Book Review: ‘The Red Tent’
The Story of Dinah, Daughter of Jacob, Sister of Joseph
Since all the furore about the concept of having one day to celebrate women has died down, temporarily, let me acquaint you with a book.
‘The Red Tent’ is a book given to me by my friend and co conspirator, Nina, to remove the taste of another book she had given me, written by a male author desperately trying to think and ‘feel’ like a woman.
No, I neither remember the name of the book, or the author. Or care to.
Anita Diamant, the author of ‘The Red Tent’, relates the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, sister of Joseph.
The prologue gave me goose bumps… ‘The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken, and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing…Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text.’
Every word reinforces how a woman needs to fight for an identity, and then fight again to keep that identity sacred and inviolate.
Dinah’s grandfather Laban had four wives and four daughters. Dinah was the youngest daughter of Laban’s daughter Leah and her husband Jacob. As the youngest of the entire progeny, she trailed after her mother and aunts, witness to their loves and their hates, their jealousies and their heartbreaks. And every month, along with the women, the girl-child spent the three days of their sacred bleeding in the red tent, companionably and at home among all the women and their sacred rites. It was not a banishing. It was a welcome withdrawal from the drudgery of backbreaking toil: the cooking, the cleaning, the weaving, and the bringing back water from the well for every little chore.
From infant and toddler, to girl and woman, Dinah relates the life of the community as seen through her eyes. The female Goddesses, the maternal spirits of nature, Innana and Lady Asherah of the Sea, Elath, the mother of the seventy gods, Anath, the nursemaid, the defender of mothers, the names drop out of the pages like honey.
Unabashedly feminine, fiercely courageous, Dinah is the chorus, the ‘Sutradhar’ and the protagonist of ‘The Red Tent’. I wouldn’t advise anyone who is squeamish or uncertain about the joy and mystery of womanhood to touch the book with a bargepole.
‘The Red Tent’ is a metaphor, a source of energy, an affirmation of the sacred feminine.
The book is meant for women and girls who know themselves intimately, and are not afraid of the knowledge.
It is also meant for those men who know their women: and are comfortable in that knowledge. It is a celebration of women being from both Venus and Mars. It is not a ‘bestseller’ that you can read in the three hours that you need to spend before boarding your train, or your flight.
If you dare, read ‘The Red Tent’.
If you care, read ‘The Red Tent’.
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