It’s a most uncomfortable feeling when a book induces two strong but completely contradictory reactions in you.
It’s a most uncomfortable feeling when a book induces two strong but completely contradictory reactions in you. For example, when I read Henna House by Nomi Eve, I felt like a thousand-legged worm (if worms have legs) wiggling and squirming as one part of my mind marched off in one direction, while another part headed elsewhere.
On the one hand, I hated Henna House. It’s the kind of book I most abhor: deliberately exotic with a style that imbues even the most mundane things from a non-Western culture with significance and drama for the benefit of people unfamiliar with that culture.
But on the other hand, as I gritted my teeth and turned pages, I was swept into a world that I never knew had once even existed, though I had heard of it in a fleeting paragraph in an espionage novel featuring Israel’s spy agency, Mossad.
Henna House is about Adela Damari, a Jewish girl from Yemen in the pre-Second World War period. When the novel opens, she’s only five years old, but already an old maid because of an edict in the Imam-ruled territory of Yemen she lives in. The edict states that when a Jewish child’s father dies, she or he is taken away by a person known as the Confiscator to be adopted by a Muslim family and into the Muslim faith. So the only way for Jewish parents in the Yemen of that period to keep their children Jewish was to stay healthy and alive for all the years that the child was a child, or to ensure that the child was engaged to be married as soon as possible so that she or he had another Jewish family to go to if the father should die.
Adela should have been engaged when she was a toddler, just like all the children in the Jewish quarter, including her best friend Binyamin. But her mother, oddly, doesn’t seem to care about that. In fact, her mother doesn’t care about Adela at all: the child is the youngest after a long family of much older brothers before her. Her mother is either tired of children or just does not like her little girl.
Still, eventually she tries to arrange marriages for Adela. But every fiancé dies. So it’s a lucky break for the little girl when her father’s older brother arrives unexpectedly in the village with his son, Asaf, who is not engaged to be married either.
Quickly, before Asaf’s father can learn of Adela’s fiancé-killing reputation, Adela’s mother has the cousins engaged. The children, who had taken to each other right away, are now separated to prevent them from treating each other as siblings so as to avoid even the mildest idea of incest. So Adela’s best friend continues to be Binyamin — but she and Asaf are unambiguously aware of each other as spouses-to-be.
Then Asaf’s father gets the wandering itch and the two of them leave, though Adela knows she’ll love Asaf forever. But soon Hani, Adela’s other cousin, daughter of her father’s younger brother, arrives. And confident henna-covered Hani, who becomes Adela’s best friend, and Hani’s mother, the henna artist Rahel, change Adela’s life.
In what way You’ll have to read Henna House to find out because a lot goes on in this book — and I mean a lot! Which brings me back to my opening complaint of schizophrenia. Though Henna House has detail like few other books have, somehow it’s not enough — and not in a good way.
That’s because the book suffers from a failing I’ve often noticed in books about a long gone culture: its author has done so much research that the book that eventually emerges is less of a story than simply about the lives of its characters as would have been lived in that culture and period of time.
Despite my reluctance to read books that make something exotic of non-Western cultures (I’ve suffered too often courtesy Indian authors writing for a Western audience), I have to say I was fascinated by the lives of the pre-Second World War community of Yemeni Jews. The details Nomi Eve weaves into the book are as intricate as the details of Rahel and Hani’s henna designs. And more than any other book, Henna House showed me what it’s like to be part of a minority community in a country with a hostile majority: in one word, creepy.
But just like it’s hard for a viewer to see the overall picture in Hani’s henna designs, which are so full of twirls and squiggles, I suspect that it became hard for Eve to keep her story intact and focused once she started writing the book. Because more than two-thirds of the book is about the characters living their lives — and then suddenly Eve seems to realise she must actually do something with Adela.
So whizz-bang, major things happen in a flash and then the book almost skips the world war altogether and winds up in Israel, where the Jews from Yemen were air-lifted in Operation Magic Carpet. And that’s where the story winds down, suddenly weaving in the Jewish holocaust in Europe, leaving you utterly dissatisfied. It’s sort of like reading a summary of a book.
So do I recommend Henna House or not For the first two-thirds of it, in spite of its exoticism, definitely. But if you place great store on endings, no. Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea
