Former International Booker winner Jokha Alharthi’s latest novel leaves a bittersweet aftertaste

Bitter Orange Tree is Jokha Alharthi’s much anticipated novel in translation – published only three years after she and Marilyn Booth won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019 for Celestial Bodies. Of the three novels that she has written, this is the second to be translated into English. Booth’s deft translation elevates Alharthi’s talents as she weaves patterns between the past and present, memory and dream, and inhibitions and ambitions. But, is good writing (and translation) reason enough to ignore a few damning flaws?

Our narrator, Zuhour, is an Omani student at a British university. Exchanging the hot sun of Oman with the gloominess of Britain is not what she had in mind. Zuhour can find no joy here and cannot get over the death of her adoptive grandmother, Bint Aamir, who died only a few days after her departure. Unable to overcome her grief, Zuhour fears turning into her mother, who suffered from postnatal depression even long after her children had grown up and flown the nest.

“At the word depression, the woman I called my grandmother, Bint Aamir, simply laughed. Again she told us the story of Athurayyaa’s madness and how she could not stand the sight of her son.”

So how does one reconcile with such grief? Zuhour wonders what Bint Aamir’s life would have been like. She reimagines the events that might have led Bint Aamir, also a distant poor relation, to care for Zuhour’s father and later his children. She remembers her grandmother through certain fragrances and gestures, and traces her feisty personality back to her girlhood when Bint Aamir successfully snubbed the advances of a rogue shopkeeper and saved up little money for a fruitless trip to another city to see a white doctor in hopes of getting prescription spectacles for her bad eye.

But Bint Aamir was not always a portrait of rebellion. She was expelled from her father’s home and never lived to see her dream of owning an orchard. In the recollections of Oman through Bint Aamir, Alharthi takes us back to a time when the country witnessed hunger and sickness, when water was scarce, and people were migrating in search of livelihood wherever they could smell a faint whiff of money.

“Shame! Don’t you feel shame eating from your father’s platter? Eat from the toil of your own arm!”

A canvas of feminine disappointments

Zuhour is not alone with her memories. She forms reluctant friendships with two Pakistani sisters, Suroor and Kuhl. The sisters have not known grief – they come from rich, privileged families and all decisions are made on their behalf. So much so that the only act of resistance they have ever put up is choosing to wear the hijab.

Their wealth and petty misfortunes segue into the memories of Bint Aamir – it’s a tried and tested method to illustrate extremes. Alharthi gets caught in this cliché. Suroor and Kuhl are interesting additions yet they fail to make a mark. Kuhl’s lover (and secret husband) Imran is a Pakistani peasant who won a scholarship to study at the university. He is not the right man for wealthy Kuhl, or so Zohour is convinced. There’s no basis to her belief, of course, except her vague acquaintance with poverty through Bint Aamir.

There are hints of Zohour’s growing fondness for Imran but they are so imperceptible, one is almost convinced that they had imagined it. This does not bode well – Alharthi dangles a delicious carrot that she snatches away as soon as the reader extends their hand towards it. The sense of incompleteness that arises from this love triangle stays until the end.

Bitter Orange Tree is a canvas of women’s disappointments. Their grief permeates through every word. Apart from the unfulfilled dreams of Bint Aamir, there’s also Kuhl’s mother, a woman who never quite lived up to her thespian potential and reluctantly slips into the role of her mother; Sumayya, Zuhour’s elder sister, who ends her unbearable marriage in a split second of unthinking manoeuvre; and Zohour herself, whom we do not know much about outside of her heartache.

Despite the flaws...

Alharthi’s women bring in stories from London, Karachi, and Oman – but the vignettes are so fast moving that it was difficult to sink my teeth into any of them. The men have their fair share of adventures too – Imran’s memories from his life in a “village in the Pakistani hinterland” and Bint Aamir’s distant relative forges through the jungles of Congo in search of fortune and excitement. These accounts zigzag through the chapters and instead of blending in, jut out like rude wedges. There’s a glimpse of a great story there but ever so annoyingly out of reach.

Here I would like to mention three chapters which I thought were especially superb. “A Day Trip”, “Bliss”, and “A Leaf Falling from the Mango Tree” revolve around Zuhuor’s elder sister, Sumayya. Nicknamed “dynamo” as a child, she is stilled into submission by a pitiless husband. Sumayya suffers silently. One day when fate offers her a fleeting opportunity to free herself, she makes a grab at it. This twenty-five page episode is so poignantly written that it demands a full-length novel of its own. In her silences, Sumayya emerges as a more engrossing heroine second only to Bint Aamir. Yet this finely written story has no discernible impact on the whole.

As is common with grief, there’s a sense of claustrophobia that permeates throughout. However, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a reminder of how women make a life despite the disappointments that are doled out to them at every age. In a moment of terrible realisation, Zohour articulates her grief as, “Her dead body looked nothing like her. It looked a lot like me.” This made me stop in my tracks, what a singular achievement with language!

Bitter Orange Tree is not without its share of flaws, not much different from the women who are the driving forces in the novel. This is a deeply humane story of deafening failures and silent triumphs. Alharthi creates a world where the future is vague but hopeful, the past is rich with possibilities and reconciliations, and the present offers a chance at redemption.

“We had my mother’s fragility, and my grandmother’s fierce will; my father bringing us gifts from his travels, and Sufyan’s amazing little bouts of troublemaking. All of it was ours, and we didn’t doubt that for a moment.”

Bitter Orange Tree, Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Simon and Schuster India.