Where the past exists as an eternal disappearance

Ellie swam up to me. "Hey," she whispered, cupping her hand under my head and lifting it so I could hear her. "I was thinking about how, in the mystical Jewish tradition, reading histories that have vanished, that have been hidden from view through time's erasure, through the systemically concealed violence against our people, is considered an approximation to nothingness, to Ein Sof, to the divine. So maybe interrogating a space like Al-Andalus, like the apartment, however wretched it was — a place where the past exists as an eternal disappearance — is like entering the void itself, the place where language feels divine because it is capable of naming that which has been made to disappear, of articulating the unspeakable. Do you think that's possible?"

Do you? Because I always think about these things during casual drunken ocean swims.

Savage Tongues, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, reads more like an extended psychotherapy session than it does a novel — it's an academic exercise, not an entertainment.

Arezu, an Iranian-American, heads to Marbella, to the apartment where she stayed as a seventeen-year-old and fell into a sexual relationship with a much older man. Fortunately, she brings along her best friend Ellie, a red-haired Palestinian-supporting Israeli, to help her clean the place.

Friendship, I thought, is a form of witness. She had received my testimony. She had held it with tenderness and love. She had taken care with my story. 

While Ellie scours the bathroom, Arezu plumbs the depth of her memory of Omar, instinctively maintaining that she was complicit in all that transpired. It's clear to anyone of this #metoo generation that Omar is a pervy predator and she'd been seriously gaslit.

I was in acute pain, lonely in ways I was too young to grasp, and there was no one around to ask me to articulate my suffering, to help me fix it in language, so I raged on like a wounded animal who knows not what to do except soothe her pain with more pain, lust after the final blow of death that will put an end to it all. I became hooked on Omar.

The protagonist is a writer and is fixated on articulating things that are as yet beyond her understanding. I thought this was my way into the novel, as I'm trying to come to terms with my inadequacy in expressing my emotional self, to accept that some experiences are inexpressible, to differentiate between what needs expressing and what doesn't. When does language help and when does it hinder?

One who comes to this novel with the wrong mindset might easily find it laughable.

The relationship between our political pain and our attraction to destructive men was not always clear; perhaps being with men who make us scream and gasp and moan takes us beyond the confines of language, back into our original pain; it allows us to explore and later confront the patriarchal and patriotic leaning of the colonial social project.

Arezu sees the value of sharing personal pain as a means of political agency, but struggles "to process your own loss of dignity without demonizing him or subjecting him to the dominant narrative of the Arab man."

The jacket copy makes comparisons to Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Samanta Schweblin. I detect no trace of the latter pair — there is nothing easy about the writing or subtle about its social commentary. It may be a brave novel, but I found no joy in it.

This is a heavy book. The added sociopolitical layers don't add much depth to the characters, needlessly weighing down the plot with theory. The psychological exploration of Arezu's trauma feels valid and true, but its payoff as a novel wasn't worth the investment.

[I just realized I've had Oloomi's Call me Zebra on my shelf unread for a couple of years. It may stay that way for a while.]