What Kept You opens in death: fires are raging through the Sydney hills, where Jahan lives with her husband, Ali. The revelation that she is grieving her nani’s death follows shortly afterwards and, a beat later, we learn she has suffered a miscarriage.
In the early pages of her extraordinary debut, Raaza Jamshed warns the reader this is not a story of clean endings and tidy miracles. This is a novel full of ritual and poetry. A type of witchcraft, and of healing. “Perhaps, that’s what I’m trying to do here – to build a staircase out of words, to climb towards you to the sky or descend into the grave and lie down beside you,” Jahan writes of her nani.
This is a novel that sits comfortably in the grey areas between the literal and the figurative; between overcoming grief and being overcome by it. It exists between two worlds – not unlike Jahan herself, who grew up in Pakistan, raised by her nani, before fleeing, as a young adult, to Sydney.
In Pakistan, Jahan’s nani kept a watchful eye on her, mapping out the shadowy motivations of the world around them through story and superstition. But as an adolescent Jahan begins to rebel against the stories she has been told, wanting, as all young people do, to find her own narrative, and her defiance brings her closer to danger. Her recollections start to form a second narrative: we begin to learn the reason she couldn’t stay in Pakistan, and the night she did something that has haunted her in the years since.
Jahan tries to find herself between the stories of her mother, who believed in the predictable arcs of conventional romance, and those of her nani, who spoke of dark things hiding in the shadows. She struggles to identify with either. This disconnect is amplified by her life in Australia, a country where she both belongs and doesn’t, where she has found a friend and a husband who accept her but never seem to fully understand her. There’s a sense that everyone in this story holds themselves at arm’s-length from each other, preventing true intimacies, although their relationships are underpinned by care and concern.
In first-person narration, Jahan addresses her nani throughout. Early on, a facilitator at a grief circle tells her to write for 14 days to a person with whom she has unfinished business: “You write and write and write. And when you’re done, you don’t back-read the letter. You burn it.” And even though this seems to fly in the face of her nani’s belief in the power of stories spoken aloud and shared, the idea takes root in Jahan. There is a sense across the novel’s 15 chapters that we are reading her response to the writing assignment, as she processes the unfinished business she had hoped to leave in Pakistan; the business that keeps her from returning to visit her nani, even upon her death.
Alternating between her recollection of the past and the immediate crisis in the present, these chapters are in part a confession and in part Jahan’s attempt to gain control over her own story.
Jamshed peppers her text with Urdu and Arabic phrases. She leans into the slippage of words, delighting in the poetry and double meanings found in translation. For example, Shamshad (nani’s name) “implicates itself in the English ‘shame’ in the first half but swiftly escapes it in the Urdu ‘happiness’ of the second”. The pleasure for the reader is twofold: Jamshed’s expression is a joy to read, treading carefully between poetry and prose; and thematically, the careful unpacking of words and meaning adds complexity, indirectly critiquing the loss of identity and language that occurs through the flattening process of western colonisation.
Towards the end of the novel, as the fires close in around her and Jahan nears the climax of her recollection of the past, she picks through the half lies and truths that she has told herself over the years. Finally, she lands on this: “All I wanted to be was a girl who was not afraid.” Has she succeeded? In some ways, she has outrun the fears that kept her in place throughout her adolescence but there is a sense that these have been replaced by something just as dark and unforgiving.
What Kept You? is tightly crafted and rich in poetic metaphor but the real satisfaction for a reader lies in its complex portrayal of grief and growing up. By rejecting either of the fixed narratives that Jahan’s matriarchs have prescribed her, Jamshed imagines a space in which grief and hope might coexist. Ultimately, her question is not how to outwit fate but how to make peace with uncertainty.
What Kept You by Raaza Jamshed is out now through Giramondo ($32.95)
