by Kelly Harrison
October 19, 2021
Kelly A. Harrison, MFA, teaches technical communication at Stanford University and works as a writer and consultant in San José, CA. She edited West Winds Centennial, an anthology of works by the California Writers Club, for which she won the Ina Coolbrith award. Her works have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Hidden Compass and Celebrate Creativity, and she writes for Technical Communication. She is the Associate Editor for West Trade Review.
The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, Graywolf Press, 272 pages, $16.00
Some might compare The House of Rust to books like those in The Chronicles of Narnia because the stories cover adventures by children with talking animals, missing parents, and references to religion, but this comparison is reductive. Debut author Khadija Abdalla Bajaber has created something more complex than a simple “overcoming the monster” story; she’s created a heroine’s journey wherein the young protagonist fights physical, societal, and interpersonal monsters, resulting in a text that warrants a deeper reading.
The novel follows Aisha as she leaves her ordinary world in Mombasa—including the safety of her grandmother, the comforts of home, and the young boy, Omar, whom she cares for—to search the seas in a foreboding and secret adventure to find her missing father, a local fisherman, dead or alive. She begins the journey after a talking cat, who is both trickster and sage, helps her gather resources for the trip. He summons a boat of bones, some long-dead mythical beast, and into the dark seas they go to battle the physical monsters that lurk in the depths.
Bajaber’s writing style has a quality of antiquity to it, largely because of the storytelling features used. Yes, there’s magical realism, out-of-fashion diction (man instead of human or humanity, for example), talking animals and monsters, a riddle, characters with legends of jinnis and stories of yore to tell, barters and exchanges of goods and services, names that have power, numerology—particularly repeats of three—and superstitions large and small, but also a ghostly narrator who pops up throughout. Sometimes the narrator simply shifts from telling the story to revealing something about the past. For example, after the cat reveals himself by speaking to Aisha, she asks for his name. After the cat replies, “You may call me Hamza,” the narrator comments: “A name, not necessarily his own, or his only one.”
Sometimes, though, it feels more like the author than the narrator who intrudes, albeit delicately, to insert an inside joke. An early example seems to presage the story to come: “She was an isolated careful fiction of a girl. Doing what she was told, yet keeping the rest of her to herself.” Aisha may be a “careful fiction of a girl,” acting the girl part by obeyance, but she is also a girl in a fictional story, one written by an author who seems to enjoy going meta from time to time. In the acknowledgments, Bajaber writes that this novel is “[a] project led with…imagination unfettered by questions of what anyone would think,” and that comes through at several points.
One stronger example of this authorial intrusion occurs when Aisha encounters one of the monsters, saying her reason for looking for her father is that she is “a keeper of histories. A recorder of legends,” and to the creature she reveals that she (or our author?) is there “to write of you, and of Baba wa Papa,” and then immediately when questioned about “what historian” would be following a fisherman, Aisha replies, “One in love with story-craft.” When Aisha’s response is followed up with “as if humbled by her imagined accomplishments and embarrassed to speak of her imagined aspirations,” we feel not only the narrator but also the writer speaking. In this moment, we fuse Aisha, narrator, author.
Narration isn’t the only protean quality in The House of Rust. The descriptions of places, objects, characters also have a magical fluidity, where things are not what they initially seem to be. For example, young Omar is walking alone when he sees something: “Beyond the wall loomed the roof of a house, and above the wall peeked the head of a pillar, domed like a minaret. It was all built of shag coral, more deeply soaked in time than any old house he’d ever before seen in Old Town. Not a minaret. His stomach swooped strangely. A pillar tomb.” What was first seen as a lively minaret from which calls to prayer come throughout the day, morphs into a monument for the dead.
Besides transpositions, the descriptions are also refreshingly paced. First, we encounter a person or place, no definition or connection, as if the narrator assumes we know already, and then in a subsequent paragraph, perhaps as much as a page away, the connections appear. This delay of information routinely enchants us into a state of anticipation, like a magical trick where all will be revealed if we just follow closely.
In addition to descriptions and a writing style that uses many of the older techniques of “story-craft,” Bajaber has created a bygone feminist heroine in Aisha, a girl who “was raised like a boy,” who doesn’t want to marry, who once touched by the sea wants only to explore the grandeur of the world. Of course, in a Muslim family living in Mombasa, Aisha is expected to follow social and religious rules of behavior, but “wild” and “weirdo” Aisha questions these protocols. Her process of questioning can seem, like the narrative style, to come from an earlier time. Aisha wants to make her own decisions, pushing against expectations—feminist issues of personhood, self-determination, autonomy, and individual rights that girls in the west won decades ago.
We modern and western readers might not immediately understand why Aisha can’t do what she wants—of course she can!—but this isn’t a western story. It’s a Mombasarian story, and should be read as such, from the rich heritage of Islam and eastern Africa—and with an interesting touch of mystical story-craft.
So, is it right or wrong that as a modern, western reader I sometimes felt that Aisha wanted to come out of the closet? Hers is more than just a tomboy’s aversion to a domestic life, chores, child rearing—it’s a grief for what lies ahead for her. When listening to her grandmother talk of her own marriage to a much older man, “Aisha swallowed, throat thick with a grief she was coming to realize would be her inheritance.” Many times, Aisha clearly says she doesn’t want to marry, and many times the writer reveals this marital unsuitability through the sharp thoughts and actions of other characters, who often see Aisha as fractured and lacking something wifely: “women…who sneered at her, their eyes telling her what soft places she lacked for a knife called ‘husband’ to carve to his liking.” Furthermore, when Aisha speaks with her father, she reveals her desires in the clearest terms “to see the marvelous things” in the world and look for “someone of my own—but not a husband.” Even looking for a man without the intent to marry could be scandalous in a Muslim family, but after this dialog, Bajaber writes the father’s reaction, by far the closest we get to a recognition: “His hand tensed in hers. He understood her meaning. But he did not protest yet.” And later we get another detail. When dealing with her grandmother, Hababa, Aisha argues for her right to do what she wants. To this the narrator adds, “The truth would kill Hababa, if she even believed it. It would spoil everything…She would blame Ali for being a poor father, Aisha for being strange.” The truth? Strange? Not queer, a word far too forward, far too revealing for a traditional Muslim grandmother who prays daily.
Other clues exist, the issue never confronted directly. What is on the page clearly is a girl’s desire to explore on her own, create her own heroine’s journey, a journey where she may fight her own monsters, physical or otherwise. The magic in this work may be more than what appears on the page, too, and readers are sure to find other layers of complexity in this debut novel. In this, Bajaber has given us not just an age-old monster story but one that challenges lingering expectations for girls who want to carve their own paths.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Fighting Monsters in the House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
FICTION REVIEW
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