Images: Translations (2024).
There’s a hadith that says that if the end of the world comes while you have a sapling in your hands and it’s possible to plant it, do so. There’s always a chance that the seedling will offer something before the final hour—shade, nourishment, oxygen, beauty—and we cannot know how long the end will take. In Jumaana Abdu’s debut novel, Translations, al-qiyāmah feels close; the novel is set in a rural New South Wales town beleaguered by natural disasters and peopled with characters whose worlds have fallen apart, who must learn to live amid catastrophe.
Independent and self-possessed, Aliyah has decided to become an ‘uncitizen’ by moving to a house in the country with her daughter, Sakina. Her ex-husband calls this grief, though Aliyah thinks of it as survival. They’re starting fresh, and Aliyah immediately gets to work on the land, hiring the local imam, a Palestinian man she refers to as ‘Shep’, to help. There is, from the start, something flickering between the two, but Aliyah is determined to keep her distance. She tries to do the same at the hospital where she works, but fellow nurse Billie and her family nonetheless jostle Aliyah into friendship. With the shattering arrival of her childhood friend Hana, matters grow complicated, leading to a series of events that threaten to topple the world Aliyah has fought so hard to build.
A book that can be inhaled in mere days yet will linger in the reader’s mind much longer.
Abdu’s is a startling debut: assured and confident, it is written with a deliberateness that never feels heavy, only gentle—as though the book were a garden Abdu was tending. It has been carefully trellised and structured, shaped into a narrative arc whose form is comforting in its familiarity but which surprises with the variety and abundance Abdu has sown. In this, it is a deeply satisfying read, a book that can be inhaled in mere days yet will linger in the reader’s mind much longer, so propulsive is Abdu’s plotting and so multifaceted, so expansive, her world.
Despite its conventional shape, Translations refuses generic constraints, becomes multitudinous: at once a Bildungsroman, a settler pastoral, a romance-cum-Austenian novel of manners were Elizabeth and Mr Darcy Muslim. It is even something of a psychological thriller as the threat of Hana’s past weighs heavy over the house. The novel is social criticism and theological fiction and more besides, an Eden of interpretative possibilities written into every scene.
For example, a central tension throughout is what might be described as a love triangle. Shep is the Ibrahim to Alya’s Sarah, and the fondness between them grows patiently, nurtured by mutual respect and guided by their deep theological conversations. Yet it is Hana that Aliyah loves, a love that is ‘cataclysmic’ and undeniable but whose shape remains elusive to readers, even as the two women fall into a traditional marital dynamic (Aliyah taking the masculine role, Hana the feminine) and Sakina becomes ‘their child’. Then again, this relationship can also be read as an intense friendship—one seeded in the blurry intensities of girlhood—and the relations around the house as signalling something closer to an intentional community. Rather than impose interpretations, Abdu lets them unfurl.
Despite its conventional shape, Translations refuses generic constraints.
To some this might come as a surprise in an overtly Muslim novel, but Abdu isn’t interested in explaining Islam to those readers—she wants to plumb its depths. In Translations, not only are the protagonists Muslim, they are—a thing vanishingly rare in Australian writing—Muslims whose devotion is central to their identity. Islamic teachings permeate the text, from asides like Sakina joking that ‘It’s sunnah to sit when you eat’ while eating her meal on a balustrade, to khutbahs and extended dialogues on the nuances of particular teachings. There is, here, a serious and scholarly interest in Islamic theology and Abdu uses the form of the novel to explore it. Through dialogue, certainly, but also through plot and characterisation, even voice. At every turn, Abdu is posing questions and offering paths to find answers: questions about identity, about love and loss, about forgiveness and making amends. Questions, too, about possession and its opposite.
While a commentary on settler colonialism slides into the foreground in conversations between Aliyah, her Kamilaroi friends and Shep, it is through Aliyah’s relationship with the land she lives on that Abdu crystallises this commentary into critique. Aliyah pointedly refuses any knowledge of the people who lived in her home before and avoids thinking about its Kamilaroi custodians or what is owed to them. Her labours in the garden are set against the work of the previous owners and the millennia of Indigenous management that have shaped the land on which she builds her future, and, well-meaning as she is, Aliyah’s grief renders her unable to hold herself accountable to history. She is not redeemed by her roots in dispossession. Neither is Shep—whose dispossessions are nearer and more violent—and whose painful recognition of this fact contrasts Aliyah’s more passive awareness, the two serving as proxies for common modes of progressive relation to colonised land—modes that could easily lead to inertia, though in this instance do not.
Translations does not pretend to know how to solve the problem of colonial histories—or their presents. It refuses neat solutions to climate crisis, to grief, to violence. What it offers instead is an orientation towards the future, one of hope and solidarity. We may be living in the end of times, and whatever good we have in our hands, Abdu asks that we plant it.
Translations is our Debut Spotlight book for October.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
