Book review: The Spirit Whisperer

Availability: Aristoc Bookshop

Published: 2022

Pages: 258

Author: Nassur Tab’an El-Tablaz

This Christmas, as with all the Christmases before it and those that come after it, we hope that you do not just savour the food and festivities that come with this season. It should provide you with the time to reflect and relax as you journey down the path of your own spiritual awakening. After all, this is the season where we find ourselves in the soaring grace of the Lord and partake of the passion of Christ.

To do so, you might probably need the right company of family and friends around you as well as the right books to help elevate and alter your consciousness state.

These books may be of an intellectual kind or simply whimsical enough to keep you smiling while expanding your awareness of the storybook possibilities found in alternative realities. To do this, you do not necessarily need to read classic stories and epics like the Bhagavad Gita or the Ramayana, or other books of the enlightenment bent.

The Spirit Whisperer by Nassur Tab’an El-Tablaz will be sufficient enough for this purpose.

Indeed, The Spirit Whisperer is a novel of deep religious and worldly tenor, a syncretism of profound Islamic theology, culture everyday rural and urban life. It offers practical insight into parental pragmatism in bringing up children, the conservative streak in African families, the dominant patriarch and the indomitable spirit, wisdom and authority of the African matriarch. 

It delves into Islamic polygamy, not romantic polygamy of lust and man’s basic animal instincts, but real, hard plain truths and facts of family dynamics intertwined with inevitable jealously and filial love. It is an intriguing collage of innuendo and subtlety, the author explores spirituality in its raw form and, gradually, the sensation that the Qur’an is its sailing boat is compelling, giving you a true experience of the intricacies of the Qur’an and Islam in general.

The novel is a story of young Elkas, complete with skirmishes of divination, witchcraft, civil strife, adolescent infatuation, and truant escapades wound together in the renowned African sense of family and community. 

Elkas is evacuated from rural Zarai and thrust into urban Banu by parents wary of the existential threat that comes with a polygamous family setting. 

With sheer willpower and deep spiritual beliefs, gifted and likeable Elkas grapples with witchcraft and sorcery guided by the Qur’an and Islamic teachings to find the true meaning of love, spiritualism and humanity in order to reach the acme of life. As meets the characters, drives or walks into the schools, towns and villages of Elkas’ world, they get the poignant feeling that they have been to or seen a place like it before. The average youth in Africa will be able to relate to this story and be inspired by it, too. 

There are many bumper-adrenaline moments for the action junkie with strong literary tastes. Here, why not take a sneak peak and see what I am talking about:

“A group of serrated militants, who had been sowing terror and destruction in a neighbouring country for the past two years, descended on Bugo in the dead of night. 

They had been previously written off by top security officials as people leading a rebellion without a cause. However, on this fateful night, they swooped onto the remote district like a well prepared cast that had rehearsed their execution to perfection. 

Trapped and tucked away between mountain ranges, Bugo found itself held captive in a tempest of raining gunshots. 

The rebels had adopted this part of the country as their theater of operations because of the mountainous terrain, the proximity to the border and the ability to exploit an existing ethnic conflict in the area.”