The House of Rust
by
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
(Graywolf Press)
A Literary Review
~
Aisha, a young girl living in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, having recently lost her mother, loses her father, Ali. He gets lost at sea and Aisha’s grandmother, Swafiya, gives an allowance of five days before she considers her son dead and holds funeral rites. Aisha doesn’t believe her father is dead, waiting and hoping for him to return before the five days elapse. She seeks the help of the adults around her and soon, it’s made clear that none of them thinks Ali will be found. She takes matters into her own hands and goes to rescue her father.
The story is told as a fairytale interwoven with Mombasarian superstitions: the innocent and naïve protagonist (usually a child), yearning for something, largely unaware of the mystical world they inhabit encounters an aspect of that magical world such as a talking animal. They go on an adventure with said animal as their guide in the new world and encounter challenges that the protagonist overcomes with knowledge from their life and satisfy their yearning. They return home having changed and live happily ever after—not in this story, however.
From her father’s lesson of “everyone must have their share,” Aisha is kind to the alley cat which she leaves food for every day, even when it shies away from her. She is unaware of the mystical Mombasa inhabited by animals and other creatures. When she decides to save her father, the cat, Hamza, also a philosopher, speaks to her and offers help as payment for her kindness because:
“… kindness must be acknowledged and returned. Kindness can have teeth. A kindness, like all things, is a transaction, a pending promise, a debt.”
In the second act of the story, Aisha, with guidance from Hamza, sets sail on a skeletal boat and thus begins the adventure. They encounter sea monsters. Using the knowledge from her father’s lessons and instinct, she wrestles with them. It is during this portion of the story that Hamza challenges Aisha’s ideas of determinism, the lessons she’s learned and the thinking behind why she does the things that she does—whether it’s for other people and/or herself.
In the third act, Aisha is more aware of the pressures (familial, religious and societal) that seek to put her in a box and she spends a large portion working against such pressures.
In this debut and winner of the inaugural Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, gives an offering to Mombasa, capturing its essence, more than its surface appearance. She employs rich imagery to imbue life into every aspect of Mombasa and the sea to the degree that they become characters in the story. Old buildings are “stones hunching toward each other like suspicious, gossiping crones” and the sea “sniffles in petulance,” its waves lap backwards and forward, swelling and receding “like the breath of a far larger animal—the soft exhale and inhale of black-blue lungs.”
The imagery functions to comment on a character, juxtaposing them with others and, at the same time, capturing emotion. The characters, too, are brought to life: The monsters embody wit and wiles with cleverness unusual in other fairytales; the crows are organized into a crowdom led by the tyrannical ‘The Burned One’ and are conscious of what is crow and uncrow; the ‘Old Snake’, who is the crownless warden of Mombasa, embodies the spirit of the coastal city and is revered by all.
The author doesn’t offer much in terms of physical descriptions of characters, relying mostly on impressions. Though they may be faceless, one easily understands and knows them. The character descriptions offered the function of juxtaposing one against a group and also portraying the emotional result of their actions. About Ali, Aisha’s father, she writes:
“Last seen as a sun-glare blot on the horizon, the sails of his vessel flashing like mirrors, plunging into the unknown, daring a distance unfathomable to those other ordinary people who had sought roots, steady earth, who carried with them the firm, clear knowledge of what could and could not be. All those happy people whose fathers did not vanish with all the ceremony of a bottle cap rolling over the edge of a table, dropping from sight.”
Ali struggles with fatherhood, seeking to be better to Aisha than his own father was to him, and also satisfy his yearning for the sea, the latter leading to much hurt and disappointment in his family who feel, in the words of Swafiya:
“He desires only to exceed and abandon. All who love him, he leaves. He will always be in want and not look back once.”
Swafiya, Aisha’s grandmother, seeks to make her conform to societal expectations and make Aisha into a wife. She hopes a good marriage would save Aisha from the stain of her mother’s name, and even when Ali disappears, it is where she finds solace. In the end, however, love trumps conformity.
Aisha, after her adventure on the sea, learns that she needs to determine herself beyond expectations placed upon her in good or bad faith. She is held back by love for family and Mombasa who won’t let go until she fully understands them.
All the characters in the story serve to examine the central theme of the story—predetermination. One way the author approaches this is through names. She writes of Shida, Aisha’s mother:
“There’s power in a name,” they said seriously. “Shida? The old ways are not quite just. To be a child of a woman whom you have called ‘hardship’ and ‘trouble’ … what lousy inheritance is that?”
Names can be a glimpse into one’s destiny. Shida succumbs to the prophecy in her name: born a bastard during a drought, and against her free-spirited nature, she marries Ali to gain acceptance and is dulled by it. Her life is spent in hardship with a long illness she eventually succumbs to.
In this novel, names function as representations of more than oneself but of family, community, culture, and are strongly tied to honour and dignity. It denotes the degree of damage is ‘spoiling one’s name’ for a name is also how one is perceived by others.
In reading, one understands that names can functions as prisons—limiting and confining their owners, especially for those whose names come with a historical familial burden. The novel asks whether we grow into our names (and other identity markers) or determine our own destinies. It asks us, in the evolution of Aisha throughout the narrative, to question everything, even when it seems we’re working against all we’ve known, to seek that which we yearn for despite expectations placed upon us, and to take action for it is the only way in which we can determine ourselves for ourselves. Hamza puts it best:
“Being is to be alive, awake—to believe, not to roll under the world as it is. Are you alive if you do not question the world? If you do not go to war with yourself in deciding how to acquaint yourself with it or challenge it? At the end of all worlds, will you show how neat your miserly kept book of sums is? Or will you have had the courage and say I did deeds good and bad, I disagreed with the world around me, I was awake and I believed and I doubted, but I was not immobilized? I was alive, to the best of my abilities, I was alive.”
And when you finally set sail to your destiny:
“Don’t go to sea with a leaky heart… Your own convictions will be turned on you, as poison on a spear… You must be able to bear the elements and the punishments of a body going without; you must be hardened to hunger, patient of thirst, and mightier than the cold.”
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