killed for returning to her Jewish faith. Like Suleika, Brit follows a desire that forces her to cross boundaries and break taboos, as she falls in love with her mother’s brother. And Gaby himself is a man whose artistic desires drive him to a cultural border; he is a Jew who makes pottery among Arabs who consider him an enemy.

Beyond the surface of Setton’s unconventional coming-of-age love story is a powerful novel about the search for freedom. Even in looking for her history by returning to her birthplace, Brit feels constricted by the “strangehold of memory” and describes herself as feeling “numb, as if I’m doing what was written for me centuries ago. Walking through the seething medina at this exact instant. . . . Even loving Gaby. I have never felt less free.” Although Brit’s taboo love for Gaby reflects her desire to pursue “a love without limits,” she also loves him because of the image of her mother—her own history—that she sees in him. And perhaps most of all, she and Gaby are linked through their shared desire for freedom from boundaries and definition.

Though history and tradition have much to teach young Brit, she finds that through her struggle to escape the confines of the past and the constraints of expectations she can make her way to the ultimate goal of self-discovery. As The Road to Fez goes down a road less traveled, the reader is taken on a journey rich with cultural and emotional complexity.

—M. Yvonne Taylor