Bitter Orange Tree

by Jokha Alharthi

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Translated by Marilyn Booth

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

An extraordinary novel from a Man Booker International Prize-winning author that follows one young Omani woman as she builds a life for herself in Britain and reflects on the relationships that have made her from a “remarkable” writer who has “constructed her own novelistic form” (James Wood, The New Yorker).

‘Alharthi makes lyrical shifts between past and present, memory and folklore, oneiric surrealism and grimy realism.’ Guardian

[A] stirring tale of a woman who battles every social and religious constraint. The juxtaposition with the narrator’s reflections on modern life and the speed of change is brilliantly judged in Marilyn Booth’s agile translation from Arabic.’ The Observer

Zuhour, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can’t help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Aamir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhour left the Arabian Peninsula.
 
As the historical narrative of Bint Aamir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhour’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips, and dreams mingle with memories.
 
The eagerly awaited new novel by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize, Bitter Orange Tree is a profound exploration of social status, wealth, desire, and female agency. It presents a mosaic portrait of one young woman’s attempt to understand the roots she has grown from, and to envisage an adulthood in which her own power and happiness might find the freedom necessary to bear fruit and flourish.

Release date: May 10, 2022

Publisher: Catapult

Print pages: 224

Sample

Fingers

Iopen my eyes suddenly and see her fingers. One by one I see them, fleshy, wrinkled, the nails rough. A single silver ring; and her thumb with its thick, tough black nail, preserving the traces of a bad injury that all but severed it.

I didn’t see that strange fingernail as strange. She always asked me to cut it, but the heaviest nail clipper wasn’t strong enough. Every time I tried, she would shake her head. “Khalaas. Forget it—try the knife.” And a small blade really would appear, all of a sudden, from nowhere, it seemed. I didn’t attempt it, though. I cut the rest of her nails, the ordinary, healthy ones, leaving her the business of the hard black thumbnail deformed by injury.

Waking up to snow falling outside the window of my top-floor room in the university residence hall, I climb out of my narrow bed and stand barefoot on the wooden floor in my long nightgown, staring into the snow and the darkness. And suddenly what I am seeing is not the nighttime landscape but the hard, black, crooked nail. Right there, plain before my eyes, leaving me wakeful with remorse. I go back to my narrow bed, and finally the voices of my classmates in the kitchen fade away and the loud music from my neighbor’s room grows faint, as I toss and turn in an agony of regret.

I could have done something for the black nail instead of leaving it to grow so long, neglected and askew. It was possible for the word ignore not to exist. But it did. It existed and it grew, and it got longer, just as the black nail lengthened, just like any confident, healthy fingernail would grow long enough to leave a scratch or not. Like this nail of mine, still bearing traces of the polish I had put on for my Pakistani friend’s birthday party the day before. Yes, the word ignore could go on and on—without a nail clipper, without any polish even, and when I felt like I was suffocating, wrapped up in my long nightgown, in my little bed on that snowy night, it was the remorse, the guilt, that choked me. Neglect. Negligence. Looking the other way. Pretending not to notice. Ignoring it.

Was there ever a day when I asked her, “What happened to your finger?” Maybe, but if so, I don’t remember what she said, if anything. I remember collecting the rough slivers cut from the healthy fingernails, ready to toss them out. She wanted me to bury them in the dirt, but I ignored her. I pretended not to know that this was what she wanted. She’d tug at her white pouch of medications, concealed beneath her outstretched leg, and hand it to me. There was nothing there one could read, not really, perhaps two or three lines of ink on every little plastic bag. The white pills twice a day, the pink ones three times a day. What were the pills for? I don’t know. I never asked. I had twenty problems in my math textbook that I had to come up with solutions for: I wasn’t about to start asking questions about the medicines with hurriedly written lines of ink sprawling across them.

I would forget the fingers, forget the medications. Then, on some night, any night, a night without insomnia, or grief, or memories, I would see her in a dream. Sitting, the way she always was sitting during those last ten years, her face sweet and all wrinkles, her smile radiating goodness, her arms reaching out for me. When she stretches her arms toward me in that way she always had, the long, bright-colored tarha draped over her head cascades into dozens of little folds and pleats, and the silver ring on her healthy, straight little finger flashes with light, concealing the afflicted black nail. And then I fall into her embrace.

It would already have been autumn. The large trees ringing the university residence would have gone yellow and the leaves would have fallen. The caretakers would be sweeping the yellowed leaves from the pavements, and the female students would be showing off how well they could endure the colder weather by choosing to wear their shortest skirts. But just a moment before, I had been there: just before I opened my eyes and autumn plunked itself down in my consciousness. I was in her embrace, I was smelling her scent, a blend of civet musk, precious aloeswood oil, and ancient soil. We were switching roles. I was repeating the words that she’d always said over and over: “Don’t go.” No, we didn’t exchange places exactly, because this time she was smiling softly, sympathetically. I hadn’t done that back when she was the one saying “Don’t go.”

I had gone. And then she had gone. And it wasn’t possible to change anything. What the hand of fate had written could not be unwritten. That ancient line of poetry: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. For I had gone, and I went away without smiling. I just went, in my cocky presumption that I could look the other way. That I didn’t know; that I didn’t need to know. And then: remorse. Harsh, grating regret, making me more fragile than the brittle autumn leaves crumbling under the janitor’s broom beneath my window.

My svelte Pakistani friend’s fingers were perfectly symmetrical and polish never touched those nails. Her name, Suroor, means “happiness.” And yes, she was the picture of happiness. Suroor: jet-black hair rippling down her back and a dazzling smile. Her slender fingers with the precisely clipped nails raking through that beautiful hair of hers. No scratch ever blemished her nails. It was as if life itself had deposited her in a remote and sheltered spot, protected from storms or high winds. No scratches, no swellings, no scars. I was always teasing her. Looking at her fingers brought ancient poems to mind. “You are made for love, Suroor.” She would laugh. In my defense, I quoted the ancient Lubna’s beloved Qays, the sad and lovelorn poet.

Love’s own tokens etch themselves,

the youthful form grows thin

Love will strip from the lover’s hands the

very finger-bones

Suroor didn’t like that at all—“the very finger-bones,” imagine!—and she herself wasn’t made for love. Her sister was.

On her birthday—the day I painted my nails bright red—Suroor’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. For her older sister, Kuhl, had married her beloved in a secret temporary marriage. No one else knew, and Suroor had to conceal that severe secret. It was a heavy, heavy weight on picture-of-happiness Suroor. Born in her father’s luxurious villa in Karachi, speaking nothing but English all of her carefree life, Suroor didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. It overwhelmed her; it perplexed her. She didn’t understand how her sister could have gone from a few silly flirtations to the calamitous business of marriage. And for whom? A boy with only secondary school English he had learned in his remote village somewhere deep in the interior of Pakistan. His father wasn’t a distinguished banker like hers was, and his peasant mother had never heard of a city called London. But in her final year studying for a medical degree, Kuhl found a shaykh who was willing to bind her and her beloved in a mutaa marriage. And Suroor, on her twenty-second birthday, was bearing the secret, dragging it around with her like a mutilated finger with a misshapen black nail.

Her long black hair falling disheveled over my shoulder, Suroor sobbed. “Just imagine, Zuhour, imagine! My sister. . . my very own sister, marrying that peasant!” Suroor was prettier than her sister; she resembled their mother, who had grown up in London and, had it not been for her marriage, probably would have become a star of the London stage. Suroor didn’t wear any makeup. Her tears were pure, clean drops, not darkened by kohl or tainted by face powder. They were large drops, glistening pearls, proper tears: suitable tears. But my tears—they had been thin brownish lines edging down my dirty face.

As my grandmother had rubbed them off my cheeks with her black-nailed thumb, she handed me her walking stick and said, “Go after them! Give them a good beating, will you.” I had pretended to go off, but instead I hid in the enclosed prayer alcove behind the main house. It was the summer before she went lame and could do nothing but sit. She was still walking every late afternoon then, between our house and the orchards, cutting across the narrow lanes where we played. And then there came the day when she witnessed a scene that had happened many times before, unbeknownst to her. Me, sprawled on the ground, and Fattoum rolling my face in the dirt while her brother, Ulyan, yanks my hair, and tears run in dirty lines down my face. Suddenly she was there: her massive frame, her distinctive height and full, strong body. The walking stick that always supported her came down on Fattoum and Ulyan. They scampered away, slipping into their house, but she followed them, and she swung that cane upward and thwacked the wood door, nearly splintering it. When Abu Ulyan opened the door, it was a miracle that he escaped having an eye gouged out by her cane. “If you don’t punish those kids of yours,” she said, “we will.” And she turned away and marched home without as much as a glance at me.

There was still some birthday cake and paper cups half-full of juice on the table. Very few classmates had shown up: Suroor didn’t serve alcohol. She was studying classical and medieval Arabic. For a while now, she had been more at ease reading the medieval scholar al-Tabari than she was reading the newspaper. Reading ancient scholars’ interpretations of the Qur’an, she’d become convinced that her father was wrong to have served drinks at his boisterous parties, whether at the Karachi villa or in the London flat.

I was thinking that we ought to clean the place up, but Suroor just went on moaning about her sister. “He’s a peasant. His mom and dad are illiterate. A farmer.” But he wasn’t a peasant farmer. He was a student pursuing a university degree in medicine, just like her sister.

“My grandmother would’ve given anything to be a peasant farmer,” I said. And then immediately I regretted my abrupt reaction. Suroor raised her head. “Your grandmother?” Right. The words had come out and they couldn’t be put back. I had said it: my grandmother. Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached. Those words had been said. What’s done is done.