“Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is the closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is a 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.”
I first heard about Celestial Bodies – originally published in Arabic as Sayyidat al-qamar, literally “Ladies of the Moon”, and translated to English by Marilyn Booth – in an article tweeted by @cherrysbirds (thanks, fren). The article spoke about the book and Jokha Alharthi, the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize from Oman as well as from the Middle East. As someone who’s spent more than half their life in Muscat, any mention of the place is enough to get my attention, and the premise of the book – the lives of three generations of a rural family revolving around three sisters – seemed interesting, so I hunted it down. And I’m glad I did.
Celestial Bodies tells the story of three sisters born into an upper-class family in the village of al-Awafi – Mayya, Asma and Khawla – who each get married out of very different personal and societal motivations. It follows the lives of these women, as well as the people around them – their parents, their children, their husbands, their cousins, their uncles and aunts – while simultaneously providing a historical overview of the country and its trials and tribulations from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present day.
It is hard to pin down exactly which genre the work falls into, and that is one of its biggest strengths. It speaks of love and loss, but it is not quite a work of romance. It talks about the history of Oman, but it is not quite a historical novel. It tells the stories of various women, strong and weak, with voices and lives of their own, separate from the men who they are attached to, but that does not define it completely. It talks of alienation from one’s own land, but it is not a diaspora narrative. At the heart of it all, the book is a love letter to Oman – to the country and its people, to places familiar and unfamiliar, to its geography and terrain, and to everything that defines its identity as a country on the verge of coming into its own.
One of the best qualities the book possesses is how all the female characters in the book are fleshed out completely and given lives and identities separate from the men in their lives. Each female character is different from the other, there are nuances and facets to each of their personalities, and they all move the story forward one way or the other. The women of al-Awafi are integral to the premise of the work, and are treated with the appropriate respect and dignity.
Reading Celestial Bodies feels like unraveling a tangled ball of multicoloured strands of wool. The story does not progress in a linear fashion, timelines are fuzzy and hard to keep track of, and the lives of each character intertwine to the point where you cannot make out where one story ends and another begins. However, once you figure out each strand’s place in the bigger picture, you realise that this ambiguity serves only to heighten the surrealness induced by the structure and setting of the novel. It is a task that may induce impatience, but it is well worth it in the end.
As a former resident of Oman, reading Celestial Bodies gave me an immensely more mature and rounded perspective towards the country and its people than I’d ever had previously. While the setting of the work might be unfamiliar to most – Oman, unlike other Middle Eastern countries, is not a common choice of literary background – it does not take away from one’s enjoyment of the work in the slightest. On the contrary, reading the work actually brings you a better understanding of the country and its people, as well as human nature in general.
Text by Abhirami G
Illustration by Sanjana Acharya
Article 19 