November 9, 2020 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Kindness of Enemies by Leila Aboulela (2015)

Earlier this year I read my first book by Leila Aboulela Bird Summons (2019), a wonderful novel about three immigrant women, born in different countries but living in Scotland, setting off on a holiday in the Highlands, to pay homage to Lady Evelyn Cobbold, the first British woman convert to Islam to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I really enjoyed it for many reasons, confirming I wished to read more of her work, thus I chose The Kindness of Enemies as her next book to read, one I have had my eye on for some years, having refused to buy earlier because of the dreadful cover. That may sound whimsical, but I think that earlier cover does this book a great disservice, the way it turns readers away.

Being Muslim and an Academic in 21st century Scotland

Hadji Murad Tolstoy Leila Aboulela I was completely drawn into the dual narrative story and loved both parts of it, modern day Scotland and mid 1800’s Russia and the Caucasus.

The contemporary story centres around Natasha Wilson (born Natasha Hussein to a Russian mother and Sudanese father, themselves the product of a Russian university education, her name is changed when her mother marries a Scot). A university lecturer in Scotland, her research concerns the life of the Caucasian Highlander, Shamil Imam.

Natasha is friends with Malak, of Russian/Persian parentage; her son Oz, is in her class and they possess a historical artefact belonging to Shamil Imam, due to an ancestral connection. Natasha is in their home when Oz is arrested for downloading materials related to jihad and she too comes under suspicion, her telephone and laptop seized.

“I was seeing in these awkward composites my own liminal self. The two sides of me that were slammed together against their will, that refused to mix. I was a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves. My Russian mother who regretted marrying my Sudanese father. My African father who came to hate his white wife. My atheist mother who blotted out my Muslim heritage. My Arab father who gave me up to Europe without a fight. I was the freak. I had been told so and I had been taught so and I had chewed on this verdict to the extent that, no matter what, I could never purge myself of it entirely.”

Meanwhile, in Sudan, her father whom she hasn’t seen for 20 years is dying and there is pressure for her to go and see him, along with feelings of resentment and ill-will, demanding her to stand up for herself and her existence, a daughter of mixed heritage, living a life she has created for herself.

“It was an effort formulating this summary, explaining myself. I preferred the distant past, centuries that were over and done with, ghosts that posed no direct threat. History could be milked for this cause or that. We observed it always with hindsight, projecting onto it our modern convictions and anxieties.”

Being Muslim and a Caucasian Highlander in the 19th century

Interwoven between chapters of Natasha’s story, we are transported to the Caucasus territory in the 1850’s, to a period during the conflict between the Highlander mountain men lead by Shamil Imam who were resisting Tsarist Russia from expanding into their territory.

Shamil Imam, the Chieftan of Dagestan, led an armed resistance for thirty years, he appears in Leo Tolstoy’s classic posthumous novella Hadji Murad. Through imagination and historical fact, Leila Aboulela enters his territory and home, bringing us a view from the spaces women and children inhabit, not just that of men, as Tolstoy does.

In earlier years, to settle a conflict, Shamil was only able to negotiate peace by surrendering his son Jamaleldin, who for the next ten years or so was raised as part of the Tsar’s family (as his godson). Now Shamil’s men have captured the Russian Princess Anna (previously of Georgia – her grandfather Gregory XI, the last King of Georgia, ceded the territory to Russia), her French governess and two children Alexander and Lydia.

“Nothing has caused me so much pain as treachery. If the Russians would fight me honourably, I would not mind living the rest of my life in a state of war. But they tricked me; in Akhulgo they treated me like a criminal, not a warrior, and they sent my son far away to St Petersburg.”

The Kindness of Enemies follows these stories and although one carries the heavyweight magnitude of a well-known story of significant characters in history, the foreshadowing of it by a modern story, brings to light the many aspects of the past, whose threads might be seen as being current today.

Kindness and Empathy, Another Perspective

Much of the literature of the Caucasus in the literary imagination is told from the Russian perspective, by grand novelists like Tolstoy and Pushkin, whereas Leila Aboulela, by setting this historical period during the time of the Princess’s capture, takes us on that journey, re-imagining events that took place, understanding better the complicated and mixed sympathies of Princess Anna, a young mother, exploring her loss and how those eight months in captivity might have changed her.

The Kindness of Enemies Leila Aboulela The Queen's Gambit

Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Pexels.com

She also presents the perspective of young Jamaleldin in another light, how his childhood memories lie dormant yet present, his mixed feelings of the return, his strange and estranged reality of feeling part of himself belonging to both worlds, the Highlands and to St Petersburg.

There was a time when it had all been much simpler. He rescued from the wild, Nicholas the benevolent godfather. He the pet, Nicholas the mighty. He the puppet, Nicholas the conductor, the thrower of crumbs, the arranger of roles, the changer of destinies. Jamaleldin the chess piece, and now Shamil had changed the rules of the game.

In the contemporary world, Natasha experiences something of the same, born of culturally different parents, spending her childhood in one country, her adulthood in another. She must create her own sense of belonging, to find peace of mind somehow. Being neither one thing or the other, having no one place called home, hers, by necessity is a spiritual journey, determined by the need for the soul to find home, rather than body or mind.

“I said that I was not a good Muslim but that I was not a bad person. I said I had a brother that I wanted to keep in touch with. I said that I wanted to give up my share of the inheritance to him. Apart from my father’s Russian books and Russian keepsakes, I wanted nothing. I said that I did not come here today to fight over money or for the share of a house. I came so that I would not be an outcast, so that I would, even in a small way, faintly, marginally, tentatively, belong.”

Highly Recommended.

My Reviews of Interest

Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela

Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina tr. Lisa Hayden

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, And He Hanged Himself, Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie

The second volume of essays by Kathleen Jamie that I’ve read, more encounters with birds on lonely, windswept islands that have long been abandoned by humans, though traces remain of their earlier occupation.

If you have not yet read Kathleen Jamie, do check out my review of her first collection Findings, which I adored. It talks a little more about her writing and the difficulty her publisher had in describing her work, which defies categorisation, not exactly travel writing, not quite autobiography, a more accessible form of nature writing than we’ve seen before, seen through the eyes and in the prose of a poet.

In her trademark lyrical style, she travels with experts from whom she gleans bits of information, fascinating trivia, or alarming statistics that tell of a significant drop in population of certain species, but mostly she continues her mission of acute observation, of trying to see in the simplest terms something of the lives and patterns of behaviour of majestic winged creatures, who make long migrations each year and return to these islands to continue their heritage.

We learn more of her beginnings, of the archeological dig where she developed a fascination for uncovering secrets hidden beneath. She muses on microscopic observations in a science lab, writing about wind, light, the moon. We accompany her to the Arctic, witnessing giant icebergs on the move, the green lights of the aurora overhead. She visits to a museum in Norway where ancient whale bones dating from the mid 1800’s will be cleaned, restored, rehung, the melancholic weariness of their demise emitting an odour even after years of inhabiting this dusty dry interior.

The Gannetry

Jamie and friend take a picnic and visit a gannetry during mating season, they see much of what is expected, they’ve been there before, Jamie observes, looking for the unusual, she spots it in the sea, a straight line, something she doesn’t recognise until she does. A pod of orcas lead by the matriarch, she reflects on her role as mother, as her own children approach the age of leaving the nest.

The Woman in the Field

Jamie recalls being 17 years old, leaving school and rather than her mother’s suggestion of a library job or secretarial school, she delivers her to an archeological dig, to uncover a ‘henge’, a circle of stones seen from the air, where they’ll find a Bronze Age burial cist containing the skeleton of a woman and a well preserved pot, findings that will inspire a poem ‘Inhumation‘.

Aurora borealis
Source: Wikipedia M.Buschmann

Aurora

Polly asks Jamie what brings her to the Arctic north, to the freezing cold, to float alongside unleashed icebergs, watching green light phenomena in the sky.

It is the birds that lure Polly, though the geese have flown, that and an illness which awoke something that continues to push her to seek these experiences, while they remain possible.

For 30 yrs Jamie sat on cliff tops looking at familiar horizons.
Now she wishes to change her map.
Something is changing.

The Hvalsalen

The Bergen Natural History Museum in Norway houses the largest whale skeleton installation known. No one knows how they got there, whether they were hunted or stranded, they date from 1867.

About to close for 4 years for renovation and repair, Jamie is invited to return during the conservation work, she will spend hours sitting in the bones, smelling the still present odours, imagining, contemplating their previous majesty.

Pathologies

Musing in frustration on nature clichés: ‘nature takes it course’, (death of her mother) ‘reconnecting with nature’ (environmental activists) Jamie makes an appointment with a clinical consultant in pathology to observe the inner workings of the human body ‘nature’ and its mutations, tumours, cancer cells, infections, seen to the naked eye and under the microscope. She sees landscapes, shorelines, marshes. Looking at the lining of someone’s stomach, searching for bacteria, she notes the following:

Between the oval structures were valleys, if you like, fanning down to the shore. Frank wanted to show me something in one of those valleys and I couldn’t find it at first; it took several patient attempts – this microscope didn’t have a cursor device to point at things. It was a very human moment, a collusion of landscape and language when one person tries to guide the other’s gaze across a vista. What vistas I’d seen. River deltas and marshes, peninsulas and atolls. The unseen landscapes within. You might imagine you were privy to the secret of the universe, some mystical union between body and earth, but I dare say it’s to do with our eyes. Hunter-gatherers that we are, adapted to look out over savannahs, into valleys from hillsides. Scale up the absurdly small until it looks like a landscape, then we can do business.

‘There!’ said Frank. ‘Isn’t that a pastoral scene? They’re grazing!’

I had it: six or seven very dark oval dots, still tiny, despite the magnification, were ranged across the blue valley, like musk oxen on tundra, seen from far above.

Kathleen Jamie’s first collection of nature essays ‘Findings’

Her easy reading essays will also cover a lunar eclipse, three attempts to visit St Kilda, Neolithic caves and the passage of time in her own life, marked by the growth of her children into adolescence, on the threshold of young adulthood.

Fascinating and cosy reading to discover freezing cold, wind blown parts of the world that hold fascinating secrets that only the hardy voyager will venture to uncover. Enjoy reading them about from a more comfortable vantage point.

To buy one of her books, click the link below.

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