The Allspice Bath by Sonia Saikaley
2019, Inanna Publishing, 320 pages, $22.95
1970s-1990s, Middle Eastern. Women's Studies. 1st Place Winner for the 2020 International Book Awards for Multicultural Fiction.
Indigo, Amazon, Inanna Publishing
I enjoyed this book, but as a White man, I am not the target audience. This book is very much the experience of a Lebanese woman and very much attached to that context. The book is centralized around that experience of growing up as a young girl, coming of age as a young woman, as a Canadian-born child of conservative immigrant parents. Conveying that experience is what substitutes for a linear story.
The main character is named Adele Azar. She is the youngest of four girls born to Youssef the grocer and Samira the housewife, both from the old country. The pressure the parents put on their children to marry within their community and fulfil the role expected of them is a nuanced narrative. While the father is emotionally and upon occasion physically abusive, he’s not a caricature of orientalist male oppression. He loves his family, but has terrible, learned behaviors, and gradually acknowledges this as the story’s redemptive arch. The three older sisters all marry Lebanese men, but they’re not forced into the marriages, and they appear to find happiness in those lives that are lain out for them. The theme here is coercion rather than force.
I liked that element of the theme, as people make do with what life’s given them, rather than that American trope of “follow your heart and everything will be fine”, although it is there for Adele, particularly in the last quarter of the book when she moves to Toronto and manages to support herself as an artist. Mother Samira doesn’t internalize Canada and think of it as home, but finds joy in her family. The sisters don’t complain about their husbands and children, but we’re not really introduced to many of them.
That’s one of the criticisms that I have of the book, that there are characters that we don’t get to know. The sisters aren’t really developed, and their families are anonymous shapes in the background. The idea is that the Lebanese community is the limits of their world in Ottawa, but we only occasionally see glimpses of this. The most commonplace writer’s critique of “show don’t say” is present here.
Much like life, there are characters who come in and seem important for a chapter or two, then leave, sometimes to return and sometimes to disappear. That’s not a criticism of the book, it made me think of the people in my own life who meant so much to me for a time, and now I wouldn’t know how to contact them.
As the purpose of this review is for a history of Ottawa website, I have to mention that city is not a major setting, even though 75% of the story takes place in Ottawa. Adele’s mind is the setting of the story. There are trips to Montreal and Lebanon, a move to Toronto, but physical location is not central to this book. It’s a character study, not a melodrama or a travelogue. However, it could have taken place in any city. There are a few references to some landmarks, but nothing that would put the location centrally into the story.
★★★★☆
