Centering Women in Contemporary Gulf Arab Fiction: Jokha Alharthi's Sayyidat al-qamar ( Celestial Bodies )

Abstract: The article looks at Omani author Jokha Alharthi's Celestial Bodies ( Sayyidat al-Qamar ), the first Gulf Arab novel to receive the International Man Booker Prize in 2019. Alharthi's novel offers insight into the transformations of a tribal society foregrounding emblematic moments of social disruption, namely, the end of slavery and concomitant modernization. Through a remarkable intervention into Omani literary tradition, Alharthi repositions femininity upon the novelistic proscenium and captures the spectrum of Omani women's lived experiences while highlighting the affective topography of the female body. Her female characters are representative of a cross-section of Omani society, occupying a range of social positions, from the wives of wealthy Omani merchants to the slave women who own absolutely nothing, not even their own labor or their own bodies. Pertinently, the reproducing female body becomes the most spectacular site of modernization in the novel, reflecting upon major transformations in the institutional techniques facilitating and regulating birth and identity production in Oman. Ultimately, Alharthi's novel reveals how women remain encapsulated within a punitive patriarchal economy, and their reified gendered positionality persists as the influx of Western goods and technologies infiltrates and transforms the materiality of everyday life in the community.