Amira Ghenim's A Calamity of Noble Houses: Confronting the clash of forbidden desire and tradition in 20th-century Tunisia

Earlier this year, Tunisian writer and academic Amira Ghenim made her English-language debut with the translation of A Calamity of Noble Houses, a family saga set in 20th-century Tunisia that revolves around the noble Ennaifer and Rassaa families.

The story begins on a fateful night in December 1935, when Zbaida Rassaa, married to Mohsen Ennaifer, is accused of having a scandalous affair with Tahar Haddad, a radical activist and intellectual.

In unfolding these events, the novel adopts a Rashomon-style structure, comprising eleven chapters, each offering a different family member’s account of the incident. Through this, readers are invited to question the fluidity of truth, reality, guilt, and innocence.

To fully understand the scandal, the narrative traces Zbaida’s upbringing in the modern Rassaa household, where her parents valued their daughters’ education and relative freedom, ensuring they attended French colonial schools, which were the most accessible form of education for North African girls in the first half of the twentieth century.

Concerned about their daughters’ command of Arabic, their father, Ali, hires Tahar, a student from a poor background, to teach them. This decision, intended to strengthen the family’s educational foundations, sets the stage for further complications.

Zbaida and Tahar fall in love, but, fearing the impact on his family’s social standing, Ali rushes to marry her off to Mohsen, the eldest son of the Ennaifer family, a symbol of patriarchal tradition.

A few years later, the tensions of this arrangement erupt when Zbaida receives a mysterious letter from Tahar, intercepted by her brother-in-law, igniting the scandal.

This sequence of events highlights the novel's central tragedy: Zbaida, a woman enlightened by modern education, ultimately succumbs to patriarchal control.

Tradition versus modernity 

At its core, the story is a meditation on the confrontation between tradition and modernity. It is an age-old theme that many Arab writers have explored since the onset of European colonisation, remaining a foundational, if not existential, concern in modern Arabic literature and occupying the minds of Arab thinkers for centuries.

Modernity and tradition are complex concepts that are difficult to define. Simply put, modernity represents an ensemble of post-Enlightenment thought, encompassing rationalism, empiricism, progress, secularism, and the rejection of tradition, whereas tradition values stability, religious authority, rigidity, and continuity with the past.

In Arabic literature, this confrontation is often expressed through the clash between two worldviews: colonial European modernity and Islamic tradition.

The novel illustrates this theme through its characters, each presenting their version of the story according to their worldview, although some portrayals lack nuance, resulting in one-dimensional characterisation.

For instance, Mohsen’s father asserts: “There’s nothing in this life more harmful to women than trying to imitate men. A woman loses half of her femininity any time she holds a pen instead of scissors and a needle, or puts a book in her lap instead of an embroidery hoop and ball of wool.”

These strong and dichotomous characterisations leave little room for the reader’s reflection or imagination, and adding more depth to the traditional characters would have made a more poignant contribution to the discourse on tradition and modernity.

A clash of beliefs 

The novel, however, adds an interesting layer to the modernity-tradition dyad by incorporating a spiritual perspective informed by indigenous epistemology.

Different worldviews coexist and sometimes overlap through the characters: a secular worldview shaped by colonial education (‘modernity’), a religious Islamic worldview (‘tradition’), and a spiritual worldview informed by indigenous and Sufi practices.

The Sufi framework is often employed in Arabic novels to transcend the strictly modern and traditional, or to strike a balance between the two.

This worldview, though Islamic, draws from indigenous North African practices that centre on the omnipresence of the otherworldly, the worship of saints, awareness of jinns, the practice of magic, and pervasive superstition.

Amira employs this spiritual worldview in the chapters focusing on female characters who find themselves caught between the forces of tradition and modernity.

For them, this way of interpreting the world appears to be the only means of gaining agency and exerting control within a patriarchal system: making offerings at shrines for good luck, seeking the help of magicians to cast spells that influence others, or interpreting mysterious illnesses as jinn possession that can be warded off through faith and effort.

The tension between these different frameworks is a central theme in the novel, with characters dismissing each other’s philosophical perspectives while attempting to persuade the reader of their own beliefs.

Each chapter is told by a different — and highly unreliable — character, each presenting their own version of events and interpretation of the truth, so the accounts don’t always come together into a coherent story.

Tunisian complexity

Spanning nearly 400 pages, A Calamity of Noble Houses serves as both an introduction to contemporary North African fiction and a window into the complexity of Tunisia, highlighting multiple cultural layers and a wide spectrum of characters and perspectives.

Despite its wealth of information, the novel comes with caveats: it is often unclear whether it aims to be a fictionalised biography of Tahar Haddad seen through the eyes of others, while also grappling with numerous 20th-century Tunisian issues such as women’s rights, classism, slavery and anti-Black racism, homosexuality and homophobia, disability, colonialism, Hitler’s occupation, and antisemitism. 

The final chapters feel drawn out, and the tension built throughout the novel does not conclude with a conventional resolution, which is not unexpected given the format.

This may well be intentional, as the ultimate aim of the story appears to be a warning against the essentialisation of truth, achieved through the interplay of different worldviews, contrasting narratives, and persistent uncertainties.

Ilham Essalih is a book reviewer, researcher, and Bookstagrammer based in London. She specialises in postcolonial literatures from the MENA region and diasporas

Follow her on Instagram: @ilhamreads