Omani novel explores mourning and alienation
Bitter Orange Tree Jokha Alharthi Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth Catapult
In 2019, Omani author Jokha Alharthi won the International Booker Prize for Celestial Bodies. Her multi-faceted generational story, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, offered English readers a rare look at Omani literature, particularly Omani fiction by a woman. Indeed, amid the surge of international attention generated by the U.K. award, Alharthi noted, “People were surprised by the book, and some even said they had no idea a country named Oman existed.”
The second of Alharthi's novels to be translated into English, Bitter Orange Tree, should find a primed and better-informed audience. As before, the author continues to demonstrate a deep sympathy for the ways women suffer and survive the vicissitudes of a society that gives them little agency. And fans will recognize Alharthi's fluid treatment of chronology and setting, once again gorgeously translated by Booth.
Bitter Orange Tree is a story of mourning and alienation, and Alharthi has developed a tone that captures that sense of being suspended in the timelessness of grief.
The heroine is a young Omani woman named Zuhour studying at an unnamed British university. Her adventure in the West should be a period of excitement and discovery, but Zuhour is caught between past and present, Britain and Oman. Her displacement confronts us in the novel's very first words. On a snowy morning in her dorm room, she tells us, “I open my eyes suddenly and see her fingers.” Those fingers, described in almost grotesquely intimate detail, belonged to Bint Aamir, a woman Zuhour regarded as her grandmother. She was the only person who ever showed Zuhour unconditional affection.
Now, lonely and grieving, far from her family, Zuhour is transfixed by her loss of Bint Aamir. “I had gone. And then she had gone,” Zuhour says, suggesting a grim correspondence between their departures — one geographical, the other existential. Convinced she didn't express her appreciation sufficiently while the old woman was alive, Zuhour keeps combing through memories of their time together. It's a process that continually consoles and torments her.
If Bitter Orange Tree has a weakness, it's this emphasis on the narrator's static grief, which may tax readers' sympathy and then exceed their interest. But fortunately, the swirling current of the narrative pushes against the narrow confines of Zuhour's extravagant mourning. In the undulating rhythms of this story, we're repeatedly drawn into the early details of Bint Aamir's life as a woman in Oman. Thrown out of her father's house at 13 and partially blinded by an herbal treatment, Bint Aamir survived shocking poverty and subsisted only on her wits and determination. From the fog of these harrowing years, anecdotes arise with arresting clarity.
Every memory of Bint Aamir's tireless devotion reminds the young narrator again how cavalierly she treated her adopted grandma. Zuhour's thoughtlessness was nothing but the typical cruelty of youth — those blissful years when “what we had was certainty and contentment and pleasure in life” — but she's haunted by how repulsed she was by Bint Aamir's aging body, how impatient with her wandering mind.
Between the leaves of that mournful story of recrimination and retrospection, Alharthi gently explores Zuhour's troubled life in Britain. The picture is elliptical and impressionistic. We catch mostly glimpses — a college party with bad snacks, Chinese students laughing in the dorm. But what becomes clear is that Zuhour has fallen in love with her best friend's husband, an anxious Pakistani man who seems equally uncomfortable in England.
The agony of unquenchable desire creates a weird emotional triangle that keeps her vacillating between “the fear of abandonment and the dread of togetherness.”