As other reviewers
have pointed out this is a “story, where the situation is already evolved, and
the reader is drawn in by the gradual revealing of its components: an art of
disclosure rather than transformation.” (James Lasdun, ‘The Guardian’ 11 July
2009).
Set in an interview
room in a prison in Beirut, our protagonist is Daniel, known as Yalo. He’s
under interrogation for a rape he claims he did not commit. As a young boy Yalo
used to close his eyes when he lied, under the torments of his grandfather who
wanted Yalo to confess something he’d close his eyes and make something up,
each time he was beaten. Early in this work I started wondering if each time Yalo
closes his eyes and “confesses” a crime is he lying? With no father, there is
no doubting Yalo is involved in at least petty theft, he doesn’t deny he
hijacked a car parked in the forest, where the stories diverge is when the
girl, Shirin, claims Yalo then took her into the forest and raped her, he
claims his in love with her, she claims he stalks her, intimidates her:
When she showed signs of standing up after
paying the check, he caught her by the hand and felt everything inside him
tremble. The softness of the hand cheered and intoxicated him. Yalo would write
that there in the café he discovered a softness he had never known and would
feel regret that he’d not discovered it at his home in Ballouna. There he felt
a woman so light that she could have flown to the rhythm of the desire
exploding inside him. It had not been sated. He said he had never felt her
softness because he had been submerged in the scent of incense from her
forearms. In the café, an unspeakable softness spread through his limbs, as if
her cold fingers were made of silk and stitched to her palms.
Our protagonist here
is brutally tortured, accused of a number of crimes, if found guilty many would
surely lead to the death penalty, and as a result he is forced into confessing
no end of atrocities. As part of the interrogation, Yalo is forced to write his
life story. We then have chapters of first person memories, followed again by
third person sections viewing Yalo’s interrogation. The blur between truth and
fiction becomes palpable, at one stage he claims he can’t write, another he has
the best handwriting at school, his confessions to crimes are they under
tortured duress or is there some semblance of truth? What is truth? What is
memory?
Yalo did not deny that during the civil war,
he had begun to distinguish between terror and fear. Yalo could never forget
his first night at the Sodeco checkpoint on the Green Line in Beirut when the
shooting started and he felt unable to control his bowels and that his knees
where going to give out. He crept over to the corner of the checkpoint,
squatted, and defecated. No one saw him. All the guys were busy fighting while
he was busy shitting, as Alexei told him the next day when the odor was
obvious. The word shit would have become part of his name had
the Goat Battalion not withdrawn from Sodeco and taken up a new position near
the museum. There, at the museum line, Yalo learned how to be afraid without
losing control of his bowels, though at the beginning of every exchange of
gunfire he felt the need to urinate. He controlled himself in the beginning,
then when he was nearly losing control, he joked to the guys that he was going
to piss on the enemy. When he saw their looks of bewilderment, he came out from
behind the barricade, squatted, and pissed under the volleys of bullets.
“Why do you piss that way, like the Bedouin?”
asked Tony.
Yalo replied that this was the humanitarian
way to urinate: “We have to squat rather than flaunt what God has given to us,”
said Yalo, repeating his grandfather’s saying.
It was during the war that Yalo learned the
difference between fear and terror. A fighter might be afraid, but an ordinary
person would be terror-struck. That was why Yalo chose to be a fighter. He
fought to inflict rather than feel terror. It’s true that he was afraid, but
fear was nothing compared to the terror that paralyzed a man and made his mind
a blank.
As our story unfolds
and Yalo’s story gets told and retold, under interrogation, the subtleties
change, there is more depth to his story, the layers upon layer start to become
a whole, but the truth remains elusive, as we find the anecdotes contradicting
each other. As in the retelling of the war, what is history, what is fact, what
is fiction? We again begin to question the truth. This tale is not a coherent
whole, it is a murky pile of human oral history.
At first, Yalo saw himself as a hero, the war
had come to teach him the secrets of life. That was what he felt in the
training camp where he had become a Goat. He and his comrades, poor kids from
the Suriac Quarter, became the masters of the streets. Yalo understood little
of the complications and convolutions of the war that made talk of it seem so
useless. He believed that he was fighting for the existence of a people who had
disappeared into the darkness of history, as the cohno had
described the continued migrations that had brought him from Ain Ward to
Beirut. “we came from the darkness of history, and we will stay in the
darkness, until the sun of justice rises.” When Yalo asked him about the “sun
of justice,” the cohno replied that it was the Messiah. “My
boy, we are awaiting the Kingdom of the Messiah, and He said that His kingdom
was not of this world.”
Yalo did not understand Lebanese politics or
the language of war. He played along as if he were acting in a movie, and when
he took part in a battle he felt as though he were a hero. But his feelings of
heroism disappeared with time. He felt sad when he heard his mother, quoting
the cohno, saying that war was useless. “We have to be yeast. We do
not fight, my boy. The yeast does not fight the dough, but becomes part of it
and leavens it so that it becomes bread. Leave the war and go to school. You
should become acohno like your grandfather.”
Yalo was frightened by the image of himself he
saw in his mother’s eyes, for it had become a miniature version of his
grandfather with his immense white beard. But what he feared above all else was
the emptiness, not the sight of the bones with shredded clothes, but the
profound emptiness of this war, which had become monotonous. The idea of war
was seductive and gave you a feeling of heroism, but the war itself was tedious
and repugnant.
Personally I didn’t
believe a word of Yalo’s story, the coverslip tells us that his is forced to
confess to crimes of which he has little or no recollection. I wasn’t too sure.
The anti-hero, a thief and alleged rapist who we pity due to torture?
Later in the novel
Daniel (Yalo’s real name) comes to the fore and begins writing Yalo’s story
adding further complexities and layers to the tale.
A tale that unravels
each page you turn, the story of a single man’s obsessions, life in Beirut,
mistaken identities all presented in a wonderful language, giving you an
ethereal feel, almost dreamlike as flashback upon flashback reveal Yalo’s
family history, his travels to France, his involvement in the civil war, his
employment, his insatiable sexual appetite and his blundering in love. Yet
again, another writer who I will be reading more from, another great discovery.
A work that I read
almost twelve months ago, but one that still lingers and therefore one I need
to highlight on my list of reads for the year. In fact, when reviewing my list
of books read and reviewed this year, there were a number of works I couldn’t
recall a single thing about, I can assure you this wasn’t one of them.
For my full review
click here.
1 comment:
I was very impressed with this when I read it. I liked the way he uses the character to explore the complex history of the area.
Post a Comment