This novel, originally written in Arabic, recounts the lives of three generations of a wealthy Omani family, living in the village of al-Awafi. The narration switches between an omniscient third person and Abdallah, the husband of the eldest of three sisters, who together form the narrative backbone of the story. The tale unwinds slowly, with flashbacks often breaking the chronological flow of the drama. Bits and pieces of local history and gossip are revealed, which fill in the blanks of previous events. Azzan and Salima, the parents of the three daughters, also feature prominently in the narrative, but the novel is as much about all the relationships and intrigues that build across the whole village over generations, more than just one family’s travails. Al-Awafi abuts a Bedouin encampment and takes a three day donkey ride to travel to Muscat. But, by the end of the novel, its kids are playing on Playstations and the Shaykh’s Landrover, the town’s lone car, has been joined by pickup trucks and Mercedes sedans.
One of the most striking transformations in Omani society, over the course of the 20th century, was the liberating of the slaves. Abdallah remembers of his father, “He went on shouting, in one of those bouts of raving that took his mind for most of two years before his death. Boy! Boy! Tie Sanjar up, tie him to the column on the east side of the courtyard, out there, out in front of the house. Anyone who gives that slave water or shade has to answer to me. I knelt down beside him. Father, the government freed the slaves a long time ago, and then Sanjar went to Kuwait.” Later, Abdallah recounts what another of his father’s own slaves, a runaway, had told his wife (and Abdallah’s nanny), “Before he fled, Habib told Zarifa that songs were the only thing left in his memory to keep his language alive for him. That’s why he sang. If he didn’t have songs in there, the hollow spaces would be filled with rage.”
Class roles and traditional societal structure are paramount in all the relationships in this novel. Gender norms are particularly acute. Alharthi writes of Mayya, the eldest daughter, “her father left the matter in her mother’s hands. After all, these were her girls and marriage was women’s business.” Mayya’s own daughter, London, also found out how little customs had changed despite the years. “By then, this grandmother of hers was swearing out loud that she would slit her granddaughter's throat if the rebellious girl really did marry the peasant’s son. How could she possibly marry the issue of the man who had threshed the family’s grain?” Asma, the middle daughter, realized on the eve of her wedding, “She’d be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.” Salima, the family matriarch, herself concludes, “We raise them so that strangers can take them away.”
Another theme that recurs in the novel is the concept of home. At one point Abdallah says, “when we are away from home, in new and strange places, we get to know ourselves better.” At another point, having moved with his family to Muscat, he says of his old family village, “Al-Awafi’s people were firm believers in the past; they did not look to the future.” Finally, a man known as Issa the Emigrant, because he had had to flee Oman for fighting alongside the Imam in the Civil War against the Sultan and the British, cautioned his son while spending years of exile in Cairo, “We may live here but we’re not from here. We won’t leave anything of ourselves here. When we die our coffins will be carried to Oman. That’s where we’ll be buried.”
No comments:
Post a Comment