Roumina Parsa reviews Translations by Jumaana Abdu
Translations
by Joumaana Abdu
ISBN 9781761343872
Reviewed by ROUMINA PARSA
For people in diaspora, the perceived value of our creative expression has traditionally been contingent on the telling of familiar stories. To write into the demands of “authenticity” is to perform with pre-existing notions of our identities as the baseline. The market-prescribed version of diaspora is one in which the pool of our experiences is all made of the same still water, its depth swelling with each faltered variation from the retelling of “loss-exile-return”. As a knowable thing, it’s a comfortable iteration of the foreign because it can be named; “home” as the shared contested nebula of our personhood. Yet I question, if we are to always operate with this struggle as our centre (working either to reject or affirm it) are we truly distancing ourselves from the violence of our oppression, or cementing its bind through relentless association? It is perhaps this consideration that has allowed Australian diasporic writers to stray from the confines of mainstream narratives. Picking up Translations by Jumaana Abdu, I craved to not hear a familiar story. And Abdu, a bold and poetic POC voice in Australia’s literary sphere, got close to not telling one.
Translations follows a divorced Muslim woman, Aliyah, moving to a run-down property in rural New South Wales with her young daughter. Between shifts as a nurse, Aliyah works on transforming the property with the help of a Palestinian imam hired as a farmhand, nicknamed Shep. Here, Aliyah must navigate the notion of “home” as a haunted space, as a reunion with an old friend, dreams of the previous owners, and interactions with Indigenous Peoples intensify the question of what it means to belong.
Abdu’s cited intentions with her debut novel are noble ones. Aware of the hyper-visibility of Middle Eastern and Muslim suffering, particularly in the past year, Abdu approached the representation of her characters with a commendable objective: ‘I wanted to afford my characters the dignity of ambiguity, to prove ambiguity was possible despite the demands for explanations that have infiltrated identity politics’ (1).
In refusing to exist in the loaded context of the “other”, Abdu allows herself to create in the space left by what is negated. The decision to leave Shep’s real name unknown, for example, is one such praiseworthy move towards what is traditionally only afforded to white characters: assumed neutrality.
This manifests in a refreshing depiction of the Middle Eastern/ Muslim/ female body that is not focused primarily on its experience of pain. The “neutrality” is emphasised through descriptions of Aliyah’s physical labour. When Abdu writes ‘her body had become unbearable’ (p62), it is not connected to her identity but to the corporeal; her working on the land. Cleverly, when Abdu does position the body within a meaningful framework, she relies not on the hyper specific, stereotyped experiences of WOC, but traces its sinews out to the universal.
It comes out most beautifully in her simpler sentences: ‘I forget what it’s like outside myself. Right now, out here… the wind and all the rest’ (p269).
The temptation could be there to suggest Abdu does go back on her promise of characters who ‘demand compassion without having to bleed’ (2). Aliyah recalls a traumatic miscarriage, her mother’s unexpected death, and her friend Hana is revealed to be a victim of interfamilial abuse. And yet, the foundation of universality grounds these characters’ pain in their lived experiences not as Muslim POC, but as people – or more poignantly in these instances, as women. This avoids what Edward Said called “self-orientalisation” (3), while also underscoring cultural traumas to be understood as such. Shep detailing his personal connection to Gaza, for example, is a purposeful and necessary distinction of the Palestinian experience that can be witnessed, but not claimed, by the collective. This is tenderly communicated through the imagery of a splinter in Shep’s finger, that is never removed by Aliyah, a nurse, despite repeatedly seeing it.
In play with contrasts, this physical distance between Shep and Aliyah accentuates her nearness to Hana, and it is here that Abdu’s writing truly shines. Her appreciation for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is apparent in this portrayal of a female friendship with cosmic closeness. But more distinctly, it is the added element of religion that takes readers to a rarely represented intersection: Islam and queerness. Abiding by her premise of ambiguity, Abdu never explicitly defines the women’s relationship.
Instead, it is expressed once more through the body: ‘The girls threw their arms around each other, pressing hard to leave a mark, or better yet a scar, something lasting, something to span a vastness, to absorb and hold and revisit’ (p93).
In a novel that explores the notion of a homeland, there is something uniquely moving about two women being each other’s mooring, through distance and time. In a standout line, she writes: ‘What was a country? Here was a beautiful girl.’ (p87).
The infused undercurrents of queerness within Aliyah, a hijabi Muslim, applied in tandem with her distinctive independence and assertiveness, affords Abdu the opportunity to dispel the archetype of the Middle Eastern woman presented in traditional media. Yet this nuancing of “the Muslim woman” is unfortunately undercut by the degree to which Abdu applies strict conservativism to the relationship between Aliyah and Shep. The two cannot share a car, with Aliyah instead riding in the back of his ute. The two cannot be indoors alone, expressing the desire for a chaperone mid-conversation. They react with embarrassment when Aliyah’s 9-year-old walks in on them at the cusp of a vulnerable discussion, and they opt to utilise two iPhone cameras as a make-shift mirror so Shep can cut his own hair and be untouched by her. As the fresh fluidity and raw physical expression of Aliyah with Hana is stunted with Shep, the female-Middle Eastern-Muslim body is returned to the original politicised position Abdu had valiantly rerouted from. It is a regretful undoing of the best part of the text. A retracing of the long shadow cast by men over Aliyah, and even larger, over women.
This pervasive conservatism clashes once more against an additional element: Abdu’s understandable, but ultimately unnuanced, commitment to re-imagining Islam in the reader’s eye from beneath the Western gaze. Utilising Shep as a “translator” of Islam to the uninitiated reader, Abdu emphasises the liberal elements present in the religion – particularly feminism – in his sermon dialogue. Literarily, this poses a contradiction; Aliyah is presented as both the maverick – divorced, queer, feminist – and the conformist – willing to consider a marriage proposal from Shep’s friend who she interacts with once at a sermon. Here Abdu’s ambiguity clause results in a weakness in her character’s verisimilitude. Without knowing how Aliyah is led by her faith, and why, her varying beliefs construct her not as a person of multitudes, but one of unexplained inconsistencies.
Culturally, Abdu’s rose-tinting of Islam as a religion in line with the collective oppressed highlights an area where greater perspectives could have been considered. At a sermon where a man is raising money for Yemen, Abdu writes:
‘[He] called them my people though Aliyah knew him to be Lebanese. But the white woman on her right with a redheaded baby nodded to agree, my people, and the Bengali grandmother handing out dates on her left nodded, my people, and the children, like a pocketful of gems, nodded my people, and every Arab and Malaysian, my people, my people, with a pride so boundless it seemed that if one Lebanese man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of Yemen, then any one man could feel a kinship with the countrymen of the world.’
(p251)
By underpinning Islam as the foundation of community, belonging to the choir of voices (both displaced and not) singing “my people”, Abdu omits the voices of those who experience Islam as a force of oppression. Neglected is the historic Arab colonisation of the Middle East and beyond, the rise of extremist powers such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, the IRGC in Iran, and further Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Mauritania, in place of a sentimentalisation of worldly kinship under Islam.
She continues:
‘Here were people who loved belonging to each other across oceans, swept into a corner of the Australian bushland, huddled in a barn doubling as a place of worship because the townspeople had no room for Pangea in the streets.’
(p251)
This emphasis on the idealised unity of diaspora, in contrast to “the townspeople”, fails to honour the book’s initial, exciting venture into the negated, universal space. It instead decorates the existing depiction of diverse peoples in Australia as a monolithic community united and isolated through our sole identifier: oppression. Perhaps most unfortunately, Abdu’s dilution of difference between those in varying forms of exile also extends to the depiction of Indigenous Australians, at one point connecting their experiences of unhomeliness to ‘hijabis in France’ (p267). The ungroundedness of this approach has a ricochet effect. Aliyah’s indigenous coworker Billie expressing belief that Shep’s Muslim mother was the spiritual reincarnation of her deceased uncle (the only Muslim she had known) comes across as a one-dimensional interpretation of Indigenous beliefs, rather than an expression of POC connection.
In Translations, Jumaana Abdu invokes the philosophies of Edward Said in writing: ‘I think it matters what people see. It depends – depends on who’s making the image, who the image is for’ (p146). A new image is quietly born in her work, and bravely so, but it is just as quietly buried. Against the aesthetic touchstones of “the Middle Eastern” – desert dunes, a headscarf turning into a flag in the wind, hardcover editions of One thousand and One Nights – Abdu’s strength in imagining a new way of belonging is muted. We are returned to those still waters, uniform and indistinguishable, denied once more the individuality afforded to whiteness. Perhaps, the alternative is a story that is yet to be translated.
NOTES
- 1.Abdu, J. (2024b) We love to dissect our ‘private lives’, but is forgoing privacy the only way to prove I am a human being? | Jumaana Abdu, The Guardian.
- 2.ibid.
- 3.Said, E.W. (1979) Orientalism. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Vintage Books.