Jokha Alharthi - Celestial Bodies

Celestial Bodies is Omani novelist and academic Jokha Alharthis acclaimed second novel, first published as Sayyidat al-qamar (literal translation: Ladies of the Moon). The book traces an Omani family over three generations, shaped by the rapid social changes and consequent shifts in outlook that Omans populace have experienced across the twentieth century and in particular since Omans emergence as an oil-rich nation in the 1960s. One of a wave of historical novels that constitutes a major subgenre of fiction in the Arab world, this work is narrated against a carefully evoked historical canvas. As the critic Munir Utaybah remarked, A complete world of social relations, practices and customary usages is collapsing, sending the novels characters to the very edge, the border between two worlds, one of them a suffocating, rigid yet now fragile world and the other one mysterious, ambiguous, full of tensions and anxiety, of uneasy surveillance and fear of what will come... It is a precarious edge between one era and another, the border between the world of masters and that of slaves, between the worlds of human beings and of supernatural jinn , between living reality and nightmare, between genuine love and imagined love, between the societys idea of a person and a persons sense of self.*

At the heart of Celestial Bodies is an upper-class Omani family whose members are expected to maintain traditional ways with only a tentative embrace of minimally modified social behaviour. But, trying to control the effects of social change, the family cannot repress an unspoken history of unacceptable liaisons and of master-slave relations. The impact of a strong patriarchal system on both women and subordinate men is unsparing but it shapes different generations, and individuals, distinctly as it leads to both suffering and confrontation. We find a patriarch whose love for a Bedouin woman tears apart his marital relationship. His wife, adhering to the strictures of patriarchy, seeks her own kind of authority through denial of her granddaughters challenge to inherited values through an unacceptable linkage to a man of lower social status. The older woman herself has had a difficult childhood in her uncles home.

Three daughters exemplify diverse reactions to the societys notion of ideal womanhood in a time of rapid socioeconomic transition. The eldest, Mayya, prefers not to challenge her family and acquiesces in marriage to the son of a rich merchant. The second daughter, Asma, seeks an education; she marries an artist but one who is a relative and therefore acceptable. The youngest, Khawla, insists on waiting for her cousin who had told her repeatedly during their childhood that she would be his partner. Yet his emigration to Canada stymies her hopes. The younger generation, following a worldwide trend, move from the family village to Muscat, the capital, and their lives are equally turbulent.

The novels structure is intricate and engaging. Alternate chapters are narrated by an omniscient narrator and one character, Abdallah, the husband of Mayya. Abdallahs father had been no ordinary merchant; his wealth was derived from a slave trade that had continued despite its legal suppression. Abdallahs life is overshadowed by the mysterious death of his mother; raised by his fathers slave, Zarifa the maternal figure in his life Abdallah seeks emotional contentment with Mayya, but his love for her is not reciprocated. Through this tracing of intimate family relationships, Alharthi tells a gripping story while offering an allegory of Omans coming-of-age, and indeed of the difficult transitions of societies faced with new opportunities and pressures. The novel has been praised by critics across the Arab world for its fineness of portraiture, its historical depth and subtlety, and its innovative literary structure.

Marilyn Booth

Oriental Institute and Magdalen College ,

University of Oxford

* Munir Utayba, Sayyidat al - qamar : Fitnat al-haki wa-alam al-tadhakkur ( Sayyidat al - qamar : the allure of storytelling, the pain of remembering), in his Fi l - sird al - tatbiqi : Qira at arabiyya wa - alamiyya (On narration and critical practice: Readings in Arabic and world literature) (Cairo: al-Haya al-amma li-qusur al-thaqafa, 2015).