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Book Reviewed by:An illicit affair precipitates the drama in A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim. On December 7, 1935, a letter hidden between several loaves of bread arrives at the wealthy Ennaifer household. The plan is for the maid Luiza to accept the bread delivery and tuck the letter in a safe place until handing it to Zbaida Rassaa Ennaifer at an appropriate time. But Mhammed Ennaifer spots the letter and reads it out loud, shocking the family with the contents. Zbaida, his sister-in-law, has been having an affair.
Immediately, the pious Ennaifer family, devout followers of Islam, are in chaos. The misgivings about their son's wife that have been shelved during their five-year marriage rise to the surface. Zbaida was raised to be independent and educated, while the Ennaifers believe in female submission. And so there they are in the living room, stunned at the defiance of Zbaida, who they have barely tolerated and who has betrayed their son and Islam.
Later in the day, the Rassaas arrive at the Ennaifer house after being informed that Zbaida has been beaten. Her mother compares the Ennaifers to thugs. When Mhammed enters the room with obvious slap marks on his face and his heavy body loosely fitting inside his clothes, Zbaida's father knows "the solution was to complete the tear and make a clean break."
Although A Calamity of Noble Houses is a story of an affair, it really isn't a story about an affair. It's a story about women who have the independence to make their own choices and the chasm created within a family by those choices that are seen as unforgivable. While the story is set in Tunisia and within a Muslim family of wealth, Ghenim's novel lands across cultures and continents where husbands and fathers lack the ability to bend women to their will. By default, Ghenim shows, men become unstrung and relentlessly punitive.
Secondarily, we see how male discomfort stirs families into dysfunction. Mhammed Ennaifer was psychologically broken by a rape when he was a boy. He manifested his trauma by indulging in food. Later, his homosexuality is outed by Zbaida's maid and he is forced into a marriage he doesn't want to quiet the rumors. He is angered when he discovers Zbaida's affair, but as the story moves through multiple narrators, Mhammed's outrage feels more layered. Less to do with his cheating sister-in-law, and more to do with rage from his childhood sexual assault, his physical limitations — he was born with one leg shorter than the other, and in a patriarchal culture, his masculinity was questioned — and his mother coddling him. He is lonely and adjusting to a new kind of world with independent women; that is shattering.
But the beauty of A Calamity of Noble Houses is that men tell their stories. The elevation of their voices, which reflect their often fragile egos, adds to the narrative. Zbaida's father wonders, "Should I go to the Ennaifer house to hear them say that my virtuous daughter, my hidden pearl, my well behaved princess had dragged her husband's nose in the dirt and disgraced her family's honor? Should I go to support my daughter or to drink her blood? Had I lived so long only to see my educated daughters make my enemies gloat over me and see thugs chew on my reputation?"
What I wasn't prepared for in a story about Tunisian conservatism and female independence was anti-black racism. But there it was in a chapter about the black maid Khaddouj. When Jnayna Ennaifer gave birth, her baby was breech and wouldn't come out of her belly. At wits' end, the family beckoned Khaddouj, the child of the maid.
"With God's help, their blackness attracts the evil eye, and it will be hurled into them and not into you, so the victim of envy will be safe."
Black skin being able to rid someone of evil? Tunisian culture has long held the belief that black skin is dirty and not clean, yet Ghenim's fictionalization, without much explanation, of dark skin as a double bind — being able to exorcise evil and then to inhabit evil — while probably a passed down folktale and befitting the character, bothered me because one, it isn't a thoughtful way to explain racist behavior and two, where did that evil go? Did it disappear? Or was it in Khaddouj for the rest of her life? When the Rassaas go to the Ennaifers' house the night of the incident, Khaddouj's blackness is written of as a horror. "The gloom made her skin darker, to the point that all we could see of her in the darkness of the night were her big teeth and the whiteness of her protruding eyes."
A finalist for the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, A Calamity of Noble Houses was translated into English by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil. It is enlightening and melodramatic. The novel carries the freight of religion, politics, and community, with passages of disturbing sexual violence. The incident of adultery is told through the perspectives of multiple narrators in the Rassaa and Ennaifer family, who are the eyes and ears of that terrible night and have had to carry the trauma for decades. I had to keep a cheat-sheet list of who was who, even though the front of the book has a family tree as a guide. I didn't find that sufficient and relied upon my own diagram.
Those who enjoy a historical fiction read will be transfixed by the story even during those parts where the novel is obviously overwritten (but perhaps that's a consequence of the translation). I found myself getting lost in some of the narrators' perspectives that deviated from the incident at hand and towards less interesting tangents, but the narrative always returned to the host, a family torn apart at the seams. Politics changing the country.
A Calamity of Noble Houses has something significant to say about traditionalism and affluence and where independent women fit into the paradigm. It feels timeless; three decades from now there will still be resonance and valuable perspective. The story is both absorbing and concerning around the ways women can access their independence and their faith. And how they sometimes pay the price for whom they choose to love.
This review
first ran in the February 26, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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