AGAINST THE LOVELESS WORLD
By Susan Abulhawa
Exhausted writers sometimes try to simplify their trade by boiling all stories down to only two essential trajectories: Someone comes to town, or someone moves away. But Susan Abulhawa’s third novel, “Against the Loveless World,” disproves this reductive hyperbole, artfully looping together comings and goings, entrances and exoduses, burials and birthdays in a humming narrative of human movement.
Nahr, the novel’s middle-aged narrator, is a daughter of migration. A Palestinian who has never known Palestine, she recalls her coming-of-age in Kuwait with her exiled mother, brother and snippy grandmother. She has no interest in the traumas of her ancestry, and is instead enamored of all things Kuwaiti. “It was my home,” she says of her adoptive country, “and I was a loyal subject of the royals. I lined up every day of school with the other students to sing the national anthem. … I even taught myself to speak their dialect and could dance Khaleeji ‘better than their best.’ That’s what someone told me.” Snubbed in her youth by an Independence Day dance troupe because “such an honor should be reserved for Kuwaiti kids,” Nahr doesn’t flinch, or feel offended as her mother does — “for her, everything came down to being Palestinian, and the whole world was out to get us.”
Instead the young Nahr seeks belonging elsewhere, breaking rules and expectations as she goes. She “back-talks” and steals, is promiscuous and unapologetically grounded in her body. Her premature marriage to a Palestinian war hero, the result of her sexual curiosity, is believable in both its hope and desperation. Abandoned and confused, Nahr cedes control of her sexuality to Um Buraq, a worldly Kuwaiti woman who sends her to work as a high-end prostitute.
Initially appalled by the job requirements, Nahr is intrigued by the power of her earnings, and soon it is she who pays her family’s bills, her brother’s school fees. When she is gang-raped on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, she leaves sex work and becomes involved with an Iraqi soldier. “I wasn’t yet ready to give up on men,” she thinks. “Part of me wanted to know if men could be good.”
A rebellious spirit propels this story of statelessness, but the unburdened tone can also come off as unrealistic. Soon after the Kuwaiti police torture her brother (they consider Palestinians Hussein’s collaborators), the family flees to Jordan, where Nahr runs a successful beauty business out of their living room. From there, though, it’s back to Palestine to finalize her divorce and fall in love again, this time with her handsome former brother-in-law, Bilal, a resistance fighter. Following a period of action- and romance-laced sequences of arrests and homecomings, weapons smuggling and lockdowns, Nahr is caught and sentenced to solitary confinement in an Israeli prison she calls “the Cube.” There she reserves her spirit for reliving the past, for dancing and taking showers under a showerhead she names Attar.
Known for her beautiful and urgent chronicling of the Palestinian struggle in fiction and poetry, Abulhawa skillfully situates Nahr in a life of friendship and family that is consistently upset by geopolitical changes and a volatile police state. In this sense, Nahr is a 21st-century everywoman, strong in her own mind but angry about how little control she has over her own life. Given the persistent attacks on her self-determination, it is easy to understand Nahr’s commitment to justice at any cost. But it’s less easy to feel it. Her toughness and sass are rarely counterbalanced with moments of vulnerability, or grief. The self-reflection in the novel often comes from the head rather than the heart, unidimensional interior monologues flecked with facts that serve more as platforms to explain the plight of Palestinian refugees, sex workers, liberation fighters. Nahr encounters so many tragedies that she can at times come off as a composite of women and the issues that plague them in this region, the novel too rarely pausing in her moments of weakness and exhaustion that might have distinguished her, illuminated the cost of passion for the powerless.
Those forced to leave the places of their birth to live elsewhere then have to tell stories to the people they encounter there. Not all communities are willing to listen to these messy narratives of displacement. In our current climate of isolationism, the transnational storyteller must do more than entertain — she must educate. In response to this demand, Abulhawa has created a spirited protagonist who lives invisibly and in opposition to her “loveless world,” telling her own story on her own terms lest either her comings or goings be forgotten.
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