Celestial Bodies

Jokha Alharthi
Sandstone Press

Celestial Bodies centres on the perspectives of three sisters and their extended circles. It begins with Mayya, the eldest, facing a marriage proposal from a man she does not love. The middle child, Asma, deeply dedicated to her education, marries willingly and welcomes the prospect of motherhood. The youngest, Khawla, refuses to marry until her estranged cousin, whom she was promised to, returns from Canada.

If we are to imagine the three sisters and Abdallah, Mayya’s husband, as the novel’s roots—the perspectives upon which the novel’s main momentum is drawn, upon which the novel grows— perhaps more fascinating then are its branches. Memories blend together and lose their distinction. As further is unravelled about the lives of the fictional Al-Awafi’s people, we witness how the fabric of daily village life changes beyond the characters’ imagination.

Alharthi utilises a wide array of third-person accounts to structure her text with the exception of Abdallah, . The son of a slave trader, he speaks in the first person, and through his chapters, we are led, almost intrusively, into the psyche of a complicit man — whose upbringing and societal status depend upon the oppression of others, particularly his father’s slave Zarifa. Now liberated, she questions her purpose, having internalized decades of generational trauma. Born on the day the League of Nations officially outlawed slavery in 1926, Zarifa becomes the novel’s leading perspective into Oman’s slave trade, itself outlawed in 1970.

Originally in Arabic, translated by Marilyn Booth, Celestial Bodies was published as Sayyidat al-Qamar, or Ladies of the Moon. Shifting the title’s focus seems to me a loss, if not an injustice to one of the novel’s most interesting characters. Through Najiya, known as Qamar or, in English, the Moon, Alharthi portrays an attempt to liberate feminine desire, though not without consequence.

In a society dependent upon its repression, Qamar’s unapologetic yearning for Azzan, Mayya’s father, exists outside of the patriarchal violence of both Bedouin and village society. ‘Her desire was to be his lover and she was, and she didn’t want anything else,’ writes Alharthi. ‘When the Moon longs for something, the Moon gets her desire.’

Celestial Bodies brings together decades of personal and familial histories, weaving them together with glimpses of magic, poetry, and skill. Alharthi manages to create a world equally familiar and strange with its effortless exploration of time, intimacy, and the day-to-day runnings of Omani village life.

—Zein Sa’dedin