A CALAMITY OF NOBLE HOUSES, by Amira Ghenim; translated by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil
Little is known about the personal life of Tahar Haddad, the Tunisian writer, scholar and labor movement activist who died a political outcast in 1935, at just 36, after angering conservatives by calling for gender equality as a requisite for national rejuvenation and liberation. Taking his death as inspiration, Amira Ghenim’s sweeping, multigenerational historical novel “A Calamity of Noble Houses” is not just a fictionalized version of his life, but a kaleidoscopic portrait of Tunisian history, from colonial rule to the Nazi occupation to the country’s independence and the political struggles that followed.
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Ghenim’s second novel — published in 2020 in Tunisia, where she teaches linguistics and translation at Tunis University — imagines the early-20th-century feminist as a poor but idealistic young tutor for the wealthy Rassaa family, whose European-influenced patriarch is considered progressive for allowing his daughters to be educated. Tahar falls in love with the brilliant, strong-willed youngest daughter, Zbaida — whose mother calls her “useless,” i.e., one of the “women who are bad at housework and don’t know how to embroider or sew or clean the offal of the Eid lamb to make osban” — but her father arranges for her to marry the son of the prominent Ennaifer family instead. (For women in this family, “leaving the house should be only for a good reason,” her father-in-law says. “This is a conservative house.”) Years later, just before he dies, Haddad sends a secret letter to Zbaida, setting off a series of horrific events that reverberate across four generations.
Before the note can reach Zbaida, it falls into the hands of her controlling and xenophobic brother-in-law Mhammed, who thinks Zbaida’s “brain had been poisoned by a European education and her behavior ruined by the Rassaa family’s failure to zealously guard its women.” He assumes she’s having an affair, and alerts everyone in the family. Anger and chaos ensue. In a scuffle on the stairs, Zbaida falls — or is she pushed? — and is paralyzed from the waist down.
The story is told and retold by 11 members of the two families across seven decades — from Zbaida’s parents and in-laws and two maids to Zbaida’s granddaughter, Hind, in 2013 — but never by Zbaida herself. The effect of these “Rashomon”-like testimonies is not only to speculate on guilt and innocence, but also to reveal the complicated relations among the many peoples of Tunisia and the tensions caused by classism, racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny and the lingering aftereffects of colonialism. “Today, my daughter, a jinn of truth is emerging naked and barefoot,” Hind tells her own child about her great-grandmother, in a gorgeously textured translation by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil. “Don’t let the numerous characters, diverse voices and many names confuse you; all of them … are like a single sick body that conspired and united against their disabled victim. And even those who didn’t raise a whip or throw a stone were false witnesses in the silent crowd that tormented her.”