Melissa Oliver revels in poet Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel.
Have you ever been halfway through a book and needed to pause and sit with it for a minute to take in the fact that this will be your only first time reading it? Like you already know it will be a book you go back to again and again, but in this moment it will be the only time it is new to you. I had this while reading Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel Before the Winter Ends: it took me a long time to finish reading because I wanted to draw out that beautiful first-time experience.
I pondered for a long time how I was going to write this review. I’d lost any sense of how to form a coherent thought or sentence. It is a book that completely took me away from my own life and my own ways of seeing the world. It’s unlike anything I’ve read for a long time and will be a novel that a lot of people will not know they’ve been waiting for.
This is a novel of three parts: the first is set in 2019 Wellington, and follows two characters, Omar and his mother Asha. When we first meet Omar, he is struggling: at university; with maintaining friendships; at speaking Arabic and Somali; at connecting to his whakapapa and to his father; at connecting to Somalia; and he is struggling to look after his mother Asha who is ill with “it”.
As the novel continues, we slip back to 1999 and to Cairo and Mogadishu to follow Asha and her relationship with Omar’s father. In part three we move to 2019 Cairo to where Asha returns, and Omar visits for the first time. At its core, this novel is the story of a mother and son and the canyons of space, time, history and grief between them.
At just under 300 pages, this novel manages to carry a lot of grief. It runs through every page; you can feel it simmering away behind the words. The grief comes in many forms and are woven through the novel – a longing for a home you have lost or have never known; mourning a parent you never knew; a loss of language you feel you should speak; a desire to connect with people who don’t understand you.
Asha is grieving for a life she once knew and Omar is grieving for the one he hasn’t gotten to know. The benefit of reading both from Omar and Asha’s points of view means you get to see the circumstances of the lives that have made them and forged their relationship. Part two of the novel (1999 Cairo and Mogadishu) offers a different insight to the Asha that we encounter in part one. It peeled back my understanding of how she came to be in Aotearoa and the circumstances that informed her move.
It is a testament to Mohamed’s skill that she is able to cover such an expanse of locations in the book: Wellington, Cairo and Mogadishu. Taking on these varied places but also timeframes is a huge commitment and her prose paints these places so well. Wellington comes alive on the page. I am walking down a rainy Riddiford Street with Omar and I am inside the Baobab Cafe with him too. In Cairo and Mogadishu the heat beats down and I walk the markets with Asha; I am sitting beneath sumac trees.
The fullness of these settings made me think of Mohamed’s skill as a poet (We’re All Made of Lightning won the Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Award in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards). Before the Winter Ends has a beautiful, lyrical quality to it; and Mohamed works with a quiet skill to find the right way to communicate both the small moments and the large ideas with equal weight; a teabag bleeds, the rain bangs, language sticks like a bone in the throat.
There is so much to tease out in this book, so many wonderful ideas explored: but one that has stuck with me is the idea that language can get stuck in the throat. Omar is the child of a refugee mother and a father he doesn’t know. His only knowledge of his father is from his grandmother who tells Omar his father wasn’t a real man with a “lineage made up of ghosts.” His sense of self is precarious. Language is a big part of making you feel like you are enough, that you have connection to a place and people.
Many Māori in Aotearoa, like myself, experience this every day; that prickly feeling like your tongue and body long for another way of being that is hard for you to access. Omar and Asha both experience this in different ways to different degrees in the novel. Omar’s language sticks in his throat: he understands Somali but can’t think quickly enough to respond; he mumbles through his readings of the Quran in Arabic that are meant to help heal his mother. Asha longs for the comfort of her mother tongue while living in Cairo. Her Somali language is “buried deep in her tongue” – she is unable to communicate with others as well as she would like, so she remains locked inside. Lack of language traps them both in states of disconnection and exclusion.
Khadro Mohamed has created a piece of literature that is quiet, beautiful, sorrowful – you won’t forget it once you read it. It feels like a deep breath before you take the next step, that infinite space before you move on.
But I won’t completely move on: I will be carrying this book in my heart. Omar and Asha have taken up residence and they won’t be leaving me for a long time to come.
Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed ($30, Tender Press) is available to purchase at Unity Books.
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