Marcie McCauley Reviews Farzana Doctor’s Seven
Seven. Farzana Doctor. Dundurn Press. $22.99, 416 pp., ISBN: 978-1-45974-639-8
Seven opens with hot tea. One character sits with a full cup, untouched. Her aunt speaks through the cardamom steam – “You should do it like me” – and pours tea from her cup into her saucer to drink. Sharifa agrees, and apologizes when she pours and dribbles. From this innocuous opening scene, readers become engaged in a study of how we inherit and disseminate ideas and traditions.
Farzana Doctor’s previous novels similarly invite readers into ordinary, contained spaces – an office building, an urban neighbourhood, a resort – that raise questions about belonging. In Stealing Nasreen (2007), Shaffiq works as a janitor and his passion for “clues and curiosity” spirals outward as the narrative broadens to include Nasreen, who often works late in her office and reminds Shaffiq of “Home.”
Ismail’s story in Six Metres of Pavement (2011), examines personal responsibility and regret against a backdrop of tragedy pulled from newspaper headlines. In Toronto’s Little Portugal, he navigates sustained grief surrounding his daughter’s death, and through his community relationships he witnesses and participates in the act of becoming.
In All Inclusive (2015), Ameera works at a Mexican resort and explores her evolving sexuality in her off-hours whereas Azeez struggles to connect and has difficulty maintaining relationships; their experiences create a pattern as themes echo, revealing ironies and injustices about status and desire.
In Seven, her fourth novel, Doctor continues to explore familiar themes of home, labour, sexuality, regret, isolation, and responsibility. Here, she simultaneously narrows and broadens narrative focus: she zooms in to reveal the intricacies of a single marriage, and she zooms out to consider the Dawoodi Bohra community, a sect of Shia Islam.
Sharifa – niece, daughter, wife, mother, cousin, friend, and teacher – is at the heart of the novel and readers travel with her from New York City to India, where her husband, Murtuza, will teach for a term while Sharifa cares for their daughter and researches great-great-grandfather Abdoolally. Sharifa’s plans – to meet with descendants and blog about her ancestor – underscore the theme of inheritance. Maintaining the focus on Sharifa limits readers’ knowledge, creating a growing tension. We become increasingly aware that the characters around Sharifa suspect or know more than she does, about how the women in her family were instrumental in her female cousins’ experiences with khatna.
Khatna is a Dawoodi Bohra tradition which unfolds when girls are seven years old: proponents view the cutting as female circumcision, opponents view it as female genital mutilation. Sharifa’s cousin Fatema is a survivor and seeks to halt the practice (the author, too, is a survivor and volunteers with WeSpeakOut). Fatema’s activism introduces open conflict with both older family members who were aware of – or responsible for – the arrangements for this procedure, and younger members whose opinions vary.
With a permanent home in the west, Sharifa’s daughter, Zee, will not participate in this tradition, but while visiting India, Sharifa tempers her response to the practice with her love for all parties involved: “I like a little tradition and membership in a community, even if I don’t always follow its rules.” As familial conflict escalates, however, Sharifa confronts specific realities: women responsible for loving and protecting each other and the younger generations also caused harm.
At first, she is grateful that her own mother, a survivor, protested Sharifa’s khatna, but her cousins’ legacy of trauma – the emotional and psychological betrayals, the physical ramifications – leads her to recognize patterns: “The particular components of these stories don’t vary much, as though an entire community, generation after generation, is following the same terrible, unwritten script.”
Quotidien details in the novel about marriage and parenting counter narrative tensions. But even while homeschooling Zee, exploring subjects like gender and electrical charges, Sharifa is increasingly aware that Zee is approaching the age at which Sharifa’s cousins were taken to a cutter. Her genealogical research no longer provides her with a distraction when it intersects with this theme.
The author’s note explains how Doctor’s own great-great-grandfather inspired Abdoolally’s story. In the novel’s final chapter, readers view the fictional blog post, and throughout the novel, short chapters relay Abdoolally’s story in a contrasting font. Ultimately, about a third of the chapters are rooted in the past, but the focus remains on the present action with longer contemporary chapters. In small motions, the chronology of Abdoolally’s story moves ahead. In small increments, Doctor develops the thematic links between past and present.
This interplay between dual narratives is handled deftly, much as Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) balances alignment and divergence in a satisfying way. Thematically, Doctor’s novel meshes with novels like Katherena Vermette’s The Break (2016), which also raises questions surrounding tradition and violence, and Elizabeth Ruth’s Matadora (2013), with its core matters of identity and loss. The relationship between the body and selfhood is key, as it is in Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2016), and the exploration of secrecy and sexuality is reminiscent of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996). Complications revolving around agency and victimization are central as they are in Catherine Bush’s Accusation (2013), with the kind of commentary on class and personal responsibility that readers find in Katrina Onstad’s Everything Has Everything (2012).
One could view these novels as explorations of a single social issue, however weighty and complex; this kind of reductive description would still appeal to readers who are passionate about ethics, who read primarily to broaden their understanding and deepen their compassion. Seven – like the seven novels above – cultivates a wide readership because of the dedicated characterization and the deliberate expansion of storytelling territory, particularly the supporting characters and the scene building. In just a handful of chapters, Doctor secures her readers’ relationship to Sharifa and, in time, their relationship to a story about khatna, a story about navigating a polarizing issue within the context of a family, a story that cannot be reduced to one idea. Seven presents a messy situation and Doctor skillfully curates the disarray into a rewarding and consistently engaging read.
One of Doctor’s earlier novels ends with this sentence: “The movement might be minute, perhaps imperceptible to the naked eye, but certainly, definitely real.” One could draw a parallel here to how a small cut, even one made for symbolic purposes, is still a real cut, and its impact, imperceptible or not, just as significant. One could also observe that any movement – however small – in service of resistance and reconciliation, is real change. Seven is one such movement. It’s just a story, but it’s still very real.
Marcie McCauley reads, writes and lives in Toronto (which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - including the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and the Wendat – land still inhabited by their descendants). Her writing has been published in American, British and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online.