Translating the Transcendent

Jumaana Abdu’s Translations opens with the main character, Aliyah, literally on the road to a new beginning. She is driving to her new house in rural New South Wales with her nine-year-old daughter, Sakina, and we are told that she has never set eyes on it before, has bought it sight unseen. We are also told that she is an ‘uncitizen’, signalling immediately that this is a novel of exile, perhaps banishment, and this chosen word sets the tone for the rest of the novel, in addition to being reflective of its style.

The novel wades into a myriad of complex themes: identity, diaspora, colonialism, exile, religious experience, and relations between the Indigenous and the immigrant. The book’s title refers to translations not only between languages and cultures, but also between states of mind and ways of communicating that have been shaped by historical and global forces, as the following conversation between Shep, a Palestinian man, and Jack, a Kamilaroi man, demonstrates:  

The novel attempts to delve into the aforementioned themes through the unfurling of various relationships – primarily between Aliyah and the characters Hana, Shep, Billie, and Jack.  

Over the course of the story, we learn that Aliyah has left her previous life behind in an abrupt and extreme fashion due to the death of her father. With her inheritance, along with alimony from her ex-husband, she is able to buy a house and land in the countryside. Her new life consists of working the land of her property while homeschooling Sakina. She also takes a part-time job as a nurse at the local hospital. There an initially reluctant Aliyah is befriended by a Kamilaroi woman, Billie, who works as a midwife, and whose daughter Mel helps babysit Sakina. Aliyah also hires help to work the land on her property – a Palestinian man she nicknames Shep, who turns out to be an imam at the nearest mosque. Initially, Aliyah is fiercely self-protective and independent, but she gradually settles into her new life, with Shep as her farmhand and Billie as a colleague and friend of sorts.  

Then the critical incident occurs – her childhood friend Hana reappears in her life. Hana and Aliyah have known each other since they were eleven, and were very close. ‘Aliyah had never loved, though it is true that in all her life she had loved only one friend: a girl named Hana Musa.’ The novel then moves between the present timeline and the past, when Hana and Aliyah first meet at school and become friends. We find out that Hana has a troubled background filled with violence, both in the home and outside of it. Her family works in an abattoir, and Hana suffers at the hands of her father, and later, her brother Hashim. The girls’ intense friendship ends after Hana moves away, and they do not see each other again until their coincidental meeting in the present. Hana is living with Hashim, but all is not well; Hashim is drug-addicted and violent. Hana takes refuge in Aliyah’s house and they begin their friendship anew. They settle into a domestic rhythm, with Hana doing the cooking and domestic duties. Aliyah, Hana, and Sakina are thus able to mimic a safe nuclear family, something which perhaps none of them has had until now.  

Slowly, a tense triangle emerges between Hana, Aliyah, and Shep. For reasons not entirely clear, Hana and Shep are uneasy with each other. But as Aliyah works the land with Shep, they get closer and talk about various subjects, mainly to do with Islam. Her interactions with, and feelings for, Shep continue to deepen, despite the startling revelation that the land and house she now owns once belonged to Shep’s family, who had to sell it after a tragic loss.   

Yet despite the importance of these relationships to the novel’s thematic ambitions, they are strangely one-sided, especially the ones between Aliyah and other characters. Aliyah has Main Character energy in spades: everyone likes her, wants to support her, rejects others for her (as Shep does Mariam, Aliyah’s ’plump’ counterpart at the mosque). This includes Salwa, Shep’s mother, who takes immediately to Aliyah when they meet at Eid, despite the reminder of the loss of her former home. Aliyah is the mutual object of Shep’s and Hana’s affections, and she is offered friendship from Billie and her family despite her initial reluctance. While the other characters are enamoured of Aliyah, she seems noticeably less interested in them. 

If there’s a class structure to the novel, Aliyah belongs among the wealthy who habitually outsource menial tasks, using Shep’s labour for her property, Hana’s for her domestic needs, and Billie’s family for childcare. Everyone seems to exist for Aliyah’s benefit, to help move her story forward. The novel tries to portray Aliyah as a struggler, yet her struggles seem largely due to conditions she has created herself: 

Choosing to homeschool her daughter, choosing to buy a farm, choosing to work at the hospital: these aren’t choices she has made out of necessity. Rather, they seem to be driven by grief and a certain self-destructive tendency that often falls into self-absorption. So when Billie asks her in the novel, ‘How are you managing the elusive work-life balance?’, and Aliyah replies, ‘With otherworldly difficulty,’ it is unclear whether we are supposed to sympathise with Aliyah, or groan at her lack of self-awareness. 

But sympathy is hard when Aliyah’s feelings for others often border on contempt. For example, she dismisses her ex-husband’s concern about his daughter’s being spirited away to a random rural town as ‘boy-panic’ and ‘vanity’. His phone calls and gifts are interpreted by Aliyah as attention-seeking, so much so that she considers limiting Sakina’s calls with her father. In the end, she refrains – not because father and daughter might miss each other, but because she believes such a restriction would ‘be taken up as a challenge to their vanities’. She also notes, highly improbably, that once Adam starts calling more frequently, Sakina ‘swaps’ Shep, a man she has known for mere months, for Adam ‘with relative ease’.  

Aliyah even has a contemptuous view of the friend she putatively loves. While she uses highly inflated language to describe their friendship (see below), Aliyah is at the same time constantly putting Hana down and it’s never really clear why. She describes Hana as being full of ‘that obscure need that was always asking and asking’. Yet it is Hana who keeps Aliyah and her child abundantly fed. The novel states that ‘Aliyah relished a taste of men’s work: tiring her body out, returning to a safe child and a warm meal, sitting with Sakina at night to read her a bedtime story’. Except she only starts to ‘relish’ working like a ‘man’ because of another woman’s free labour. Without Hana to perform the domestic duties, would Aliyah be able to think of working on the land as an ‘escape’? The novel allows Aliyah the freedom to take on a role traditionally outside her gender (symbolically, she also tries on Adam’s clothes and wears her father’s when she leaves for the country). But in doing so it also upholds those very gender roles: another woman has simply taken on the work that Aliyah has absented herself from, a woman more vulnerable than Aliyah on multiple fronts – financially, emotionally, socially. What might look from one side like a radical attempt at self-fashioning by a young Muslim woman could look on the other like a classic dynamic of liberal feminism, where some women are ‘empowered’ at the expense of other, usually poorer, women, who often go unacknowledged.

But where the novel really lets Aliyah off the hook is in its depiction of her daughter. Sakina adapts almost seamlessly to being yanked out of school and home to start anew in a country town. And very conveniently for the story, and for Aliyah, there is no anger, no fear, no resentment or questioning on her daughter’s part. A tone of contempt even creeps into some of Aliyah’s observations about her daughter – for example, she talks about how unimaginative Sakina is when naming the chickens and goat, and in another passage, implies that Sakina is vain for wanting to ‘flaunt’ her literacy and maturity by reciting a religious book. It could, perhaps, be argued that this depiction of Aliyah’s character is intentional, that there’s an implied critique. But the narrative voice hews so closely to Aliyah’s perspective that the unsympathetic, contemptuous side of her character is never fully reckoned with.  

While other characters are portrayed as having obvious flaws, Shep seems almost superhuman: ‘Humidity thickened the remaining smoke into sublimated sludge, but he dispelled toxicity with his step […] He had the centring ray of an Egyptian obelisk in the night.’ He is the perfect son – when Shep lifts his mother out of her chair, we are told that, he ‘carried her inside with a devotion that empowered her more than it hinged on her being weak’. The dialogue between Shep and Aliyah slips often into cliché to emphasise the former’s saviour-like qualities:  

One can almost imagine two brooding teenagers having this sort of exchange. Then there are the comparisons designed to paint Shep as a spiritual and political leader:  

The book’s real story is the one between Aliyah and Shep. Almost everything in the novel – plot, dialogue, and other characters – works in the service of their relationship: from Sakina immediately taking to Shep, to Shep’s mother immediately taking to Aliyah, to Billie encouraging Shep to think about relationships (which, of course, means his relationship with Aliyah) despite the latter’s desire to focus on his spiritual and community life. The subordination of all else to the Aliyah-Shep story is especially apparent with Aliyah’s ex-husband, Adam, who, in being so dismissible, creates a blank space for Shep to step into. Aliyah complains about Adam’s ego-driven use of money to manipulate her, yet still avails herself of it. After a climactic scene where Aliyah’s car gets trashed in an accident, she has the luxury of saying breezily to Hana, ‘Adam’s dad is a dealership mogul – he gives them to us for free.’ In general, material concerns do not matter much in the novel; it represents a privileged world where the characters can spend time thinking and talking philosophy.

The narrative’s lack of interest in anyone besides Aliyah becomes problematic when it comes to the depictions of its Indigenous characters: Billie, her daughter Mel, and her husband Jack. We don’t get any real idea of their needs, their concerns, or their lives. Again, they appear to exist only to help Aliyah, to encourage the Aliyah-Shep romance, and more problematically, to soften and absolve Aliyah’s complicity in settler colonialism. While Translations is clearly interested in exploring First Nations and Palestinian solidarity, moments like Aliyah’s discovery that Billie has a Muslim uncle, felt like an unnecessary addition – as if solidarity can only occur if there is likeness and overlap, as if an Indigenous character like Billie cannot stand on her own separate and very different terms.

There is a scene where Jack and Shep talk about being peoples of occupied territory – Shep as a Palestinian and Jack as an Indigenous man in Australia. Jack teases Shep about not having the ‘sole rights to the occupied story’ and Shep sheepishly apologises. They then begin a conversation where Shep earnestly lets Jack know that he is aware of the paradox of being someone from an occupied land who is now occupying someone else’s land:  

There is very little detail, or interest, in the novel about Jack and his family prior to this, so the scene feels as if it’s mostly aimed at showing Shep’s self-awareness about his complicity in settler-colonial displacement. Despite Jack’s reply that he’s not here to alleviate Shep’s guilt, the ending of the scene does exactly that:  

In scenes like these, complex issues seem so easily resolved. Liberal guilt is assuaged – and this is a deeply liberal novel, where mere acknowledgements and nods to wrongs are enough. Problematically, the Indigenous characters become tropes, serving to absolve people like Aliyah and Shep, rather than absorbing our interest as characters in their own right. The conferral of cheap grace is also reflected in Aliyah’s relationship with Shep’s family, whose land she now occupies. Salwa is even grateful to Aliyah for ‘bestowing’ upon her the right of return to her former home: ‘I want to thank you. The right of return is not an easy thing for any occupier, benevolent or otherwise, to bestow […] I find myself suddenly at peace!’ 

But colonial relations, diaspora, identity, and exile are not the only themes of Translations – the novel also aims at higher, spiritual truths. Some of the novel’s sermons and discussions of Islamic theology appear in scenes where Shep is preaching in his capacity as an imam at the local mosque. For example:  

But other sermons occur during Shep’s conversations with Aliyah as they work together on her land – gardening scenes which often feel like a pretext for Shep to talk not just about Islamic theology, women in Islam, and Muslim identity, but also politics in general. There are many such passages, which in addressing so many of the novel’s major themes directly through Shep’s voice, tends to turn him into the novel’s mouthpiece on these matters: 

Many of these ‘sermons’ do not offer anything new or unfamiliar by way of critique, and the accumulation of them throughout the novel gives the reader the feeling of being preached at, and in a way that drones on and on. This mode of grandiloquence is not just confined to actual passages of sermonising – it leaches into the very style of the narration. The novel operates almost entirely in a high poetic diction in its attempts to elevate connections between people to the level of the transcendental. For example, Aliyah’s connection with Hana is described in the following way:   

And yet, for all these grand declarations, Aliyah often seems to despise Hana, who doesn’t ever seem more than the former’s humble servant. The novel’s depiction of the relationship between Aliyah and Hana, especially from their childhood, is unconvincing – a pale imitation of Elena Ferrante’s portrayal of friendship in My Brilliant Friend. Unlike Ferrante’s novel, where the psychological and emotional charge between the two characters is all the more palpable for being left unsaid, Translations is constantly informing us how much Aliyah and Hana mean to each other, as if just saying it in florid prose makes it more believable or true.

This is a problem with the novel in general. It is constantly trying to tell us what kinds of connections and relationships its characters are having. The reader is relentlessly subjected to metaphor upon metaphor, right from the opening page. Occasionally they are effective – for example, when the novel refers to Aliyah’s stillborn baby as ‘the little blue shock’, or when planting herbs in a garden bed is described as ‘Life thrust[ing] a hand up from a silt cemetery’. At one point, Aliyah likens her daughter to ‘a photograph of her own self at an age before blight set in’ – a visually and emotionally striking evocation of a perhaps more innocent, carefree version of herself. But more often, the metaphors are imprecise in their comparisons or feel insufficiently motivated. For example, in a fraught conversation between Aliyah and Hana just before they accidentally drive into a river, ‘Hana brought one fist to her eye, and was the image of a soldier pouring alcohol into gangrene’. It is obviously the prelude to a dramatic moment, but it is unclear what is meant to be achieved by this medicalised image (a figure for Hana’s pain?), its odd specificity deflating the emotional tension that has been building up. Or take the simile in the scene where Aliyah meets Shep for the first time: ‘redirected by the dust of a receding truck, Aliyah’s gaze panned to the last vehicle in the driveway like a camera to a lone survivor’. This is the vehicle from which Shep will step out, but this reference to a camera filming a lone survivor feels overly staged, taking the reader out of the moment rather than into it. The multitude of metaphors in the novel shows that when everything comes loaded with meaning, the truly meaningful gets lost. In fact, there are so many metaphors I couldn’t make sense of that I began to wonder if they referred to stories or images or myths that I simply didn’t know.

Similarly theological or spiritual imagery is evoked in a grandiose and vague manner: ‘as he hauled his tool with his soul-like body’ – what is a soul-like body? Or in a scene describing Hana and Aliyah as children, the novel describes Hana in the following way:  

To describe two children playing in this way is to abstractify them out of existence – a recurring pattern in a narrative where spiritual image after spiritual image is heaped upon us to say that this is something or someone really important. The effect is of a bludgeoning hammer rather than a sharp scalpel slicing through the mundane to let the transcendent shine through.   

Like the work of Marilynne Robinson, Translations could be seen as an attempt at a contemporary theological novel. From the epigraph to the chapter titles (Exodus, Locusts, Judgement Day), it’s clearly framed as such. The main plot of the novel, the blossoming of Aliyah and Shep’s relationship, mirrors that of the Prophet Muhammad and his eventual wife, Khadija, a wealthy widow with children – a story embedded into the narrative through Sakina’s bedtime reading: ‘at the age of forty, she hired a man fifteen years her junior, named Muhammad. At the time, he was no prophet. He was an orphan, he worked with a luminous tranquillity, with excellence.’ The Khadija to Shep’s Muhammad, Aliyah, although not a widow, has a child, is older than Shep, hires him as her farmhand, and, at the end of the novel, proposes marriage to him.

However, compared to, say, Robinson’s Gilead or Home – novels where characters’ spiritual insights are rooted in hard-won experience, where sweaty and pungent everyday truths heighten the transcendent yearnings of its characters – Translations, overladen with sermonising, has a prophetic tone that feels unearned, because fundamentally it displays a lack of attention to the material specificities of the world, especially to the world that lies outside of Aliyah’s own needs. What does feel refreshingly theological – and much more so than the actual sermonising – is the way the novel simply shows, without explaining, Shep and Aliyah’s religious practice as part and parcel of their reality. There’s an example of this when Aliyah and Shep navigate their companionship: 

Although Shep briefly mentions in their first meeting the impropriety of their being alone together, it is taken for granted, unexplained. The novel is powerful in its refusal to justify these norms – and moreover, to show religion as a matter of everyday practice and embodied discipline, not just ideological or philosophical doctrine. This is religion as lived experience, which the novel takes as given. But, because of the novel’s perspectival insularity, it feels less truly theological and more like a romance novel whose main characters are religious. There is in it a certain kind of wish fulfilment, where almost everything comes together for Aliyah to finally get her man. This is not necessarily problematic in itself, but the novel is constantly signalling in its language and style that it wants to be more than that. 

Translations seems to be trying to tell us that its world is one full of meaning, saturated with transcendence. But the transmutation has not worked. The novel is bloated with so many unnecessary embellishments that it is hard to see what we are looking at – the narrative voice always feels as if it is hovering above the concreteness of reality. What does it mean to remain so constantly abstract, to refuse to look directly and call a spade a spade rather than always using comparisons and metaphors, as if the thing itself were not enough? The universal or the transcendent can only be reached through the particular – this is what the best theological novels (from Jane Eyre and Moby Dick to Gilead) understand and are most effective in showing. And this is what Translations lacks – attention to the particulars of its world, to the emotional and psychological truths about human relationships in which the transcendent filters through the minutiae. Its portrayal of relationships often remains frustratingly simplistic, its grand pronouncements are unanchored in the concrete, its sermonising often dependent on familiar platitudes. Ultimately, Translations fails in translating the transcendent because it fails to translate the human.