59 pages • 1 hour read
S. A. ChakrabortyThe Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Shannon Chakraborty
Shannon Chakraborty is the New York Times bestselling author of the Daevabad Trilogy for which she was nominated for Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy and Crawford awards. She is also the author of a fourth volume of short stories that takes place in the same world as the Daevabad Trilogy. This trilogy is similar to Amina’s story in that the main protagonist is a disreputable female who is drawn into a magical world. Chakraborty’s love of medieval Middle Eastern history and mythology has a profound influence upon her work, and her series feature mythical Islamic creatures of many sorts, with djinns being a main source of both plot twists and character development throughout the Daevabad Trilogy. Her own conversion to Islam and her desire for the youth of her community to read about themselves helped to inspire the creation of Amina’s character and adventures.
The collision of civilizations stands as one of the many reoccurring themes in Chakraborty’s work, whether the civilizations in question are magical or human. As the stories’ rollicking pace progresses, the action is punctuated by conflicting cultures, powers, and in Amina’s case, ideas about lifestyle. All of these different conceptual frameworks vie for space or control in the lives and worlds of the author’s protagonists. The Daevabad Trilogy is set during a time in which European nations are just beginning to colonize the countries that lie far to the east. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi takes place in the same world as the Daevabad Trilogy, but it is set several hundred years earlier. Amina al-Sirafi’s enemy, the sorcerer Falco, is a European who arrives with the invaders during the time frame that European historians often collectively refer to as the Crusades.
Chakraborty has acknowledged that her work reflects her own conflicted thoughts about being a working parent during Covid lockdowns and simultaneously trying to write Amina’s story at 3:00 am, in between her many responsibilities. During her Kirkus Review and her interview with NPR in 2023, she specifically mentions certain themes that she aimed to develop in Amina’s story, including the Conflicting Worlds of Domesticity and Adventure and the conflict between religion and one’s inborn humanity. She also examines the need for Rekindling and Strengthening One’s Faith. In addition to Chakraborty’s focus on many different aspects of motherhood, these themes represent the primary elements that she infuses into Amina’s adventures.
Genre Context: A Mixture of Genres
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi cannot be described with a single genre label. In a conversation with the New York Public Library in January of 2022, Chakraborty emphasizes the influence that The Thousand and One Nights had on her writing, and the classic work’s fondness for utilizing various styles of storytelling is also evident in her novel. The most prominent of the narrative conventions that her work echoes is the use of the frame story, for the scribe and Amina both narrate the story of her adventures. These dual narrators allow Chakraborty to alternate between two distinct tones, for the scribe can interject humorous asides and add small unnumbered interludes that provide supplementary facts about either the people or the events that immediately follow, while Amina’s narration proceeds in the first person and reflects a more rakish, action-oriented tone. In keeping with this unusual narrative structure, the novel must necessarily conclude with the scribe, and the revelation that Jamal the scribe is in fact a transformed Dunya contributes a final plot twist to the overall story.
In addition to these classical influences, Chakraborty also incorporates many conventions of the typical pirate novel, and its subgenre, the fantasy pirate novel, reflecting a deeper dive into the flavor of storytelling demonstrated within the tales of Sinbad the sailor from The Thousand and One Nights. In fact, a quote from Sinbad swearing off having more ocean adventures is used to begin Amina’s story and is echoed by Amina herself almost word-for-word later in the novel; thus, Chakraborty makes it a point to pay a small homage to the epic sailor adventure story from classic literature.
Key elements of Islamic mythology also make their way into the novel in the form of indirect references and magical creatures, making the story feel at times less like a pirate novel and more like a mythological quest, or Hero’s Journey. The universal trickster figure, who appears in many different forms across cultures worldwide, also makes an appearance in the novel, for Chakraborty herself notes that trickster stories represent some of the most popular across time. Aspects of Joseph Campbell’s structure of the Hero’s Journey become most prominent in the scenes involving “The Innermost Cave,” which occur in a literal cave that holds magical objects. As Amina is drawn from adventure to adventure in search of her ultimate goal, her travels reflect many qualities of the stereotypical Hero’s Journey, including the injunction that such heroes generally depart from the “ordinary” world and eventually return home having been profoundly changed by their experiences. With all of these disparate influences and structural techniques, Amina’s story defies easy genre description. Instead, the novel imitates and reimagines many aspects of popular narratives, mythology, and storytelling devices, all of which Chakraborty has studied and admired.
