By Abeer Hoque
“How time plays its jokes. It raises dwarves and hobbles giants.”
Nadifa Mohamed’s second novel The Orchard of Lost Souls is a gorgeous harrowing story of Somalia’s war-torn history as seen through the eyes of three very different women in the city of Hargeisa. There’s Kawsar, an older woman with a past full of loss, Deqo, a 9-year-old girl trying to make a life outside the refugee camp she was born/abandoned in, and Filsan, a young woman and soldier in the Revolutionary Army of Somalia.
The dreams, relationships and lives of women of different ages and social and economic classes are powerful aspects of this novel. To this end. even secondary characters, like the sex workers that take Deqo in, and Filsan’s spoiled American cousins, and Kawsar’s maid with her dreams of modeling, are fully realized. I was especially taken with how precisely and sensitively the struggles of older women were portrayed, in both bodily and societal ways: “They are reincarnations of all the children who are begotten to harass old women, a fresh regiment of them born in every generation to extinguish the will to live in the already despairing.”
The writing in The Orchard of Lost Souls offers many magnificent passages. One from the beginning of the book, a description of the city of Hargeisa, drips with fabulist beauty:
“In the centre of the city where the alleys narrow at points to the width of a man’s shoulder blades, you can walk as if in a dream, never certain of what might appear after the next bend: a bare-chested man with a silver swordfish slung over his thin black back, a shoal of children reciting Qu’ran from their wooden slates, a girl milking a white, lyre-horned cow.”
However, Mohamed doesn’t shy away from the violence and unrest of the war that is tearing Somalia apart. Oppressive patriarchal and misogynist social structures, desperate citizenry (nomadic and city dwelling), failing hospitals, protesting students, and murderous soldiers loom over the narrative with increasing ominousness.
I haven’t read much Somali literature, so The Orchard of Lost Souls was an education for me. I recommend this novel for its strong female characters, the often incandescent writing and a ferocious history of a nation in collapse.
The Orchard of Lost Souls
Nadifa Mohamed
Picador
ISBN: 978-1250062369