“When there is so much broken about the world we currently live in, one cracked person is easy enough to excuse or ignore.”
The Weight of our Sky by Hannah Alkaf tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl with OCD living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, set against the backdrop of the tense atmosphere of the riots the country faced in 1969. Melati is a poor Malay girl living with her mother and a djinn that has been haunting her since her father’s death years ago (for they did not know about mental illnesses such as OCD). She goes to school with her best friend, Saf, enjoys listening to the Beatles and watching movies, and is constantly following the djinn’s relentless instruction, tapping a certain amount of times or counting a certain amount of steps or anything else the djinn demands of her, lest her mother meet an untimely death, one pulled straight from the horrific visions the djinn shows Melati. When Melati and Saf are caught in a riot at a movie theatre one day, Melati finds herself estranged from her mother and familiarity, instead being saved by a Chinese family with a son named Vincent. Scared, lonely, and constantly pressured by the djinn’s never-ending warnings, she sets off with Vincent to find her mother, all while trying to avoid the enraged rioters on both sides of the conflict amidst the political unrest of an unstable country.
“Adults rarely like being told that they don’t have all the answers, or worse still, that the answers they do have are all the wrong ones.”
This is not a love story. This isn’t the tale of a mother-daughter reunion. This does not share the improbable fable of a girl who takes it upon herself to fix a broken nation. In this novel, Alkaf writes of a girl fighting a constant battle with the demon in her mind, with her neighbors on the streets, and with the hand of cards dealt to her by fate that have left her bereft and alone. The masterful portrayal of the djinn haunting Melati shows the realities of a life with OCD, conceptualized into the form of an evil spirit haunting a young girl and forcing her to perform certain things at certain times in certain ways, lest she suffer. Alkaf’s style of writing is poignant, clearly reminiscent of a 16-year-old girl in both vocabulary and mood. This novel is beautifully written, and takes you on a frightening, yet wondrous journey with Melati as she pushes past the spirits haunting her and searches for home.
“If I’m going to wage battle with demons both on the street and in my own head, I’m going to do it with all of myself, and not be weighed down by borrowed clothes and secondhand memories.”
