Celestial Bodies and Plato’s Symposium Posted on April 24, 2023September 12, 2024 By Roo “My moon and my sun thou hast quenched for ever.” —James Joyce, Ulysses Jokha Alharthi’s 2010 book, Celestial Bodies, tells the story of three sisters and a host of other characters as they make their way through a cosmic sea of possibility, visualized by the titular “celestial bodies.” The sisters are Mayya, Asma, and Khawla. Mayya marries a man named Abdallah, who becomes a successful merchant, but their marriage is cold and distant; Asma marries a man named Khalid, who works as a doctor, and they have a happy marriage but struggle with fertility issues; and Khawla is in love with a boy named Nasir who goes abroad to study and returns many years later, and once he returns, Khawla realizes she shouldn’t have waited. Another important thread is the story of Azzan and his lover Najiya, known also as Qamar, the Moon. Celestial Bodies tells the myriad, constellation-like stories of people who, no matter how hard they try, can’t seem to get what they want or need out of their relationships—specifically romantic/spousal relationships—with others. Alharthi drew influence from Ibn Hazm, an eleventh century Andalusian scholar, and Plato’s Symposium. Understanding how these sources interact with Alharthi’s novel allows us to more deeply understand the themes at play in the story. The relationship between Azzan and Qamar is the crux of Celestial Bodies. The rest of the novel’s aspects orbit around it. Azzan is the husband of Salima, who is the mother of the three aforementioned sisters. Azzan has an affair with a mysterious woman known as Qamar, the Moon, who he falls madly in love with. The first chapter concerning their relationship begins with Azzan returning to Al-Awafi from a Bedouin settlement. This is a very conscious introduction to the themes that the story of Azzan and Qamar will cover. The Bedouin are nomads. They represent, in this instance, some kind of whole half human. This idea will make sense (as much as it can) once I introduce Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’ speech. Aristophanes’ Speech Immediately prior to Azzan and Qamar’s first chapter together, we see Asma reading again a passage from an unnamed book she has read many times before, enough times to commit the passage to memory. The passage is this: “Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half. It is decreed that each body will meet the body that holds the other half of that rent soul. Between the two a passion arises from that ancient bond. From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.” This concept reappears in Asma’s thoughts throughout the story. Alharthi cites the myth as coming from a passage from The Dove’s Necklace, a treatise on love written by Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm in 1022, although whether this is actually from where it is sourced is a matter of internal debate. My phrasing, in the interest of clarity, will indicate that it is Ibn Hazm’s writing, but I have little evidence that that is the case beyond its name in the novel. Although it has been noted that Ibn Hazm was heavily influenced by Plato’s Phaedrus, in terms of the passage cited by Alharthi it is clear that he was also influenced by Symposium, written by Plato around 380 BC. It’s not very difficult to draw this line. Andalusi literature was strongly influenced by the Greeks, especially the works of Plato and Aristotle. These works were translated into Arabic in intellectual Islamic cities like Baghdad and later made their way to al-Andalus through the Islamic courts. Scholars in eleventh century Cordoba had ready access to these sources and would have been aware of all of them. Symposium is structured as a dialogue (Plato’s dominant form of expression), between various notable characters. The speech of Aristophanes, the comic playwright, is the most relevant here. Aristophanes’ speech comes in the midst of a fraught discussion of the nature of love. He follows Eryximachus’ overly pedantic and abstract speech about the beneficial effects of attraction and harmony between people. Aristophanes shifts the conversation back to the level of the individual, and expounds a comic myth to illustrate his point. “Firstly,” he says, “there used to be three human genders, not just two, as there are nowadays. There was also a third, which was a combination of both the other two…the gender itself has died out.” “Secondly,” he continues, “each person’s shape was complete: they were round, with their backs and sides forming a circle.” This is likely an influence on Ibn Hazm’s idea of the primordial spherical spirit. Important to Celestial Bodies, Aristophanes associates each of these three primordial genders a celestial object: “the original parent of the male gender was the sun, while that of the female gender was the earth and that of the combined gender was the moon (emphasis mine), because the moon too is a combination, of the sun and the earth.” Zeus, terrified of these whole humans because of their power and ambition, came up with an ingenious idea: he would split the humans into two. Apollo healed the bodies of the split humans, pulling their skin around to cover the wound and “knotting” it together at the belly button (ἓν στόμα ποιῶν ἀπέδει κατὰ μέσην τὴν γαστέρα—“he knotted the stomach into the middle, making one opening”). He also turned their heads so they would face their scars. This splitting made them less threatening, as they are contrasted from their powerful and strong predecessors as weak and introverted. However, these half humans longed to merge with their other halves: they “threw their arms around each other in an embrace and longed to be grafted together. As a result, because they refused to do anything without their other halves, they died of starvation and general apathy.” This is essentially analogous to the modern idea of soul-mates. Zeus took pity on them, and came up with another plan: he would move their genitals to their front so they could fornicate—“His reasons for doing this were to ensure that, when couples embraced, as well as male-female relationships leading to procreation and offspring, male-male relationships would at least involve sexual satisfaction,” so that people could relax and get on with their lives. Aristophanes’ speech is fundamentally pessimistic. The gods are bitter and fearful, and Apollo’s “healing” is done out of spite: he turned our heads so we would see our scars, an unnecessary punishment. If he hadn’t there would have been no need to move our genitals. Aristophanes even likens the split human to a sliced egg, painting the rending of body/soul as an antibirth brought on by the cruelty of the gods. The differences between Ibn Hazm and Aristophanes’ speech are fascinating in terms of religious themes—the difference between splitting the body and splitting the soul and how they fit into Greek polytheism and Islamic monotheism is important and revealing, but it is another avenue of research that is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it should be kept in mind. It is clear that Alharthi intentionally referenced Symposium. Yes, “celestial spheres” feature prominently in Ibn Hazm, but the emphasis on the moon is singular to Aristophanes’ speech, as is the description on page 193 of bodies with two heads, four arms, and four legs. It is unsurprising that Alharthi would not want to mention Symposium explicitly. Oman has one of the worst freedom of speech profiles in the world, and works containing politically sensitive content frequently go unpublished. Because of her class and connections in the Omani power hierarchy, Alharthi is able to get away with some things, but surely she censors herself to some extent, as is clear in her treatment of sexual assault and slavery within the novel. Aristophanes’ speech contains extensive commentary on pagan beliefs, androgyny, homosexuality, and is one of the only Ancient Greek sources that talks explicitly about female homosexuality. These concepts would have been contentious for Omani publishers. The Bedouin The Bedouin “scorned, even despised, the idea of putting down roots.” They held fast to their untethered natures, preserving the impermeable boundaries that separated them from what was called “the life of the settled”. They are also almost entirely untethered from the plot, and make no meaningful impact on the story as a group. There is a reason Alharthi centers the Bedouin so prominently in the first chapter concerning the relationship between Azzan and Qamar. The nomads represent a freedom from the half-life of the split bodies or incomplete souls. They are untethered, free, presented as a dichotomy to what will become the nature of Azzan and Qamar’s relationship. It is significant that Azzan’s “friendly companion” is the moon when he is far from al-Awafi, but the Bedouin prefer to live away from the city lights—“the homes of the Bedouin scattered beneath the lip of the vast sand dune were not very far away from al-Awafi but at no point did the two settlements overlap”—close, but entirely separate, and whole in doing so. Their relationship with al-Awafi is like that of two objects in orbit. Somehow, the Bedouin have freed themselves from the consuming desire to become one with another, possibly because they have already become one with themselves. Here Alharthi’s themes are almost pastoral: the city is a symptom of the human need for togetherness, but the nomads of the story are somehow beyond that. Or, if not beyond it, they’ve learned how to live with it. For the rest of the story, separation and the inability of human beings to connect to each other on the level of healing the ancient wounds inflicted by Zeus is a shadow that looms over the lives of the characters. Qamar is one of the Bedouin, and this becomes important in a crucial scene toward the end of the book. Celestial Spheres In one sense, the idea of “celestial bodies” and “celestial spheres”, planets, astral bodies, and space garbage represents the structure of the story. It is told in short, fleeting scenes or anecdotes that are scattered throughout several generations and many different points of view. These ephemeral snapshots of life and these melancholy characters are akin to planets or stars, cosmically adjacent but still light-minutes or years apart, unreachable. Yet all those planets and stars, all matter in the universe was once one, in the singularity from which the universe would be conjured. They’ve been split for as long as anyone can remember. As the Quran says, “To God We Belong and To God We Return” (Qur’an 2:156). It is closely tied to the concept of soul/body splitting discussed in Ibn Hazm and Plato’s work in another sense. Structurally, the story is split in two: between the Abdallah’s stream of consciousness figments and the past tense, structured snippets of the lives of Azzan, Qamar, and the three sisters. This same divide can also be described as a split between the teleological and the temporally noncomformative. Even the fonts are different—Abdallah’s sections are sparser, thinner, like a famished first draft, while the past tense sections are made up of thick, measured, thought out characters. Both of these structural decisions are important in creating the chaotic beauty Alharthi wants to evoke while also visually representing the distance and closeness between all the characters. They are divided in time, space, emotion, and class, yet they are always searching for something closer. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the primordial body split was Plato’s answer to the eternal struggle of Sisyphus. The Crucial Scene This chapter, near the end of the book, begins with Azzan bringing Qamar close, saying “Najiya! My Fullest Moon, I want you, mine.” The last chapter concerning the lovers was forty-four pages earlier, in which they had a discussion concerning Arabic poetry through the ages. I say a discussion, but it is more of a less-than-conscious emotional feud, fought through the medium of poetry, in which Azzan finds his only refuge of satisfying communication and Najiya finds only horror. This feud, in reality, concerns Azzan’s ever increasing need to become closer or one with Najiya and Najiya’s instinctive recoiling from this behavior. These chapters could easily be adjacent, but they are separated by more than forty pagers, another use of physical/temporal space to illustrate the illicit and sparse nature of these clandestine meetings. “I am yours, already,” Najiya responds to Azzan’s plea. Moaning, he says, “No, not completely.” Freeing herself from his grasp, Najiya asks what he means, to which Azzan answers “I mean, people are always apart, Najiya, they’re separate in the end, even if they think they’re one. It’s the harshest kind of aloneness there is.” Of this, Najiya disapproved. Azzan is the most explicit expression of Aristophanes’ treatise of love. He consciously wishes to become one with his lover, as in the primordial, unsplit, androgynous moon-body of Aristophanes. He pleads with Najiya who, as her whole half-self, does not understand his passion, and drives him away. Soon after, we see a man in the desert pleading to Saturn, which hovers between the departing moon and sun, to “cut Najiya, daughter of Shaykha, from Azzan, son of Mayya…to separate them as darkness is separated from light, and to lead them to despise each other, ever enemies, like the enmity between fire and water.” He even uses similar language to Apollo’s “healing” of the rent human body, pleading the Great Father “to do nothing other than knotting Azzan’s carnal desire for Najiya to make that knot—by the power of these otherworldly spirits—as hard and fast as the knotting of these rock faces and boulders.” Azzan’s primal desire for wholeness in Najiya has grown too strong, too out of control, and must be split and knotted again. It is as if his body opened, flowering, unwinding Apollo’s work. But however unjust the actions of the gods, the damage has been done. Humans are no longer made for such wholeness, and Azzan must be resewn. Gravity Why, then, aren’t all the characters of the story (with the exception of the metaphorically immune Bedouin) throwing themselves at each other, longing to become one? Another trait of the moon, infinitely important to many parts of life throughout human existence, is its gravitational pull. Not only its literal effect on the tides, but also its endless give and take, Yin and Yang, wax and wane. Tides are guided by the moon, but so are souls. Give and take is about balance. One thing flows into the other, summer is always turning into winter and winter into summer. Balance is central to Alharthi’s vision of love. They are full of effort and compromise, and if they grow too close or too far, they snap under the pressure. The Bedouin have found balance, in Alharthi’s earthly cosmology, in orbiting each other without growing too attached or too distant. Najiya desires this relationship with Azzan, but Azzan’s passion is too extreme and untempered. Asma’s relationship with Khalid is the best and most explicit demonstration of this sort of balance. Rather than drawing together and annihilating each other in a vain attempt to recover what was lost, Asma qualifies her idea of split spheres. Khalid’s true love is his art. Asma realizes quickly that, contrary to that passage she comes back to time and time again, Khalid isn’t her other half, but “a celestial sphere complete unto itself.” Perhaps there was some time when the two of them were one, but there is no going back. The skin has already been pulled around by Apollo to heal the wound, precluding any reformation. But Asma and Khalid do reach an equilibrium, where their gravitational fields allow them to orbit each other like twin stars. Khalid “was very conscious and careful to adhere to the orbit he had traced out, and he was always checking to be certain that Asma was right there orbiting in his wake, and watchful above all that she never veered off course. In his own fashion, he did fall in love with her.” Their relationship is not perfect by any means, and Alharthi doesn’t pretend it is. But it is a way of living that is balanced and manageable. Although this seems like a soft rejection by Alharthi of that passage Asma had first read so long ago, the seeds of this balanced union were already laid on page 38. The final sentence of the quote reads: “From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.” Azzan is undelicate, desperately in need of attachment. Mayya is distant, Khawla is mercurial, and Asma has found gravitational balance. Conclusion Celestial Bodies is both a qualified critique of Plato and Ibn Hazm’s conception of love and a prescription for life. It embraces the concept of the split body/soul, but critiques the reflex to become one and denies Aristophanes’ hopeless pessimism. Yes, the human body and soul has been split, but there is no returning to what once was. In order to not destroy each other and ourselves, humans must find balance in their relationships, they must orbit each other, separate celestial bodies but with entwined fields. Bibliography Alharthi, Jokha. Celestial Bodies. New York: Catapult, 2010. Translated by Marilyn Booth. Amnesty International. “Oman 2022.” Amnesty International Report 2022/23: The state of the world’s human rights. Amnesty International, 2023. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Kechichian Joseph A. “A mind of his own.” Gulf News (2012). Plato. Symposium. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Essays
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