First Comes Marriage: Reading Group Guide

READING GROUP GUIDE FOR FIRST COMES MARRIAGE

By Huda Al-Marashi A candid, heartfelt love story set in contemporary California that challenges the idea of what it means to be American, liberated, and in love.

When Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry, she is six years old. Both are the American-born children of Iraqi immigrants, who grew up on opposite ends of California.

Hadi considers Huda his childhood sweetheart, the first and only girl he's ever loved, but Huda needs proof that she is more than just the girl Hadi's mother has chosen for her son. She wants what many other American girls have: the entertainment culture's almost singular tale of chance meetings, defying the odds, and falling in love. But when Huda and Hadi's conservative Muslim families forbid them to go out alone before their wedding, Huda must navigate her way through the despair of unmet expectations and dashed happily-ever-after ideals. Eventually she comes to understand the toll of straddling two cultures in a marriage and the importance of reconciling what you dreamed of with the life you eventually live.

Tender, honest and irresistibly compelling, First Comes Marriage is the first Muslim-American memoir dedicated to the themes of love and sexuality. First Comes Marriage is an almost unbearably humanizing tale that tucks into our hearts and lingers in our imagination, while also challenging long-standing taboos within the Muslim community and the romantic stereotypes we unknowingly carry within us that sabotage some of our best chances for finding true love.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Discuss the tension/play between observance and rebelliousness in this book: how Huda, her mother, Hadi, and others hew to traditions yet find moments and opportunities for bending the rules, even if just a little.

2. What do you make of Hadi’s behavior when his undergraduate studies and grades are faltering, the families come together in the summer, and his father offers that Hadi and Huda’s engagement could be broken? Why do you think Hadi doesn’t fight more for Huda? Why does she decide to stay engaged?

3. Huda watches a lot of romantic comedies as a teen, has expectations and dreams of grand romantic gestures, and worries that she doesn’t feel “cinematic love” for Hadi.

What were your romantic fantasies when you were younger? What do you make of Hadi’s gestures of first courtship and later love: the small gifts, the offer to make her a mixed tape, the custom license plate? Share some thrilling or disappointing moments from your romantic relationships.

4. What were your conceptions of the institution and realities of marriage specifically when you were very young, and how did they change when you were an early teenager, then on into young adulthood and beyond? Do you agree with Huda that marriage is “a great equalizer” (page 233) among people of all cultures?

5. As she matures, Huda reasons that for her mother and aunts, “That kind of love wasn’t essential to a good marriage” (page 74), meaning that “cinematic love” mentioned above in question 3 wasn’t necessary for a marriage to work. In your opinion, what is essential for a good marriage?

6. How does Huda manifest, and work through, the pull of various cultural identities throughout First Comes Marriage, particularly what she sees as the “American” and “Muslim” sides of herself? What about Mexico’s culture and Catholicism strike Huda as familiar to her own upbringing, and how does this cause her to continue to evaluate her definition of self? How does her visit to the Shia community in Torreon give her new perspective on her marriage to Hadi?

7. Huda shares, “I took seriously the responsibilities that came with representing my religion” and calls non-Muslim-Americans’ perceptions of Muslims “a conversation that was already so rife with misunderstanding” (page 144). Why is there so much misunderstanding? Discuss the wide variety of Muslim women Huda meets (to her surprise) in Mexico, and the earlier insights she and her undergraduate Muslim classmates share with other students. How does this book strive to bridge cultural divides and dispel stereotypes?

8. When Huda confronts her mother about being unsupportive of Huda “becoming something” professionally and personally, Huda’s mother says, “’I really thought I was giving you more’” (page 217). Later Mrs. Ridha says to Huda, “’We wanted you to understand the way our people think. We did not expect you to listen to everything we said’” (page 237). Discuss the parent-child relationships presented in the book, and the mix of expectations the generations have of each other, their wishes and hopes for one another, and acts of obedience and defiance that occur during the course of the book’s events.

9. Discuss the mixed messages people receive about attraction, relationships, love, marriage, and sex. Share some of the education you received in preparation for romantic involvement, sex, and married life—from casual advice from parents to formal instruction to our culture at large.

10. Huda says quite early on in her memoir: “I believed this ability to embrace the relationship you were in was the upside to matchmade marriages. Muslim love was secure and uncomplicated, a decision entirely under a person’s control, but American love was almost frighteningly fragile and mysterious” (page 21). Do you think her views change over the course of the book? What other positives of an arranged marriage does Huda, and do you, see?

11. Are there aspects of your own ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, or geographic culture that you have found yourself having to explain or even defend to outsiders? What values were you brought up with that you have held onto? Has it been difficult to retain those values as you’ve aged?

12. What did you think of Huda’s options, and her sequence of choices, in Mexico? Are you surprised, or not, to learn that Huda and Hadi have now been married for more than 20 years and have three children?