Book review: An Unsafe Haven by Nada Awar Jarrar

After the poetical exploration of home, Nada Awar Jarrar wrote a complex book about displacement, bringing a perspective from the Middle East to the literary representations of the refugee issues. 

How can you continue living a normal life when nothing is certain? What does it matter most: people or places? Is it morally acceptable to put safety first, including before family and leave a place torn by war?

Every character of the book has its own story of displacement, which brings a diversity of angles and views on home and homelessness. Maysoun left the war-torn Iraq bringing her mother with her. Peter moved from America to Lebanon in order to live with Hannah who refused to leave her family in Beirut. Fatima is a Syrian refugee living in a camp nearby. Anas is an artist from Syria whose German wife decided to run to Berlin with her two children while he was out of town, after an explosion took place on the street where they lived. Everyone experienced what does it mean being a stranger, being out of place, although only from a neighbouring country and sharing at least a language and some common traditions. 

Peter's observations are relevant for the discussion, especially in relation with her wife, Hannah, a journalist coping with the weight of writing an objective story about life in Syrian refugee camps: (...) as conflict spreads throughout the region and Lebanon tumbles in the midst of it, he senses resistance in himself to the incertainty of it all, finds it increasingly difficult to separate place from people, to disconnect his love for Hannah from the country to which she belongs'. 'Peter became aware of an invisible connectedness between people and places here, a kind of map of everyday relationships, of being, that was easy to follow once you knew how and made for a sense of rootedness which he had not encountered anywhere else'.

I particularly loved in this book how the reflections about identity and home are intertwined with the events of the story, like every episode of the story brings more meaning to the discussion. 

At the end of the book, a big question remains: What is the element of stability against dramatic changes? Family, homes, countries...they are coming and going. Anas, the artist with a tragical destiny, was trying to catch the moment of inspiration and turn into an aesthetical experience, but this changes too, because the meaning of art differs from a person to another and the work of art itself is just a sequence from a chain. Can we, as humans, cope with the loss of continuity and lack of roots, becoming like the refugees 'shadows (...) colourless and in some ways invisible to everyone else'? We might look for a ground, more than ever, but the world we are living today, in Europe or the Middle East, seems to counter powerfully this gravitational force.

Rating: 4 stars

Longing for home

In the last weeks, I started to read a couple of writers from the Middle East - some of them will be featured in the next posts - discovering that in the case of many, there is a common topic: the longing for home, after long years of dislocation. This specific exploration of a topic brings new interpretations into the world literature and I am really glad that those works are introduced to the Western public, many of them directly in English.

In her debut novel, Nada Awar Jarrar is exploring the idea of home through the stories of three different Lebanese women, whose life stories interwin at certain moments. The intensity the stories are told decreases from the first to the last story, which creates a certain disbalance and, in my case, the disappointment as it raises high expectations at the beginning. 

The first story is for me an outstanding example of how the words can be powerfully used to bring back to life worlds and alternative stories. The writing is so beautifully that I hardly wanted to stop reading. The chosen words can reveal deep feelings and different layers of emotions, like in this case: 'I was somewhere between child and woman, feeling the same anxiety the adults did but not knowing what to do with it'. 

The main protagonists of the stories are women, for whom love is hidden and marriages are set since early childhood to avoid the worries of the future. But they are also able to decide their own future, including by staying out of the usual society requirements, assuming the singleton status. All are united though by the search for home, for the place, real or imaginary, made of memories or the everyday moment, where they assume they belong to. I especially loved this description of home, from the first story: 'Back home was where fragrant pine trees grew into tall umbrellas and rivers chimed down to a light-blue sea. Back home were snowy winters and balmy summers, and gentle sunshine every where in between'. 

However, in the case of the war-torn Lebanon, there is always a 'before' and 'after', with the right of belonging to a home being often symbolically refused based on the lack of a common past during hard times. This is an example of the ways in which doctor Kameel comments to Aida: 'It's always like this. People like you return, not having known the terrible years of the war, and you want to teac us about life'. 

Another aspect I've found interesting in this book is how the urban and rural collide, with Beirut often seen as a mythical city - 'Beirut is like nothing I have ever imagined'. 

There is a little house in the mountains though that brings everyone together, but the search for identity doesn't have to stop, as it only needs a proper framework to operate properly. The language which, in the first part, is evocative and poetic helps to recreate worlds and a particular genuine ambiance. Maybe this is both the strongest and weakest point of the writing. Half through the book, my disappointment increased as the writing is becoming self sufficient when is not just plain, monotonous. 

Despite the mishapes of the writing towards the end, I strongly recommend it for some of the powerful stories as well as the literary testimony. I am looking forward to explore more writers from this region. 

On a side note, I really appreciated how the political issues that cannot be dissociated from a book dealing with Lebanon, are delicately used just as a background of the story, leaving the literary discourse untammed by the usual diatribes that unfortunatelly diminish considerably the quality of any work. 

Rating: 3.5 stars