Jokha Alharthi
Celestial Bodies
Trans. Marilyn Booth
Sandstone PressCelestial Bodies is the story of three sis-
ters whose lives stretch across a period
of great social and political change in
Oman. The novel, translated into Eng-
lish from the Arabic, is divided into
short chapters often named for the
characters from whose perspective they
are told, though place-names and suc-
cinct descriptors sometimes intervene.
Alharthi and Booth were awarded the
2019 Man Booker International Prize for
Celestial Bodies.Ayesha Harruna Attah
The Hundred Wells of Salaga
Other PressGhanaian-born novelist Ayesha Har-
runa Attah draws upon the legacy of
postcolonial fiction to weave this grip-
ping story of two women navigating
the turbulent waters of history in pre-
colonial Ghana. Buoyed by imaginative
world-building, meticulous historical
re-creation, and powerful feminist
themes, The Hundred Wells of Salaga
delivers a compelling glimpse of a
world thought lost but now rebirthed
in the imaginations of its descendants.Nota Bene
Selahattin Demirtaş
DawnTrans. Amy Spangler & Kate Ferguson. New
York. SJP for Hogarth. 2019. 162 pages.The revolution will be made into art. Sela-
hattin Demirtaş is writing literature for its
power to transform people and nations
from within. He asserts that political action
is incomplete without intellectual and cre-
ative development.
Demirtaş is the former co-chair of Tur-
key’s national pro-Kurdish HDP (People’s
Democratic Party). He ran for president
from behind bars in Turkey’s last national
elections in June 2018. He also wrote a
collection of short fiction. Dawn is his lit-
erary debut. He penned its twelve stories
while in a maximum-security, F-type prison
in Edirne, where he has been held since
November 4, 2016.
Maureen Freely, who has translated
Orhan Pamuk, wrote the foreword to Dawn
from London last November. She irons out
some of the details of the political context
and marvels at his faith in humanity, his
persistence as an agent of the human spirit.
The name Seher in Turkish translates as
“dawn” or, more exactly, the peculiar ema-
nation of twilight just before sunrise.
Amy Marie Spangler translated the
twelve collected stories with Kate Fergu-
son. In the last year, Dawn went on to win
the Montluc Resistance and Liberty Award.
It was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis in
France and has sold rights to fourteen for-
eign-language publishers including Aram,
which prints in Kurmanji Kurdish. The
Swedish parliamentarian Thomas Ham-
marberg recently nominated Demirtaş for
the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
The concepts of peace, democracy, and
human rights scream out of the subtext and
leap from his stories. Dawn is a work of
political fiction, but it is not overly dogmat-
ic. Demirtaş’s characters border on textbook
liberal stereotypes and archetypal social
roles that might risk flat narratives, but he isGiven more space, I would repro-
duce several poems or fragments of
poems. Lacking it, I want to quote from
one. Here is Rosaldo, in “Observing,”
speaking in his own voice: “I flopped
the first time I tried to hard-ass. Failure
shut me up, made me feel / like I did
the day the word ‘elefante’ eluded me,
as if my tongue had been pulled / out
by the root. / In my family’s ’51 Dodge,
I drove across town, east to west, house
to house, / picked up the guys, hard-
assing the entire trip. I remained mum,
under a / bushel basket, no sign of me.
/ Bobby says, ‘Now that I mention it,
Chico, I never liked you. / I said who
the hell is this guy? I don’t think we
voted anybody / out, but you, you were
borderline.’ / Restoring my Spanish left
me unable to master another language,
the catlike / rapid swats of hard-assing.
Instead I listened with all I had, became
a quiet / guy, laughing, being an audi-
ence, observing.. .”
The Chasers is a must read.
Margaret Randall
Albuquerque, New Mexico
WORLDLIT.ORG 89