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Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a young woman, as you can see, Kenyan – from Mombasa – and of Hadrami descent. I came to the The House of Rust (2021) via Marcie/BIP pointing out it was the winner, in 2022, of the inaugural Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction, having previously been the winner of the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, awarded for a first novel manuscript by an African author primarily residing in Africa.
Wikipedia has little else to say about Bajaber except that she “writes about the ill-documented history of the Hadrami diaspora”. I keep clicking: “the Hadharem (Arabic: حضارم) are an Arab sub-ethnic group indigenous to the Hadhramaut region in South Arabia, which is part of modern-day eastern Yemen … The Hadharem have a long seafaring and trading tradition that predates Semitic cultures … Hadhrami seamen emigrate[d] in large numbers around the Indian Ocean basin.”
Old Mombasa, where this book is set, is an old city on an island in the mouth of a bay or estuary (I can’t tell which) on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. The heroine, Aisha, is poor, young, Muslim, Hadrami – though she thinks her features are more Swahili than Arab. Her age is unsaid, but approaching marriageable, say between 12 and 15.
The House of Rust is first a fairy tale, then a coming of age. Or, on reflection – and it’s some weeks and another listen since I wrote the first half of this review – a fairy tale quest, then a fairy tale coming of age.
Aisha lives with her father, Ali. Her mother, a wedding singer, died when Aisha was still a baby. When her father is away at sea, she goes round to her grandmother’s. Bajaber routinely uses ‘baba’ and hababa’ for father and grandmother.
When Aisha was younger her father used to take her out to sea.
Her mother had been beset with pains and, Aisha suspected, rather sick with the sight of her, so her father, bereft of sons, would heave Aisha up onto his shoulders and leap onto the boat.
Pay attention, he said, guiding her hands into the stomach of a red-edged changu. Feathered filaments torn, raggedly inflating within blood-speckled gills. Ali laughing a bright summer laugh, crooking his finger in the tuck, hooking from the inside. His little finger gleaming and wriggling like a worm.
He had looked into her face and what he saw there stopped his smile, his mirth fading. She would remember this ever after, sensing that she had failed not just at a task, but at possessing some important instinct. That she had both disappointed her father and yet done no more than expected the first time. It was not unforgivable. There were lessons here.
Ali snatched the struggling fish up by the tail and motioned to the sea with it bristling in his fist. The command need not be spoken this time but she heard it all the same. Pay attention, Aisha.
He flung the mutilated thing over the side, and just as the cold cord of its guts began to cloud the water pink, a black fin cleaved the wave, quick as a scythe, and vanished. A light white froth, milky as boiling rice, bubbled up in a fizz before it too dissolved.
Pay attention, Aisha. Everyone must have their share.
Most of the local fishermen fish for shark just off the coast, but Ali is more ambitious, going out on his own to the deep ocean. One day he doesn’t return. Hababa tells Aisha that if he has not returned in 5 days she will start prayers for him, meaning he will be officially dead.
On the night of the third day – and this is the fairy story/quest – Aisha goes down to the shore. An alley cat she used to feed speaks to her. They swim out to a boat which is the ribs of an ancient sea creature. Aisha can see the sea between the bones, but the water does not come in. The sea is dead flat and jet black – we feel, we are not told, that Aisha and the cat are now in the realm of magic.
This is not Magical Realism, and not an African spirit world, but a story like Alice in Wonderland, or even The Odyssey, which both despite and through its fantastical creatures carries lessons for the everyday: ‘Pay attention, Aisha. Everyone must have their share.“
Aisha takes up the oars, the ‘boat’ surges ahead, not making a ripple. Three times they stop. Three times they make an offering to the sea. Three times they meet a creature of the deep – an enormous, lonely sea serpent who has befriended Ali, has led him to fish, and has been betrayed by him; a strange creature who is an accumulation of all the ships that have ever sunk, from Phoenician triremes to German U-boats; and Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks. Aisha pulls her drowned father from the sea and as night ends they are cast up again on the beach at Mombasa.
To save her father she must remove from his heart the spirit which calls him to the sea. Zabeer, the leader of the fishermen does this for her, and so, they return home.
Ali finds a job as a carpenter. Hababa attempts to organize Aisha into marriage. Aisha is determined to be independent, a world traveller.
Hamza, the cat, a “scholar’s cat”, has gone to the House of Rust. Aisha was invited to go with him, but her first duty was to save her father. Aisha goes around the town asking the animals for their help in finding Hamza. They ignore her. There is a parallel story involving crows, one of whom is shadowing Aisha. Aisha comes to the attention of the king of the animals, a very old creature born of a woman and a snake.
Ali, who stopped taking Aisha to sea because his lonely serpent friend wished her to be his child bride, now obtains for Aisha her own sailboat and begins to train her, to prepare her for the life of a traveller.
This is a wonderful, magical timeless work, whose reading by Waceke Wambaa flows like music.
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Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, The House of Rust, 2021. Audible: Recorded Books, 2022, read by Waceke Wambaa. 10 hours.
Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction: Marcie came upon this prize last year and we discussed the shortlist and then the winner, Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell. We’re on the prize’s mailing list and I think they’re currently at the stage of whittling down the 2024 nominees. Check out this year’s judges on the UKLG website. Impressive!
I know Marcie has The House of Rust in hand and I guess her review will land shortly on Buried in Print.
It appears that Tasmanian Bibliophile@Large, Jennifer, is also making her way through my Black Africa list. I commend to you her review of The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste, which I read last month but failed to write up.
For June I am reading Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions.