Celestial Bodies: Review

Book Review

“Do you love me, Mayya?” Abdallah asks his wife. “She was startled.... She said nothing and then she laughed. She laughed out loud, and the tone of it irritated me.” Mayya thinks that such words as love belong to TV shows. In real life, no one talks about love. Abdallah remembers that on their wedding day Mayya had not laughed. She did not even smile.

Mayya didn’t want to marry Abdallah. Ali was her man. Ali had returned from London though without securing a diploma. The diploma didn’t matter really, London mattered. Mayya wanted to escape from her village and go and live in the city of Muscat. Ali was a symbol of that aspiration. Eventually she names her daughter London. She will have her London one way or another in spite of the fact that she belongs to a patriarchal Islamic system.

Most of the characters of Jokha Alharthi’s novel, Celestial Bodies, which won the Man Booker International Prize 2019, belong to rural Oman. Love is their quintessential longing. What does love mean especially in rigidly traditional, patriarchal system? The novel explores that theme primarily.

“What do you really know about love?” London will ask her mother one day. What does anyone know about love, in fact, especially in a system that keeps them all suppressed with all sorts of regulations and traditions? The novel seeks to probe love and its role through the experiences of three women as well as quite many other lesser characters. The three women are Mayya and her sisters, Asma and Khawla.

While Mayya surrenders to her fate silently as a dutiful wife who bears children for her husband and sleeps away blissfully when the children don’t require her attention, her sisters have their own discontents. Asma marries Khalid, a self-obsessed artist who decides the circle within which his wife can move. Khawla waits seemingly endlessly for her cousin who had gone to Canada as a boy for studying and does not return. Finally he has to return because he is a total failure there. She marries him. But he was only interested in the money he got from the marriage. He has his own girlfriend in Canada to whom he returns. He visits Khawla annually, however, and gives her a child during each visit. Having borne 14 children dutifully, Khawla confronts the absurdity of such a life and seeks divorce.

The novel spans over almost a century and hence there are a lot more characters, too many for a short novel of 243 pages. The author has experimented with a new narrative technique with Abdallah narrating every alternative chapter while the other chapters are dedicated to the other characters by an omniscient third-person narrator. The technique makes the novel a little difficult to understand initially because the onus for putting together varied and apparently disjointed pieces of information given in different chapters falls entirely on the reader.

Even the minor characters are interesting, however. Najiya who is also known as Qamar (Moon) is a beautiful young Bedouin woman with great aplomb. In a society that is controlled entirely by the men, she chooses her man, chooses to seduce him and even use him as she pleases. “Azzan will be mine,” she says, “but I won’t be his. He’ll come to me when I want him, and he’ll go away when I say so.” Azzan, the father of the three girls mentioned above, bites the bait.

Ankabuta belongs to a previous generation and she is a slave woman whose daring gets her imprisoned. She is kept in a cell which is visited twice each day: once in the day for feeding her and once in the night by her husband who ties her limbs to the bedposts and gags her mouth with his turban cloth before raping her.

“What do you really know about love?” London’s question echoes throughout the novel. London will grow up, become a doctor and fall in love with a young man of her choice breaking the traditional shackles. But will she succeed in discovering real love?

The novel has a lot more to offer in an exceptionally sleek volume. The Booker has drawn the attention of a lot of readers to the novel. The novel deserves to be read too not only to get clear glimpses into the society of Oman but also to understand how the patriarchal system evolved in that country.