Title & author
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
Synopsis
In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, Omani women are brought to the forefront. Through the intergenerational stories of its women protagonists, Celestial Bodies spotlights marriage and motherhood, and the ways in which they limit and heighten both womanhood and independence.
Who should read this book
Fans of The Death of Vivek Oji, Girl, Woman, Other, and Isabel Allende
What we’re thinking about
Alharthi’s use of the natural world to depict motherhood and marriage
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, eating disorders, abandonment, sexism, mental health
In Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (published originally as Sayyidat al-Qamar (“Ladies of the Moon”) in 2010 and as Celestial Bodies by Catapult in 2019), Omani women are brought to the forefront. Alharthi introduces the voices of numerous women, centering their desires, hates, and passions. And though these third-person stories might literally revolve around the narration of a man— Abdallah, whose first-person entries are inserted between every one of their chapters— just like planets revolving around the sun, it is the women’s voices that are calling for us to explore. Through the intergenerational stories of its women protagonists, as well as Abdallah’s, Celestial Bodies spotlights marriage and motherhood, and the ways in which they limit and heighten both womanhood and independence.
“Mayya, forever immersed in her Singer sewing machine, seemed lost to the outside world. Then Mayya lost herself to love,” opens Alharthi (Alharthi, 1). Within the first few lines of Celestial Bodies, Alharthi introduces Mayya’s loss of identity due to both unrequited love with a man who has just returned from London, and her subsequent marriage to a man she has no feelings toward. And so, trapped in a marriage with a man she does not love, Mayya begins to place her desires, her wishes for what might-have-been, onto her daughter. “When Merchant Sulayman’s son [Abdallah] came to see the newborn, Mayya told him she’d named the baby girl London” (7). Mayya names her and Abdallah’s daughter after a city she associates with the man she really loves, imprinting upon her daughter the memory of her desired life, the independence she craves.
As a response to losing his mother at a young age, Mayya’s husband, Abdallah, imprints his own needs onto his wife. When he first sees Mayya “bending over the sewing machine as if she were putting her arms around a tiny child,” Abdallah stops having nightmares (100). Abdallah is drawn to Mayya because of the maternal image. And when dreaming of his mother, “her hug was Mayya’s” (84). Abdallah goes so far to envision Mayya as his own motherly figure, trapping his love for her in a box. Despite never truly knowing Mayya, he wonders how with her eyes “fixed on [her] sewing machine, [she] never could see the vast and torturous expanse of [his] love, and [his] imprisoned self?” (154). Abdallah projects his own narrative on Mayya, envisioning her as he chooses to. He limits his wife, seeing her in the way he desires (as his mother) and not as she truly is (as his wife or as a woman).
And then there is Asma, Mayya’s younger sister. Unlike Mayya, Asma longs to be married, seeing it as an “identity document, her passport to a world wider than home” (156). Asma sees marriage as a way to advance her identity as a woman and as herself. “Thoughts of motherhood, her new clothes, the women dancing, and what it would be like to leave her childhood home had all wandered through Asma’s mind, but she hadn’t given a thought to Khalid, her long-awaited bridegroom” (158). Asma desires marriage and motherhood, knowing they only are available to her through marriage, but yet her initial fascination is not on the man she’ll be marrying. Rather, it’s on marriage as a vehicle, the man she marries just being the way she can achieve these goals. In fact, Asma convinces Khalid that “once branded by childbearing, a mother’s embrace could no longer be a lover’s embrace” (196). Asma’s devotion is to her own desires, her own wishes, using marriage as a way to achieve the life she craves and nothing more.
Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies is a beautiful piece of literature– a story that is so studded with poetic writing, calling readers to re-read the same pages over and over again. Yet there’s a culture of fear that surrounds books in translation, one that, depending upon the individual, might stem from self-doubt, a lack of exposure, or white supremacist teachings. As with so many other aspects of Western culture, we in the West tend to idolize our values as inherently supreme. Why would an American need to read a book about women in Oman, a place they might have never even heard of? But this is one of the values of books in translation: they open new doors, new ways of reading and seeing. They aren’t meant to be “easy” reads. Not only does Alharthi detail a story of womanhood and marriage, of love and the loss of, but a story rooted in the aftermath of imperialism and slavery, of a country coming into its own and the women shaping the country, helping it reclaim its identity.
“All of it, Khawla carried on her back, and the load grew heavier every day, and her back began to break. ”
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Alharthi writes from the view of numerous characters. Are there any characters with whom you resonated?
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