Celestial Bodies

The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is the guide to all things. Contemplate the state of the moon until you know it well. Its soundness is the strength of all things, its ruin the corruption of all things. If the moon moves closer to another celestial body then it gives more force to whatever that body can tell us or give us.

I probably wouldn't have read Celestial Bodies if it hadn't won the Man Booker International Prize for 2019, and this kind of book is precisely why I value this particular literary award: written by an Omani woman, Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies tells the stories of several generations of a family living in Oman – a setting which was completely new to me – and along the way, Alharthi describes that country's political and social history, its legacy of slavery and having been a British colony, the rivalries between the urban shaykhs and the rural imams, domestic customs, religion and superstition and the slow liberalisation of a patriarchal society. It's a lot to pack into 243 pages, and as much as I enjoyed this glimpse into a new-to-me culture, Alharthi's real focus is on the hearts and minds of her characters; people whose motivations are familiar and universal. The profusion of characters was a little confusing for me (even with a family tree to refer to) and the plot itself felt a little light (more a series of vignettes than a satisfying whole) but I still really enjoyed this overall experience.

The plot mainly follows three sisters living in the (fictional) village of al-Awafi and the marriages that they make: the mousy Mayya marries the wealthy son of a merchant, Abdallah; book-loving Asma marries the artist Khalid; and the beauty, Khawla, vows to wait for the cousin she was betrothed to as a child to return from his studies in Canada. Point-of-view rotates between an omniscient narrator following something like fifteen different characters, with a continuing, intermittent storyline following Abdallah on a flight to Germany as he considers (and sometimes contradicts) the details previously outlined. It was interesting to see how, in Omani culture, even with the sexes more or less separated from each other from adolescence, each of these characters expected a love match; that everyone seemed to fall in love with someone at a glance, yet for the most part, ended up marrying whomever their parents chose for them. There is a subtle evolution throughout the generations – with the young women being given ever more control over who they will marry – but the main theme seems to be (and the title seems to imply) that fate is written in the stars (even if sometimes, when the celestial bodies are aligned just so, humans can encourage the moon and planets to intervene in human affairs). As someone who has read extensively in Muslim scholarship, Asma believes the following:

Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half. It is decreed that each body will meet the body that holds the other half of that rent soul. Between the two a passion arises from that ancient bond. From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.

But the reality of her marriage to Khalid, content as it may be, turns out to be something different:

She began to realise that there was no way she could be Khalid’s other half, once upon a time sundered but which (he assured her) he had now found. This was because Khalid, on his own, took on the likeness of a celestial sphere complete unto itself, orbiting only along its already defined path...In the end, and with a great deal of patience, self-examination, and occasional sacrifice, they learned to create enough space that each could orbit freely. When they collided, and if they fused, Asma and Khaled knew it was only a temporary disruption, and that each path would return to its own course.

Fate vs freedom was a recurring theme, and while I appreciate that Abdallah's continuing story on the airplane demonstrates that even the son of a wealthy merchant may have little real freedom (particularly his inability to free himself from reliving unhappy childhood scenes under a strong man's thumb), it was the women's stories that most intrigued me here. From the story of a slave whose daughter will grow up into servitude long after slavery is officially abolished:

On the 26th of September 1926, Ankubuta was roaming the sparse expanse outside of town, bending over to pick up the few branches she could find, when the first pangs came. As she saw to the birth of her own daughter, with a rusty knife to separate the baby's life from her own, the men gathered in Geneva to sign an accord. Their signatures abolished slavery and criminalised the slave trade. It was Ankubuta's fifteenth birthday, but she was as unaware of that as she was that the world held a place called Geneva.

What the thought of marriage to a virtual stranger offers to Asma:

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.

And what “freedom” meant to Salima, mother of the three daughters, as she was growing up:

She felt pangs of hunger, that most familiar of sensations from her childhood, all the time she was growing older, crouched at the foot of the kitchen wall in her uncle's fortress-like compound, denied the bounties of its kitchen. True, she had not spent her childhood stirring big pots or sweeping or carrying water or wood on her head. True, she was not a slave or a servant. But nor had she ever had the satisfaction of a full stomach or the pleasures of wearing pretty clothes or learning embroidery, since Shaykh Said was not her father but only her father's brother. She couldn't leave the confines of the walled compound or play with the girls who lived nearby. She didn't have a part in the shared laughter and play when women and girls were bathing in the falaj, nor in the dancing at weddings like the girls from slave families did. She couldn't be given remnants of old clothes out of which she could make gowns for wooden dolls. But equally, she didn't have gold chains or bracelets to put on, nor could she enjoy the delicacies of the table like the daughters of the shaykhs did. She grew up at the foot of the kitchen wall, always hungry, always observing slave women's freedom to live and dance, and mistress women's freedom to command others, adorn themselves as they liked, and make visits to their likes to other well-off families.

But the times do change: by the end of the book, a young woman can cancel a marriage contract when her betrothed becomes abusive; a middle-aged woman can ask for a divorce when small seeds of dissatisfaction grow into a mass too large to ignore; an older woman can call down an effective curse upon her philandering husband, and freedom is gained whether written in the stars or not. There is a lot happening in this small book, and while I don't think the format worked 100% for me, I learned plenty and was often surprised by where the story went; an ultimately satisfying reading experience.