The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

and happy new year

One of the first books on pirates came out in 1724 and was titled A General History of Pyrates. The book’s title had an interesting detail when you keep in mind that women were usually considered bad luck on a ship. (Blackbeard, for example, is known to have killed women just for being on his ship’s deck.) Here’s the full title: “A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE PYRATES, FROM Their first RISE and SETTLEMENT in the Island of Providence, to the present Time. With the remarkable Actions and Adventures of the two Female Pyrates Mary Read and Anne Bonny.” 

Yup, female pyrates. Avast ye, me hearties. 

Mary Read and Anne Bonny joined pirate crews by dressing as men; were fiercely violent; took on and shed lovers with ease; survived all manner of challenges, and at one point were the only two people holding off the entire crew of an English sloop commissioned by the governor of Jamaica to contain piracy in those waters. In short, both women were fascinating. It makes no sense to me that there’s no series on the life of Anne Bonny, who’s adventures culminated with her getting out of prison despite being captured by the authorities and charged with piracy. Unlike poor Read, who died in prison (possibly after childbirth), Bonny was able to claim a happy ending for herself. Some say she returned to her first husband after her stint in prison, others say she assumed a new identity and returned to being a pirate on the high seas. (Clearly, Bonny becomes the vessel for whatever is the storyteller’s own understanding of happily-ever-after.) It’s also worth noting that Read and Bonny were impressive enough as both people and pirates for the rest of their crew to be accepting of both their being women and also their queerness.  

Shannon Chakravorty’s Amina al-Sirafi belongs to this tribe of pirate queens and in addition to all the general wonder she inspires for being the woman captain of a pirate crew, Amina is also brown, from the 12th century and in her 40s when we meet her. (That she’s fictional while Read and Bonny were real women is a minor detail.)

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was recommended to me by Trilogy’s Ahalya who noticed another book I’d picked up and said, “That book? Really? Then you need to read this one.” (This is why good bookshops will always trump algorithms for me.) She was right, but the truth is that even though I was theoretically sold on The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi the moment Ahalya told me the protagonist was an unapologetic brown woman in her 40s, the book joined my piles of unread books and gathered dust. Until it was time for me to pick a book to carry with me on holiday. A book about a woman journeying the seas seemed like the perfect companion for a reader who happens to be a woman journeying over seas. I started reading The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi while waiting to board my flight. Fourteen hours and multiple flight and train changes later, I wasn’t necessarily rested, but I had finished a novel that was sheer joy. 

Haunted by a tragedy that she doesn’t want to revisit, Amina is a retired pirate at the start of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. Once a feared nakhuda — Persian for “master of the boat” and hella more sexy than “captain” — Amina is now a mother, daughter and sister, barely able to scrape a living together. Her simple life gets turned upside down when a wealthy older woman effectively blackmails Amina to return to her old profession. The woman’s granddaughter has been kidnapped and she wants Amina to locate the young girl, but discreetly. Their family is a respectable one and can’t risk becoming the subject of gossip that would follow if an official complaint was filed about the disappearance.

Amina grudgingly agrees because in addition to threats, the older woman dangles the bait of a fabulous reward. And so, Amina is reunited with her beloved ship, Marawati, and old partners in crime: Dalila, the mysterious mistress of poisons (who truly deserves her own series); Tinbu the man from Malabar who is also the best first mate one could ask for; and “Father of Maps”, Majed of Mogadishu.

The case of the missing girl quickly becomes complicated when Amina realises that the girl left her family home willingly. Also, the man who has allegedly kidnapped her just happens to be a wizard of black magic. Oh, and there’s also a demon hunting for Amina. 

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is historical fiction at its rompiest, with Amina hurtling from adventure to adventure. It’s so refreshing to come across a woman protagonist who isn’t young, who knows herself, can have adventures and grow despite having a storied past and being all kinds of awesome at the very start of the book. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman in my 40s, but it’s glaringly obvious to me that there’s a serious shortage of fiction that feature older woman as stars of stories. A woman getting to be a protagonist is rare enough (though there has been a bit of an improvement on that front), but if she gets to be the lead, she’s invariably young or fretting about growing older because she’s in her 30s (trust me, as someone reporting from the other side, it only gets better). Ageing seems to terrify us as societies (we’re not particularly used to the idea of growing old and being healthy. At least in recorded history, today’s medical science is prolonging life in a way that few previous civilisations could have imagined) and ageing women have been systematically dismissed and demonised. Maybe this is because because by this time, we’re likely to be a lot less patient with others, whether they’re lovers or family or colleagues. The temptation to throw caution to the winds is stronger than ever before and ‘consequences’ no longer sounds like a scary word because most of us have been there, done that. Yet older women in fiction tend to be depicted as spent or broken. Whatever the reason that older women make imaginations dry up, heroines like Amina are manna from heaven for crones-in-waiting like me.   

Chakravorty’s story has many modern aspects, but they’re all perfectly swaddled in a magical world inspired by the medieval era and set in the lands scattered across the Indian Ocean. In her author’s note, Chakravorty writes that while working on the book, she’d declared, “I’m going to make it completely historically accurate except for the plot.” She’s done just that, taking us to different places in what we know today as the Middle East, Mogadishu and Socotra. Carefully researched and beautifully imagined, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi draws on folktales and history, which make the story feels credibly real. The book also makes you appreciate just how much we turn blind to when we follow a Eurocentric perspective on history. “In our modern age, we are accustomed to thinking of continents and land borders; rarely do we see the sea and its littorals as places of shared culture,” writes Chakravorty in her author’s note. “But long before the so-called European Age of Exploration (an age that would do more damage to existing Indian Ocean networks and indigenous populations than any such incursion before), the ports of the Indian Ocean were bustling, cosmopolitan places where one could find goods and people from all over.” True fact, and there’s something rather poetic about fiction doing its bit to widen the perspectives that may have been blinkered by non-fiction. 

I know I spoke about the women pirates earlier, but the more I think about it, Amina reminds me of Lady Isabella Trent. Amina’s older, grizzlier and much more foul-mouthed, but they’re both powerful women who radiate determination and refused to be broken by circumstance. Filed under: Literary crushes. 

There are few things that feel quite as neat as ending the year with a bloody good book. (For all those who would like to correctly point out that the year is not yet over, I agree that we’ve got a few days left to go but I’m fairly certain I will not be doing much reading in this time.) It’s been a tangled knot of a year, but that it’s winding down like this, with a bit of magic, feels reassuring. (Never mind all the other things that seem determined to get more tightly, unravel-ably knotted.)

Traditionally, this is the time for annual round-ups and best-of-the-year lists, but I’ve read so little this year that it would be ridiculous for me to attempt any of these. Instead let me leave you with wishes for the year that’s coming.

May you find yourself in stories and also lose yourself in them whenever you need that reprieve.
May you find comfort and insight, even if it’s through fictional characters.
May no one be able to shift you from being at the centre of your narrative, and if that happens, I hope you’ll be able to wrest back control.
May you feel all the feels, without being overwhelmed by them. And if you are overwhelmed, may books be the life raft that helps guide you to safer waters.
May we all find what we need to make our imaginations become wilder than ever before. After all, considering the hot mess that the real world is, the imagination has a lot of heavy lifting to do.
In short, may the stories you need find you in the year ahead.

Here’s to a new year in which we feel a little more blessed — with good, happy-making books, if not anything else.

Take care, and see you in 2024.