Sultan Qaboos bin Said, Oman’s long-serving ruler who passed away in January, epitomized the era of rapid development in Gulf Arab states and the dizzying transition to modernity. When he ascended the throne in 1970, Oman was poor, undeveloped, and isolated. Today, Oman ranks in the highest category of the United Nations Human Development Index, the capital boasts swanky international hotel chains, and its major commercial cities are well integrated with the global economy.
The official narratives on Oman – much like those of other small Gulf Arab states – all have a before-and-after element to them. The usual pronouncements are made about the lack of paved roads, schools, health care, and the like before the era of development – and, of course, the subsequent flowering of all of the above afterward. There is truth to these narratives in Oman and elsewhere. Qaboos transformed his country, but beyond the gleaming Muscat Opera house, the thousands of miles of highways, or the high-tech port of Salalah on the Indian Ocean, there lies a more complex story of a country hurtling toward modernity, families and individuals grappling with (and liberated by) rapid social change, and the haunting legacy of slavery, only outlawed in 1970.
While the death of Sultan Qaboos was certainly the defining event of Oman in 2020, there was also the arrival of an extraordinary Omani novelist on the international scene who writes vividly of Oman’s journey to modernity. Jokha Alharthi’s novel, “Celestial Bodies” (Sayyidat al-qamar, in Arabic, “Ladies of the Moon”), landed on pandemic-era book club reading lists across the English-speaking world this year, thanks to her 2019 Man Booker International Prize for best novel. It marked the first time an Arabic-language novel won the prestigious award. Notably, Alharthi was the co-winner of the prize, shared with her equally extraordinary translator, Marilyn Booth, in recognition of the vital but often overlooked role translators play in world literature.
In the translator’s introduction, Booth described the world that the novel conjured as “a precarious edge between one era and another.” Reading Alharthi’s novel in the year that Qaboos died presents a sort of symmetry: The sultan’s obituaries tell of Oman’s extraordinary development, while Alharthi’s novel explores the hopes, tragedies, triumphs, and simmering tensions beneath those headlines. The novel adds to a growing body of literature from Gulf Arab authors in translation or originally in English that grapple with the tensions that arise with high-speed development and the old ways confronting the new.
The characters and world Alharthi conjures allow the reader an inside look into the homes and lives of Omanis caught between two worlds, grappling with rapid social and cultural change amid the heavy weight of tradition, with many unable to break free from their past. In fact, amid the multiple characters that inhabit this novel, “the past” feels like its own character, always lurking.
The past was never far from the new Oman. Several African characters in the book, former slaves or sons and daughters of slaves, play key roles in the narrative. Central is Zarifa – corpulent, full of life, brimming with proverbs. She remained an occasional domestic helper, house gossip, and elder care provider for the aging patriarch who once owned her, unable to imagine a different life. Her son urges her to see the new world: “We are free – the law says so, free, Zarifa. Open your eyes. The world has changed but you keep on saying the same words over and over … Open your eyes, Zarifa. We are free, and everyone is his own master, and no one owns anyone else.”
Indeed, the world has changed dramatically for Omanis and others living in Gulf Arab states over the past five decades. Other recent novels from the region explore this modernity-tradition balance as generations clash and societal norms rupture amid the fast pace of economic development. Kuwaiti novelist Saud Alsanousi explores the discrimination against Filipinos and the meaning of identity in the award-winning novel “The Bamboo Stalk,” which centers on the child of an upper-class Kuwaiti man and a Filipina maid. When the young man returns to Kuwait to explore his identity, he finds his father deceased and a family either hostile or uneasy about his return. Set in both Manila and Kuwait, the book is enveloped in a backdrop of casual consumerist globalization that commodifies people’s lives.
Emirati novelist Maha Gargash also grapples with the effects of high-speed social change on a sprawling family in her novel set in Dubai and Cairo in the mid-1990s, “That Other Me.” Like Alharthi’s novel, Alsanousi and Gargash show that family skeletons in the closet and generational clashes are a universal theme – and patriarchs, especially misogynistic patriarchs, often end their lives alone, cared for by servants, barely able to muster a whisper, as their sons and daughters are off making their way in the new world that is dawning.
The Kuwaiti short story writer Mai Al-Nakib also contends skillfully with the clash of the old and the new in her award-winning collection of short stories, “The Hidden Light of Objects.” Two prominent Saudi female authors, Laila Aljohani (“Days of Ignorance”) and Raja Alem (“The Dove’s Necklace”), also tackle the uneasy balance between the old ways and the still unfamiliar new ones, in novels laced with tragedy set in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
While Alharthi’s characters grapple with rapid change, there is no false romance in the “good ‘ole days” of yore. Slavery was real. Women’s lives were severely limited. Life was harsh for all but the patriarchs. While many social challenges remain, in today’s Oman, however, more women enroll in higher education than men, health-care options have expanded greatly, and young Omanis – like other young Gulf Arabs – enjoy vast opportunities compared to their mothers and grandfathers. Consider Alharthi’s own life compared to that of her mother, who grew up at a time when education was only for the elite. In present day Oman, Alharthi’s multiple siblings work as oil company executives, communications consultants, or foreign ministry staffers.
Or consider Mayya, a central character in “Celestial Bodies,” betrothed to a man against her will – though he turns out to be loving, wounded, and longing for the love Mayya never gave him. When they have a daughter, Mayya names her London. It was a defiant act, perhaps she thought a girl named London would not face marriage to a man she did not love. London, in many ways, represents the new Oman: A well-educated physician, she marries for love to a dreamy poet who, in the end, turns abusive and unfaithful. But in the new Oman, London has options, and they separate.
The journeys of the characters in these novels are both universal and particular. They tell the story of life in Kuwait, Dubai, Oman, or Saudi Arabia at a particular time, but the longings, wounds, and hopes displayed by the characters are universal and familiar to all across the emerging and developing world today who have experienced the high-speed change of the modern era.
One of the most tragic characters in Alharthi’s novel was a woman named Masouda, who was essentially locked up day and night in the lower level of a home, fed once a day by her daughter. Her perennial unheard cry throughout the novel is “I am Masouda, and I am here!” In “Celestial Bodies” and the emerging works from the region, authors are giving a voice to so many of the voiceless women and men at a unique time in the region’s history.
