However, Aisha is a bit different than everyone else. She abhors social conventions and niceties, the restrictive gender roles she is expected to follow, and the path set out for her, represented by the kind market boy Hassan who, as her grandmother astutely notes, likes her. To Aisha, this pronouncement is as “grave as though it were from the mouth of a witch who reads portents.” Aisha savors her moments of independence when “she can imagine she is walking toward something rather than in between things.”

This motivation is so compelling that it would make for an engaging book on its own. But the story does not end there. Elements of the fantastic infuse this tale, from the two crows named White Breast and Gololi who see and comment on all, to the mythical beasts that roam the sea, to Almassi, an imprisoned snake demon whose whispered name serves throughout as both portent and promise. Aisha’s story merges with the fantastic when she encounters a talking cat named Hamza who offers to take her to sea to look for her father. He calls up a boat made of the bones of a prehistoric fish, and they sail into the open, devouring mouth of the ocean. In her quest to reach her father, Aisha must make her way past all manner of fantastic beasts, from the Leviathan who served as helpmate and companion to her father, to the King of the Drowned, a beast made of sunken ships with a voice “of all the drowned dead,” to the terrifying Baba wa Papa, the Father of Sharks. As a small girl in the middle of a wide ocean, she must rely on wit and cunning to outmaneuver these monsters, trick them into revealing her father’s location, and rescue her father.

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, is many things: an adventure, a story of myth and legend, a portrait of Mombasa, and a coming-of-age tale. The protagonist, Aisha, lives with her grandmother, Hababa Swafiya, in Mombasa. Aisha’s mother died when she was young, and her father, a fisherman, went to sea. Aisha spends her days doing what is expected of her: taking the grandson of a family friend to the market, helping her grandmother around the house, saying her prayers, and, of course, waiting for her father to return. Everyone, including her grandmother, has given up hope that he will.

As her father teaches her, “Everyone must have their share.” To call up each creature from the depths, she must part with something dear to her. Aisha draws the parallel back to her life in Mombasa and the young boy whose kindnesses, as she correctly perceives, have an undercurrent of expectation: “This was a transaction, and as with Hassan and the eggs, she didn’t know what she was buying. But unlike with Hassan, the worst thing that could happen was only to be eaten alive, quickly and immediately.” Even her father’s Leviathan expected to be given Aisha as a child bride so that he might “make a home for all of us under the sea.”

Aisha succeeds in returning home with her father and her life intact. But other mouths are waiting for Aisha in Mombasa. She must decide whether or not to remove the thrumming obsession of the sea from her father’s heart, “a beloved anchor — it sinks him and yet it is his.” She must contend with the gentle market boy Hassan, who eventually makes his desire known, and with Hababa Hadia, a treacherous older relative who hides her cutting vitriol behind a smile. And there are the creatures of Mombasa that fear what the girl has brought back from the water and hope to wake the terrifying Almassi, the snake demon, to neutralize the threat. Eventually, Aisha must decide whether to walk the path expected of her or to follow her passion back into the sea, to find the cat Hamza and make the journey to the fabled House of Rust, where “you will go wherever you want and ask whatever you want, all the poorly hidden things and the deeply buried ones … Everything you only half saw because you half imagined it will be fully seen, will show itself to you.”

Aisha is part of the diasporic Hadrami, Arabs of southern Yemen who emigrated to locations throughout the Indian Ocean ranging from Singapore and India to the Swahili coast of Africa, where Mombasa is located. This heritage can be seen in the portrait of Aisha’s grandfather Jedh whose “head had been turbaned in clean white cloth … and posed with a stately indifference, still dressed in the style of his village in Hadramawt.” It is also evident in Hababa Hadia’s sneering derision, her “pride of one of those arrogant people who claim their blood has not been ‘muddled’ by Mombasa itself. Oh no, they were real Arabs.” By contrast, Aisha “had Jedh and Mombasa in [her] too … the Swahili was in Aisha’s blood, in her mouth, on her face … and Hababa Hadia must laugh at them, for she thought she was better than them.”

From this narrative Mombasa emerges as a place of beauty and contradictions, of culture, religion, and tradition. Wedding singers not only sing songs but serve as gossiping troubadours; every house that hosts them “would receive tidings known only to spymasters that enjoyed their work a little too thoroughly.” When visiting Aisha’s Hababa, they “untie the wood blocks from their lesos and clap-clap-_clap_ a frenzy that called for rain and love like a war-lord howls for blood. Whenever they had kahawa [coffee], Subira, the oldest wedding singer, cataracts eclipsing her sight, would begin the solemn ritual of reading the grounds.” Shark hunters hang out at the port, “scrappy men near where the mangroves began,” including the aged and mysterious Zubeir, who sees beyond the physical world and has some history with Aisha’s Hababa. There is the mosque with the beggar asleep out front. There are the “hot days in Ramadan, the heat of sunlight so intense that it flooded every action with time, dragged it down and made it slow.” Old Muslim men play cards in town, “a cud of miraa round one cheek.” Threading through these portraits are the idioms and proverbs that lend musicality and depth to life in Mombasa.

This portrait creates a stunning milieu while complicating the coming-of-age narrative. Aisha views everyone in Mombasa as sleepwalking through life, but they are, in fact, vibrant and fully alive in their choices and pursuits. Gently, Hamza warns her about what she’s missing: “You are so stubborn, Aisha, and so very hurt, to turn living into a transaction, a business of debts one cannot escape from.” Nowhere is this more evident than a showdown between Aisha and her Hababa. When she asks why Hababa would marry a man she didn’t love, Hababa responds:

The loneliest years of my life were long and hard. I had no male guardian, and your father was barely of age. I had to protect myself in ways you will never understand … You will not treat me as though my life has all been a string of trifling events and dramatic misfortunes. I loved your grandfather, I needed him … Because I decided to live in the real world and be a real person, I had my own house, my own life, my own future.

Bajaber’s prose resembles the protagonist herself: beautiful, haunting, and delicate, with an inner musculature that energizes sentences laden with imagery. While the pacing occasionally lags from the effort to maintain such a multifaceted narrative, The House of Rust is a compelling book, and its author, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, is one to watch.

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Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Mombasarian writer of Hadhrami descent. Her work has appeared in Enkare Review, Lolwe, and Down River Road, among other places. She lives in Mombasa, Kenya.

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Melissa Reddish’s stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, and Grist, among others. She is the author of My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud (Tailwinds Press, 2016) and Girl & Flame (Conium Books, 2017).