Best known as a poet, Anne Simpson has also published two novels prior to Speechless: her debut, Canterbury Beach (2001), and her follow-up, Falling (2008). This new book shifts to an overtly global focus and beckons to a broader readership.
“A Hausa girl in Paiko, Niger State – Thomas began.
Yes, I know Niger State.
This girl, A’isha Nasir, has been given a controversial sentence for adultery.”
A’isha’s narrative is at the heart of Speechless, but for a portion of the book she appears to be speechless. What brings her story forward—into media headlines, both directly and indirectly—is a Canadian journalist’s intervention in her case.
Sophie’s decision to write about A’isha’s case is well-intentioned. A death-by-stoning is cruel, regardless of the premise of the sentence, but if the sex that occurred (and there is no doubt of that, a child was conceived) was non-consensual, Sophie is determined to draw attention to the situation.
“She felt the night opening up as if it were a peony, many-petalled, and she knew there were other people like her lying awake in their beds, waiting, so the world became large, then larger, then so big she could hardly hold the thought. Who were those other people and what were they thinking as they lay in their beds?”
Sophie believes that she can articulate the crux of the issue: “How will these two systems of law play out over the long term: Nigerian common law and shariah law?” Others who are more familiar with the community issue warnings, but even they underestimate the response.
Soon, Sophie and her partner Felix, are forced to leave the city. The stakes are high but this novel does not read like a thriller; it’s the fact that these are two ordinary young women, whose existence is so acutely threatened, that maintains tension for about 350 pages.
“Though the room was at the back of Felix’s mother’s house, Sophie had woken to the sound of the imam chanting before dawn at the mosque across the road, and woken an hour later to the garbage truck, a loud, singsong melody playing each time it paused, and then a boy started filling pails of water at a tap outside, all the while carrying on a conversation with someone at an upstairs window. The tap squeaked like a tortured animal as it was turned on and off.”
The premise of the story is striking. The tension is engaging. But what pulled my heart into this story were the innocuous details. In another writer’s hands, a single aspect of the story might overwhelm—the polemical, the moralizing, the earnestness—but Simpson wraps tendrils around seemingly unimportant minutiae. Someone tries to kiss someone else’s cheek, but ends up kissing their ear instead. Someone who is fleeing for safety notices a man in a car up ahead, picking his nose.
Such details are not random (the first demonstrates how often someone’s good intentions are misplaced, the second hints at the idea that how one behaves when they believe themselves to be unobserved is different than they behave otherwise). They also aren’t earth-shattering (the plot unfolds independently of these instances). Rooting life-and-death matters to ordinary and forgettable moments engages readers’ attention at another level, building credibility and insisting on imperfection.
In this narrative, A’isha does have the opportunity to speak, directly to Sophie and to readers. It is, unquestionably, a story that’s worth hearing. That’s not the question Anne Simpson intends to provoke. More pressing is the question of who should tell someone else’s story. Egregiously important is the matter of how one takes responsibility for errors in judgement.
I’m happy to hear you say (to Anne) that this book is very readable, in the same way as Watershed, because I, too, have this book yet to read. I love the look of it sitting there on my shelf, but it also looks so big. Sounds like another winner of a season full of them! Can’t wait to read it!
You already know that I absolutely inhaled Watershed, but this one read a-l-m-o-s-t as quickly, which I really wasn’t expecting. Maybe partly because there are a lot of interesting scenes with a good bit of dialogue? Also, as things develop, it’s literally a matter of life-and-death, so that increases the stakes and suddenly you’re even more engaged.
I’m excited about reading this one, its been on my shelf for awhile now. I’m a bit daunted by the topics because I know they are heavy, but her writing is so beautiful, and I generally enjoy reading fiction by poets because the writing is just so spectacular. I’m a sucker for those unique turns of phrase!
Don’t worry about this one, Anne: I felt the same way, but I think you’ll be surprised. Also…do you have Watershed on your shelf too (by Doreen Vanderstoop, published by Freehand Books too)? Gah, I loved and hated (LOL) that book. I could not put it down!
I do have Watershed! Sooo many books to get to, I feel bad b/c I’m letting so many publishers down, I just don’t have the time for them all…
That’s how I feel too…as much as I try to read them quickly, there are just so many books competing for reading time, in this season particularly. But I mentioned Watershed with this one because even though they both seem long and potentially time-consuming, I found them both very readable. Sometimes, when the stack is accumulating, it’s nice to know that you can race through some of them.
I sympathise with non-Western/POC who find privileged whites telling their stories for them (or running their lives for them as happens here with white ‘advisors’ in Aboriginal communities). I chased up Simpson’s bio and at least she has worked with and lived amongst the people she is writing about. My son had just taken a position as a teacher at a rural school in Mali when Covid closed down the NGO he was working for. I hope if he wrote it would be about his experience of living with the people there – his observations rather than their story.
But it is the job of journalists to bring other people’s stories to our attention. I like the idea that Simpson is discussing that, I just hope that in letting A’isha speak she doesn’t put words into the mouths of a people who have a very fine literary culture of their own.
Yes, there’s been too much of that, I agree. And, yet, there are plenty of readers who won’t pick up a book “about Africa” (overlooking the complexity of it being an entire diverse continent) and might be drawn into this kind of story. Simpson focusses for the most part on relationships, so that it feels like a very intimate story, while simultaneously having a much broader political undercurrent. I can’t comment on how she handles A’isha’s voice without revealing spoilers (given that she is sentenced to death very early in the book) but it does seem as though the author was striving for balance and fairness, while accepting the fact that some questions are unanswerable and, yet, still need to be asked and explored. Who knows what will happen with the NGO your son was hired by, but it certainly sounds like a fascinating role he’d’ve had (and might yet have, there or in another faraway place).