Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi translated by Marilyn Booth
In 2019, Omani author Jokha Alharthi won the International Booker Prize for “Celestial Bodies.” Her multifaceted 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,” arrives this month and 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.
Alharthi, who earned a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh and now teaches in Oman, can simultaneously emphasize the universality of her characters’ feelings and the unique cultural context of their experiences. “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.
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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, and that belated realization produces some of the novel’s most beautiful lines of tribute:
“Her love just seemed there, simple, like the air that meant I could breathe, without thinking about it; given freely and generously, bestowed as the sun gives its light, freely enough to allow me to see my way ahead. Her love had to be deserved, it was true; but it left no obligation. My grandmother never made me feel — or made my father or brother or sister feel — that we were in debt to her. We deserved her as we deserve to be alive, and breathing, and turning our faces to the sun.”
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. “I would sometimes forget that she had died,” Zuhour says, inspiring a new wave of sorrow. “She had died, gone silent, left the world as she lived in it, without a home, without a field, without a beloved to hold her close, without a brother to take care of her, and never having had children who came out of her own body.”
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.
Subjected to such a precarious existence, all Bint Aamir ever wanted was “her own little plot of land to till,” but that was not to be. Instead, a kind relative on her mother’s side took her into his house, and there she lived into her 80s. The life that Alharthi describes is one of almost saintly self-abnegation. Not quite a servant nor a guest, Bint Aamir nonetheless assumes the household chores and cares for her hosts’ child and then grandchildren, which include Zuhour.
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Bint Aamir was no masochist, but there’s a masochistic element to Zuhour’s ruminations. 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. What would it really have cost, she berates herself, to have responded more kindly to Bint Aamir’s little requests or to acknowledge the woman’s tireless care before heading off to college?
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.”
“I was longing to tell the two of them how much I loved them,” Zuhour says. “But I couldn’t. I was frozen in my torment, tongue-tied in my destiny.”
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Aside from how emotionally painful that sounds, frozen in torment and tongue-tied in destiny are particularly challenging conditions to sustain in a novel, which demands at least a modicum of dynamic movement. Zuhour hints at the same problem when she describes her sessions with a campus therapist as futile. With perfectly Western optimism, a British friend assures her that “there was a solution to every problem, even sadness.” But to Zuhour, “sadness is not an illness” to be cured. She cannot express to her therapist the way she feels “bound to a wheelchair that was language’s incapacity to fully express me.”
That awkward metaphor goes a long way toward suggesting why this exquisitely sensitive novel spins its wheels without going anywhere.
Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post.
Bitter Orange Tree
By Jokha Alharthi, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth
Catapult. 224 pp. $26
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