Of loss and hope
Set in Oman’s remote mountains and plains, Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger is a poetic novel about longing, healing, and hope.
By Marcia Lynx Qualey
In 2019, when Jokha Alharthi and Marilyn Booth won the International Booker Prize for Celestial Bodies, few Omani novelists were well known in Arabic—and perhaps none but Alharthi in English. In an interview the morning after her win, Alharthi answered questions about her favourite Omani novels. She noted that she had just read Zahran Alqasmi’s 2017 novel Honey Hunger and loved it, both for its unique mountain environment and its poetic language.
In the succeeding five years, the profile of Omani fiction has risen dramatically, with several Omani novels winning awards and acclaim. In February, Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger was released in Marilyn Booth’s graceful English translation.
Although Omani novels began appearing in the 1960s with Abdullah Mohammed al-Taie’s Angels of Green Mountain, until recently, poetry remained the country’s main literary genre. However, in the last decade, novels have begun to flourish, with gifted writers like Alharthi, Alqasmi, Bushra Khalfan, and Huda Hamed applying themselves to the form.
Alqasmi has said that he didn’t shift to writing fiction until 2011 and published his debut in 2013. Honey Hunger was his third novel, but he came to international acclaim with his fourth, The Water Diviner, which won the 2023 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
But Marilyn Booth had already taken note of Jokha Alharthi’s earlier recommendation. “When I first read Honey Hunger, I felt immediately engaged and immersed,” Booth says, “not least because it wanders as bees do from place to place, taste to taste. I love that it is both fierce and gentle about the ecology of the place it is set in, and that human lives are also animal lives.”
“Zahran’s language is precise and beautiful, a joy, and a challenge to render in English. Not least because of the many kinds of flora and fauna that he isn’t shy about naming.”
As in The Water Diviner, the central characters in Honey Hunger are not from Muscat, but rather from a small Omani village. Yet the novel spends little time in the village. Instead, it follows young Azzan as he camps out alone with his bees in the lowlands, and then as he and two friends hunt for wild honey in the mountains.
A novel where characters spend so much of their time alone forces the reader to be attentive less to human relations and more to the sights, smells, and sounds of the surrounding landscape. It is almost a meditative experience; as though the reader, too, had to wait for bees to come drink from a mountain pool before tracking them back to their remote hive. Yet this doesn’t mean that Azzan and his friends live in a completely different universe; they also face the challenges and temptations of modernity. As Azzan’s backstory unspools, we learn that he lost several years of his life to addiction, living in a state of near-perpetual intoxication. It was only a new obsession—bees—that helped him pull himself together.
Throughout this delicately constructed novel, the environment is both overpowering and fragile. We are called to attend to its nuances, including the different flavours of honey, and all the different plants that go into making it. “Zahran’s language is precise and beautiful, a joy, and a challenge to render in English,” Booth says, “not least because of the many kinds of flora and fauna that he isn’t shy about naming.”
And while the characters are largely solitary, this doesn’t mean there is no romance in the book. But like wild honey, love comes slowly, and with great patience.
“Even after doing many drafts of this novel, I always got teary-eyed reaching the beautiful, simple, but vast ending,” Booth says. And like wild-bee hunters who eventually find their gustatory delights, the reader of Honey Hunger also reaches their reward.
Photograph of the author by Kheridine Mabrouck
