The Bamboo Stalk Kindle Edition

One of the best books I have ever read. I found it hard to put down and read it in two days. The Bamboo Stalk is a much needed critique of religious, social, and national identity in the modern Gulf States. The argument that Gulf labor is unfair in not a new but this novel offers a look into why migrant workers continue to flood to the Gulf regardless of the treatment that awaits them. This is a must read for any student who studies the modern Arab Gulf.

This book has an interesting theme of a young man trying to find his place, caught between the worlds of his mother and father. From that perspective, it was an interesting theme, especially because these two worlds were places I am less familiar with, the Philippines and Kuwait. Like a method actor, Alsanousi had to immerse himself in the culture of the country to make himself first feel all its nuances before communicating them to his readers. It was interesting to explore those cultures with him, but I felt the story would have been more poignant with a little more angst and a little less verbiage. I know this book won an International Award for Arab Literature, and as I'm not familiar with the books it was competing against, it is difficult for me to comment here. I do think Alsanousi is a talented writer, so it will be interesting to follow his career as he matures.Lois W. SternAuthor/EditorCreator of Tales2Inspire (an Authors Helping Authors project)

Really interesting story, unusual settings in Kuwait and Phillipines. Good readable English translation.

The main character's mom leaves her homeland to work as a maid in a country with a different culture, different language. It's an act that many foreign workers do today.This was a compelling story of the son who grapples with having a Muslim name with a Filipino face. He often finds that he is accepted in neither his father's or mother's homeland as he grows from child to young adult.

Was highly recommended by a friend...I recommend it too!

Went on forever...only finished because it was for bookclub. Redundant

Read as part of a round-the-world challenge, this Kuwaiti novel was quite compelling, following the plight of Filipino immigrant workers in Kuwait.Narrator Jose/ Isa (his Filipino and Kuwaiti names) is the child of a poor Filipino maid by the son of the wealthy family she works for. Pressure from his scandalized grandmother means the maid is sent back home with her child ... but always the vague promise that he can return one day when the time is right.Brought up in poverty, with a horrible grandfather and prostitute aunt, Jose never quite knows who he is. "I was more like a bamboo plant, which doesn't belong anywhere in particular. You can cut off a piece of the stalk and plant it without roots in any piece of ground...the stalk sprouts new roots and starts to grow again in thew new ground with no past, no memory."His mother doesn't press Catholicism on him, convinced he'll become a muslim one day. And then one day he gets to visit his father's homeland...A sad tale which brings out the prejudice and snobbishness of a supposedly religious country.Not the greatest literature, but quite a good read, maybe *3.5

“The bamboo stalk” was a very insightful and inspiring read. It is written in the perspective of a Filipino-Kuwait man named Isa who had gone back for the first time to Kuwait, where his father that he had never met before originated from. The book describes all the hardships that he had faced, both growing up in the Philippines with a mixed face and going back to Kuwait, knowing that he was not well accepted due to his background. Reading this book had greatly invoked my awareness of how powerful and influential community can be, and how one tries to find belongingness to a community. One of the more important issues I had learnt from this book is the difficulty in the integration of an outcast into a community. At best, the outcast can merely assimilate into the community by sharing something in common with them. In the book, Isa, a baptised Catholic, was trying to find his identity in Kuwait, and thus assimilating into the country had caused him to lose his original identity as a Catholic and adopt a new religion, which is Islam. I found it disheartening to know that integration, which is retaining and embracing one’s unique identity in a diverse community, is very much discouraged. I feel that it would be very difficult for these traditional Kuwaitis to have an open mind and accept the outsiders, as this would require a radical upending of the status quo in the community.