~ The Writing on my Forehead, by Nafisa Haji ~
Haji’s first novel has a beautifully evocative title; the first chapter tells of the protagonist’s childhood memories of her mother tracing Quranic verses on her forehead with a finger, to sooth her after nightmares. Lovely as the image is however, I could not manage to read much narrative significance to it in the rest of the novel.
(I will be pulling no punches in this review, but for the record would like to state this novel reaches a perfectly acceptable standard for a debut novel.)
This debut novel works through issues of second generation Muslim-Sub-continent Americans in terms of identity construction and contested cultural constraints, particularly /gendered/ cultural restrictions. At the heart of the novel is the consideration of how the balance is to be achieved between the needs of a family and the needs of an individual, and whose happiness should be prioritized or compromised. This struggle and negotiation between duty and individualism is framed quite well, and the protagonist, Saira, is a convincingly complex person, who combines rebellion with appreciation for the importance of family ties and obligations. Saira demonstrates an early interest in her family secrets, and collects stories of her family which she even appropriates to some extent. She fights her battle for autonomy while understanding that her family context gives her identity, and indeed, gives her a stable place position from which she can then re-negotiate. Saira is self-reflexive enough to understand that her cultural and familial positionalities both strengthen and limit her simultaneously.
However, not all the characters were similarly well drawn. Big Nanima, Saira’s grand-aunt, is quite a charming and well depicted character, but most of the others were rather flat. Saira’s mother was a stereotype for most part, and Ameena, the docile, obedient sister against which Saira is supposed to be juxtaposed, for all her central role, was a puppet that never came to life. That said, the female characters were better depicted and imagined than the male characters, who were largely cardboard figures. In all, the novel attempts to contain too many characters, many lacking distinction, and too many were introduced in ways which were not always easy to follow or remember, necessitating flipping back and forth to try to trace the emergence of a character in the narrative and understand his/her relation to the protagonist – an effort which in the end, was not even quite necessary because some of those other characters were of relatively little significance to the narrative. These are perhaps weaknesses of character creation and introduction which are common enough to the debut novelist, and in Haji’s defence, did not detract too much from the narrative.
Another mistake common to the first time novelist is the pacing of the plotline. In this novel, the first two thirds unfolds at a reasonable pace, but the last third of the narrative simply crams in events at a suddenly accelerated pace. The narrative swiftly kills off several central characters to speed the novel to a literary climax and heighten emotional tension, arranging a series of events that contrive to push the protagonists into the crossroads of difficult choices. The attempt to bring things to a head compromised the natural progression of plot, and the desire to manufacture an ending which will contain a twist in the tail with shock impact was a little heavy handed in the end, lacking dexterity.
What I did enjoy about the novel was its self-reflexivity, curiously enough not through Saira the protagonist, but through the discussions by other minor characters. The novel also demonstrates, much less self-consciously than it discusses individual needs versus family obligations, the powerful and dynamic network which a diasporic person may experience: Haji successfully links Pakistan, India, London and the US in a network which is mental and emotional, as well as physical, successfully demonstrating the diasporic allegiances and loyalties which transcend spaces and time zones. The novel also contained some nice discussions of the natures of journalism and witnessing and fiction, but just fell short of the profound, and could have developed this interesting angle more searchingly.
While I appreciated the self-reflexivity contained in the narrative, and appreciated also the novelist’s understanding that a narrative such as a novel may contain a deeper even if fictional truth, the writing lacked the skill to translate life’s experiences into that deeper fictional truth convincingly. There were too many seams which showed, whereas, as Lukacs (1970) put it, the task of art is to prevent the extract from giving the effect of an extract. While a novel must always be an artifact, the skill of the novelist is to remove that sense of artificiality, and although this novel tried, it perhaps tried too hard and too obviously to succeed completely. This novel conveys a strong sense of being drawn from personal life experiences and a very strong sense of realism, but those salient experiences are not seamlessly translated into fictional narrative form. The fictional truths would have been more convincingly framed if there had been a greater authorial distance and objectivity from the empirical; this particular kind of translation works best when it is emotion recollected in tranquility (taking a leaf from Wordsworth) and thus transformed and lifted to another level, rather than emotion/memories merely reported. Again, however, it could be argued that this falling short is to be expected from a novice novelist, and merely a part of most novelists’ skill development.
Sprinkled here and there in Haji’s writing, just occasionally, were some astute observations, but inserted so casually they were almost asides, for e.g.: “…to live out their lives in the public forum that an extended family provides”. It seems that where this author is less deliberate, the writing is actually sharper, fresher, more original, and more captivating. In a curious way, to some degree, the authorial consciousness (and self-consciousness) almost seems to be impeding its own creativity.
Indeed, one of my problems with this novel is the writing style. Not that the style is problematic in any particular way, but the opposite actually, that it is non-distinctive and uninspiring. There even are places where it jars somewhat, for e.g., Mehnaz is in a car, driving and arguing:
” ‘…who wants to spend an evening in the bloody suburbs?! I mean,’, she dropped down again, hastily, ‘You did want Saira to see the sights…’ “.
One would have to suppose that by writing “she dropped down again”, the author meant that Mehnaz dropped her tone, rather than actually physically dropping anywhere, since Mehnaz is at the wheel of a car. But writing which invokes the wrong (i.e. unintended) kind of imagery is rather sloppy. So despite the interesting ideas and pleasingly nuanced consciousness contained within the novel, I would have to say the author has not demonstrated that knack with words which makes a reader simultaneously linger over the beauty of the language, and yet would not find the language itself any hindrance to the smooth progress and flow of the reading experience. While it is by no means a poorly written piece of text and can justifiably claim competency, the reader is instantly aware they are not in the hands of a master craftsman/storyteller. There is no luminosity in the writing, nothing which seduces the reader through form, and the novel lacks that calm mastery over language which makes the language its own. Indeed, the author has not (as yet) developed a writing voice of her own.
That said, it was a novel I am not sorry to have spent time reading, a novel which conveyed strong sincerity and integrity of consciousness, and a novel which was a pleasant read, even if I may be slow to pick it up again.
The Writing on My Forehead, by Nafisa Haji. Harper Collins, 2009.
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