The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

I think Diamant meant this book to empower women and showcase the strength and bond between mothers and daughters and their will to thrive, even through secret traditions, but it was a hard miss.

I haven’t read a controversial book in a while. When I first saw The Red Tent and read the preview, I was really excited because the main character Dinah, isn’t talked about much in the Bible, and most Christian authors don’t pick her to feature in their sagas. As such, I was interested in how Diamant wove her story and what possible “Christian” morals I could draw. Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Here’s a disclaimer, though! When I saw The Red Tent, it was listed as Christian Fiction, but it’s not; it’s religious fiction, and to me, because I approached it from a Christian perspective, I found it offensive, if not borderline blasphemous.

This book is highly sexualized. Again, I have to remind myself that it’s not a Christian book, but taking a biblical story and misinterpreting it like this is just so wrong. I think Christianity has suffered from this in the literary world for so long that it seems normal to us now, especially in African Literature (a discussion for another day). I digress…

The Red Tent was so misleading that at the beginning, I had to stop multiple times to check if it was the same Jacob in the Bible I was reading about. Diamant depicted him as this lustful, arrogant coward but favored soul pursuing four sisters in the house of Laban, who was equally as distasteful in the story. Why were all the shepherds having sex with ewes!? Is this even true factually? Why would God favor such a person???

Questions abound at this point. Jacob is a Jew, and they’re known for their restrictions and laws. If Laban were depicted as greedy, I would have accepted it, but not this. The Red Tent was not a “broadening” of Dinah’s story but an intentional misrepresentation of it.

By the end of this book, you’ll see that all the women were saints and the men beasts. The way the characters of the mothers were represented had no depth at all, and even Joseph was depicted as self-absorbed. I know we all wanted a retelling where Dinah had a happily ever after, but this wasn’t cutting it. You didn’t need to paint men as demons first and women as angels that had to endure their barbaric ways. I also understand that the cultures of that period were harsh and cruel, and the author played that card to her advantage and highlighted all the worst possible scenarios.

I think Diamant meant this book to empower women and showcase the strength and bond between mothers and daughters and their will to thrive, even through secret traditions, but it was a hard miss. You can’t preach love and hate at the same time. The only good thing is that it’s rich in history if you want to see what day-to-day living looked like in those times.

Overall, the story confused me and was very taxing; I struggled to understand why the characters, especially the men, did what they did and why they were all so unreasonable. The book should have a big question mark at the end.