| Author: | Publisher: | Reviewer: |
| Jumaana Abdu (2024) | Vintage Books Australia | Rashida Murphy |
In her author’s note at the end of Translations, Jumaana Abdu writes, “I don’t know
that there is any justice in attempting to make coherent a level of violence that
should not bear human understanding.” In view of the ongoing and unstoppable
slaughter of Palestinians since she first wrote these words, to read the novel itself
requires fortitude. Not because it brings coherence to the violence but because it is
in story that we attempt, or ought to, make connections and feel kinships. Edward
Said once wrote that he pursued a “permission to narrate” the stories of Palestinians
because that permission had long been denied to them. And in this story we learn
the intricacies of denial, the construction of a language of silence, the risk of
surrendering to amnesia.
Translations is the story of Aliyah, a woman “difficult to belittle,” her “precociously
adolescent” daughter Sakina, and the Palestinian man she hires to turn a wasteland
into a garden. We are never told his name; he is simply called ‘Shep’ because
“Aliyah felt it would be an intrusion to even think his first name – and so she dubbed
him ‘The Shepherd’ in her mind.” As visible outsiders in small rural Australian
communities, Aliyah and her daughter, Shep and his friends, and Aliyah’s friend
Hana, are all looking for a place they can think of as home. Aliyah finds work in the
local hospital where she is befriended by Kamilaroi midwife, Billie, whose gentle
friendship becomes a raft on uncertain waters. The characters in this novel talk to each other about faith and ideology and the impossibility of seeking resolutions when so much remains unfinished from generation to generation. Islam guides the lives of Aliyah and Shep and their conversations and innate comfort in each others’ company is a reflection of all that need not be said.
There is this lucid account of racism worth quoting in full. “Her friends in the city had always talked about racism as though it meant being either teased or lynched. No, it was the wish to disappear, cover up, slim down, dispel attention, avoid imposition, hide from CCTV screens; to have one’s likeness on wanted posters plastered across the national psyche. It was to scan a bus for which passenger seemed least likely to launch into a paranoiac’s tirade.” Haunted by their histories and their ancestries, the people in this novel recognise kinships of grief and deliverance.
Translations surprises, illuminates and subdues at every page. Language as a
vehicle for displaced and misplaced people, and the capacity of that language to
build a world both familiar and strange, is one of its magnificent achievements.
Legacies are keenly felt, tragedies arrive quietly and without hope of redemption,
happiness is elusive. Yet the visceral energy of the strained relationships at the heart
of the novel bathe it in light and depth and joy. “Slips of moonlight {waver} like the
house’s spirit.” And what a house it is. It reserves judgement. It averts its eyes. It
holds its tongue. It rearranges itself around its occupants, compelling them to dream
of lost kingdoms and military checkpoints. And only after they are “displaced from
memory” does the house reveal its final secret.
Translations offers both contradiction and affirmation. The sting of the matriarch’s
reprimand is felt as keenly as the limits of language. Dwelling in the particularities of
Muslimness and the alienness of men, the solace of sisters and the fret of grief,
Abdu has written a novel that reads like a reckoning. A compelling, extraordinary
novel.
