Celestial Bodies

“The tubes going into his body sucked the life out of me.”

Abdallah, speaking in the first-person perspective, is open and honest about his relationship with his father, but his honest appraisal is that the relationship is incredibly complicated. He loves, loathes, and fears his father; laying in the hospital bed, the tubes attached to his father’s body cause fear, worry, and guilt in Abdallah, eating away at him just as his father’s age is eating away at his own body. As his thoughts jump around in the narrative, Abdallah returns to the most painful and regrettable moments, hoping that he could change them.

“These evening sessions were the only thing that could lift Azzan out of his gloom and depression.”

Meeting with the Bedouins is an important outlet for Azzan. Not only are they his friends, but they represent a lifestyle that is no longer available to him. Tied down to a single locale by his family and his commitments, their nomadic lifestyle—their lack of roots and commitments—appeals to him. The vicarious sense of freedom he feels in their presence alleviates his depression.

“I saw her on the day after the Greater Bairam Feast, in the month of Pilgrimage.”

Abdallah’s first meeting with Mayya is portrayed from two perspectives. Mayya’s perspective, the first, is swathed in indifference; she is more interested in her sewing, but for Abdallah, it is a moment that he will never forget. He falls in love with her there and then. The two different perspectives and the two different reactions will set the tone for their entire marriage: there will always be an imbalance in the relationship and there will always be a residual resentment because of this.

“This anger of mine pursues me to the edge, where I’m screaming without making the slightest sound, crying without any tears.”

Abdallah’s character is neatly summed up in this quote. Despite the strong emotions he frequently experiences, he lacks the nerve or the emotional discourse with which to express himself. Thus, he is angered by his inability to delineate his emotions, whether to his wife, his daughter, or his father. Whether he is restricted by culture, personality, or circumstances, Abdallah frequently finds himself vexed by his stunted emotions.

“In the break, Zayid and I were the only boys who did not go to the canteen because neither of us had any spending money.”

Though Abdallah is the son of a rich merchant and the young Zayid is the son of an unemployed beggar, they find themselves with something in common. Zayid resents Abdallah for his wealth and is embarrassed by his own poverty; Abdallah is embarrassed by his wealth and wishes his father held a job that the Quran favors. Though they could not be more different, the boys find themselves alone together at school. For these two boys from different socio-economic backgrounds, a moment of clear solidarity occurs and then passes by without much comment. It is significant enough, however, to occupy Abdallah’s thoughts many years later.

“I saw my father in my dreams, his eyes red from so much anger.”

After several chapters written from Abdullah’s perspective, it is becoming clear that his father’s rage and disciplinary tactics loom large in Abdallah’s thoughts. Even when he is remembering other people, his guilt manifests in the form of his father’s punishment. All of his actions are prone to being judged by Abdallah’s memory of his father; everything he does must be held up to this imagined standard, even long after the old man’s death.

“London’s clothes would not look like anyone else’s just as her name echoed no other girl’s.”

Though she is seemingly quiet and unassuming, Mayya’s determination is not to be doubted. The unusual name she has given her daughter has a clear purpose: to stand out and to reflect the skill and imagination of her mother. London becomes a means of expression for the quiet Mayya, how she will define herself in front of the watching world.

“My uncle’s wife stood in the courtyard of her modern poured-cement home in Wadii Aday. Hands planted on her hips, she screeched at me.”

In addition to cultural differences which define the proximity of certain family members, it is worth considering the precise language in the translation when referring to the wife of Abdallah’s uncle. As described in Chapter 15, the two have never shared an affectionate relationship. As if to distance himself from her, Abdallah very specifically refers to her as “my uncle’s wife” (80) rather than ‘my aunt’. In addition to cultural differences which might inspire such a position, their fractured relationship is made evident by the precise choice of language when defining their proximity.

“From Hamad’s burial to this day, Azzan told her, he had never spoken about his son. Only now.”

The death of Hamad (as well as the death of Muhammad) comes to define Azzan as a character. Though he has other children whom he loves, he never truly reconciles his sense of loss regarding his dead sons. The loss exacerbates and illustrates his emotional distance from his wife Salima, while driving him into the arms of Najiya. Even telling his mistress about his dead son, Azzan still struggles to deal with his feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

“The more I wanted to forget you and the wretched trouble you made, the larger your seed grew in my eyes, grew and grew until the pressure was too great and my eyes exploded.”

Zarifa believes that there is something innate and cursed within her son; he is almost destined to betray her and try to run away because his father was consumed by the same instinct. The thought gives her physical pain, making her feel as though she will explode when the pain and the pressure become too much. Zarifa struggles to come to terms with the distinction between nature and nurture, which is one of the reasons she is so reluctant to leave the social status into which she was born.

“She received the news of his death in silent submission.”

The manner in which the female members of the family deal with pain and grief is remarkably similar. They close the door and seal themselves off from the world, choosing to endure in isolation. Salima’s mother accepts the death of her son in “silent submission” (117), while Salima locks herself away periodically to grieve for her parents. Salima’s daughters and granddaughters will grieve similarly, though the changing culture will give characters like London the ability to make their pain and emotions more evident.

“If he didn’t have songs in there, all the hollow spaces would be filled with rage.”

A slave taken from his home country, Habib has little of his past to cling to. The songs he sings while on the journey are sung in their original language, one of the few connections he has to his past. The rage and the fury he feels over his imprisonment and enslavement would be all-consuming, were it not for this one outlet, this one connection to Habib’s past as a free person.

“Zarifa picks up a large chunk and crams it into her mouth with all her fingers, and makes a point of licking them, as if now, at this moment, she’s getting her sweet revenge for those many years of hunger she knew in the household of Shaykh Said, before my father bought her.”

Zarifa’s life has been long and hard but she takes pleasure in the small treats that she now enjoys, thanks to her privileged position in the household. Her overindulgence in candies is almost a rebuke of her previous position as a slave. She is aware of the damage the candies might do to her diabetes, but she values the subtext of the action: she is now elevated above the position of a slave, and her overindulgence is proof of her ascendency.

“Are you happy and comfortable, Azzan?”

Najiya’s question strikes Azzan like an arrow. When he is with her, his language is floral and literary, but this literary language is a mask for his raw emotion, using the words of others to express himself. When Najiya asks such a direct question, he struggles to answer it with his own words. Azzan may never be happy, not until he learns how to address his emotions in a clear and concise manner.

“She’d felt this scar deepening into a wound, her dignity festered and she saw humiliation stamped in the very spot where desire still burned.”

London’s split for Ahmad will, she knows, be incredibly difficult. The emotions she is experiencing are not new; the conflict between love, shame, and humiliation is a difficult one to navigate. The contrasts between London’s relationship and those of her ancestors are stark. Whereas women were forcibly married in the past, London at least has the semblance of choice. The generational difference among the women of the family are evident in the circumstances of their marriages.

“In his own fashion, he did fall in love with her.”

Asma, the girl who grew up on poetry and literature, discovers that the practicalities of marriage differ from the idea of marriage portrayed in her books. Rather than his soulmate, Khalid regards her as an adornment, a trophy in his cabinet that justifies his taste in women and elevates his social status. Though he does come to love her “in his own fashion” (151), it is not the fairytale love Asma might have dreamed of as a child.

“Khawla held on fiercely to her dream.”

Khawla, whom Asma has mocked for her love of trashy romance novels, is determined to cling to her idea of herself as the heroine in such a book, rather than her actual experience as a tragic figure. The man she has loved for decades treats her terribly, but for Khawla to admit this would be for her to admit that she was wrong for most of her life. Her entire identity depends on her love for Nasir, so to bring that into doubt would involve Khawla having to deconstruct her existence.

“She had a single, clear goal: that London learn to read in English.”

The relationship between Mayya and her daughter London has become increasingly clear: London has become the vessel through which she will express all of the hopes and ambitions which were denied to Mayya. London’s intellect and skills become a reflection of Mayya’s competence, a vicarious means of demonstrating her worth.

“This son of his would be his revenge, which he could wave in the face of defeat, frustration, and forced absence from the homeland that betrayed him.”

Much like Mayya, Emigrant Issa seeks to use his child to fulfill the ambitions he never managed to realize. As part of a failed insurrection against the ruling colonial powers, he went into exile in Egypt. In that time, he imagined Khalid as his vessel of retribution. Khalid rejected this role and turned to art instead. While London embraces (to some extent) her mother’s vision for her future, Khalid represents the alternative: the rejection of the father’s ambitions by the son.

“To all appearances, dates were what occupied his work days, although his real profits were built on the slave trade.”

Just as Sulayman’s business is ostensibly dates but actually slaves, the subtext of the story shares slavery as an important theme. The story of the town’s families has a bedrock of slavery underneath. This quote functions as a meta-commentary on the existence of the themes within the novel and how the subtext informs the main story of the book.

“At the basil bush.”

With her body and her mind failing in old age, Masouda recalls an incident she thought she had forgotten. She overhears Abdallah’s aunt telling Sulayman about his wife’s possible affair out beside the basil bush and offers to deal with the situation. Though it is occasionally hinted that Zarifa was also involved in the murder, the state of Masouda’s memories means that the truth will never be known. Like Masouda herself, it will be locked away and forgotten.

“I am not sitting in this seat suspended between heaven and earth waiting to arrive in Frankfurt any moment now.”

As Abdallah’s flight draws to a close, his memories become more scattered and his mode of narration becomes more abstract. In this short chapter, he muses on the notion of protective motherhood, conflating the idea with his memories of Zarifa and the stories she told. As the narration becomes more abstract, Abdallah’s emotional truth and loyalty to the woman who raised him becomes increasingly clear.

“She knew you couldn’t treat a wound just by cleansing it with an antiseptic or pretending it was only a scratch.”

Despite her failed engagement to Ahmad, London’s intellect and maturity is evident in how she deals with the healing process. She is a doctor, so the metaphor is fitting, but her awareness of how to proceed stands in stark contrast to that of father. Abdallah’s painful memories haunt him his whole life, and he never truly confronts the painful image of his violent father. In London, however, he has hope for the future and a justification of his (and Mayya’s) role in raising an intelligent young woman.