Yumna Kassab, Politica

- This new novel from Yumna Kassab is a challenging read. I was really enthralled by her two previous novels Australiana and The Lovers, but in Politica she adopts a more nebulous style, exploring the world of her many characters in a suggestive, less realistic, way. 

- She takes us to the Middle East and to an unidentified country, spanning decades of time from the late twentieth century. Some of her characters live throughout that entire period, but most don't. The book has numerous chapters of only two or so pages. 

- Yet Kassab combines poetry and prose in her portrayal of the lives of the citizens of the country through its periods of war and peace. There are families of children, parents and grandparents, and they are rarely safe. Death surrounds them. War takes its victims. They have hopes and dreams, and they find real comfort in each other in their homes and communities. Some believe in the need for revolution and others in the need for negotiation and peace. ‘They mean to erase us from the face of the earth. This is one continuous tale of dispossession and displacement’.

- Of course we think of today's wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the ugliness of both, but Kassab is careful not to tread on that ground. She generalises and focuses on the individuals caught up in mundane, day to day routines, and their hopes and dreams. But her insights are often profound, and her prose engrossing. 

- One section of the book is titled 1973, where we explore the life of the delightful Salma. She's full of anxieties but she does stuff. She learns to fish, drives to the countryside for a day, travels overseas with Zahra and bores her friends telling them about it later, her nephew Dawood is a bragger, she dreams of the dead, she regrets not emigrating overseas - free education, free hospitals, etc, she can’t afford to buy groceries, the war has stopped but is there peace although there are elections, she resists engaging in politics now, is she a sellout, Ahmed proposed but she declined. ‘There was a war. It broke over them. They never found their way back and they did not find whatever it was they each privately wished for…Her life has momentum but no direction…’ 

- There are many short stories of seemingly unrelated events, but the prime focus is always the people and how they deal with them. Although the war may be relegated to history now, its effects are still felt. 

- Kassab has the gift of forcing you to confront these seemingly simple but profoundly meaningful lives with their rhythms and memories. 

There are many bodies buried in this ground.

   Some of the dead are only bones.

   Others are more recent. Their burial was hurried, done in 

the dark, ground covered so it did not appear disturbed.

   I have watched for many years.

   When the world is troubled, there are more secrets to put

to sleep in the earth, in the night-time when they believe no

eyes can see.

   I watch. There are others - humans - who believe this park

can shelter their terror and their dreams.

  There is always the watcher, one of lightness on the right,

the scribe of darkness on the left, and then the Great One who

not even the smallest detail escapes.

  The world may not see. There may be no witness in the

living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is

layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious 

is humanity.

- When reading this novel you may be tempted to bail at times, but stay with it. It's well worth it.