Transcendent Translations

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.