SELAMLIK, a lovely idea, a word we in the world need

SELAMLIK
KHALED ALSMAEL (tr. Leri Price)
World Editions
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An emotional and unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticism

Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, which serves as a gathering place for gay men from all over the city. He learns about the Hammams, secret meeting places for gays located throughout the old city.

Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Despite society, religion and regime disapproval, Furat finds the love he seeks just before being forced to flee as his world changes. Later on, Furat wakes up in a cold sweat at an asylum in the Swedish forest recalling a terrifying dream in which he was blindfolded and bound. Having seen the horrific clips of what extremists do to gays circulating on the internet, he begins to write about his experience while locked in the toilet.

This is the story of Furat's journey, along with that of other refugees, as they struggle against physical and economic challenges, migration laws, and deep-seated fears of loss, shame, and hatred. However, amid these difficulties also lie moments of passion and pleasure. Despite everything, Furat remains steadfast in his pursuit of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This story felt to me like a roadmap of what the great-haters want gay life to become in the US. Religious nuts are not to be trusted with the well being of those they don't like. Their allgedly holy book allows things well beyond the pale in the modern world. That's where the damn things belong, beyond the pale.

Think I'm being strident again? Read Furat's story, much like the author's own, to see how disfiguringly awful it is to be denied expression of your honest, authentic self.

The book isn't long, under two hundred pages, and covers three countries that create, dislike, or accept refugees. Syria's pre-civil-war accommodation of gay men wasn't acceptance, exactly, more a species of tolerance..."don't make us notice you, stay over there"...and Turkey's is roughly similar. Furat's deep discomfort dealing with the straight men (and "straight" men) who surround him comes vibrating off the page. The author clearly drew this from his own lived experience. It's a revelation of self that would likely get him beaten or worse in most macho cultures.

The way the novel is structured is likely going to put some people off. I hope you'll think of the structure as a way of communicating Furat's lived experience of fragmentation and alienation; as a deliberate and careful evocation of the world as it appears to someone who has no home, never felt at home, never had more than mere toleration offered to him. The jagged edges of severed relationships...what happened to Ali?...are the price exacted by the great-haters for one's being alive in "their" world.

"Their" world definitely includes the world of Sweden. This paragon of accepting refugees hasn't told its people that kindness and acceptance might be better for all concerned than rejection and intolerance. That's rich coming from an American, I agree, but the fact is that my majority-immigrant country has its head up its religious-nut ass. I would hope for better from the Swedes. I would, it seems, be wrong. Furat's life is better. It's not in danger anymore. His Life is. This Life, this wonderful world of lovingkindness and acceptance, of deep connection and relationship, is still beyond his reach.

The title's a word that describes and defines the concept gay men, all that I've known in my nearing-seventy years on earth, want: a place of intimate connection of men's bodies and minds.

The story has its challenges for the reader. It's not going to make the eww-ick homophobes blench. It's not going to make the linear-story reader into a fan of stream of consciousness. It's not the book's job. It is going to give its readers a personal intimate view of the way a man of multiple marginalizations navigates becoming his authentic self.

That, for this reader, is a beautiful gift.

PLANET OF CLAY, tale of the toll living exacts on the different

PLANET OF CLAY
SAMAR YAZBEK (tr. Leri Price)
World Editions
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ode to fantasy and beauty in the midst of war-torn Damascus

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her.

One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story.

In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

We needed to take two buses to reach {my mother's job} from our house, which was at the end of Jaramana Camp in southern Damascus. I am happy for you if you haven't heard of it.
–and–
Personally, I turn over the coffee tray and make it into a desk, then I pick up the blue pen which I found among the stacks of paper, and I begin. You must not set off before the sound has started. Don't stop unless you are faint from exhaustion, but it must be from exhaustion and not fear. If all this isn't done properly, I mean using the blue pen to play with words on a blank page, then my instructions will fail, the blank page won't like you, and the roar of the aeroplanes won't disappear.

The rational response to an irrational world, one filled with mortal danger, will always be different for a small child. When a small child is required to make the world make sense when it simply doesn't, such as in a war zone, there will arise adaptive responses that are in the long run maladaptive. And add in the probability of the person being neurodivergent from the get-go...well, what are the odds of that person reaching adulthood? Still less unscathed.

Rima's mother knows her daughter isn't the usual sort of child. She's got "her brains in her feet," meaning a mania for walking, walking, always walking if she can stay on her feet...in other words, a need to escape...and on one of her very first outings, so to speak, a group of well-meaning adults stop her and ask her all sorts of urgent questions...what's your name, where's your mother...that she simply can't process fast enough to answer. Thus is an elective mute created.

So now Rima's mother is living in a war zone with a manic, elective mute daughter. She does what any mother would do...she makes the medical rounds, seeking answers. Getting none, she does the thing mothers have done since the beginning of time: She improvises. She gets some rope and ties Rima to her wrist when she has to go out and, when the girl's too much of a woman for that to be safe, she ties her to their bed.

That sounds horrific to a Western person who's safe inside a house every night, with only police drones and cop cars to worry about. But think of this: How safe is a young woman on the streets here in your fat-and-happy country? You'll always teach her to be aware of the threat posed by Them. (You'll be filling in that space with the people you dislike the most, of course, but I assure you she's safer from Them than from the nice, entitled, self-satisfied boys in her school.) For someone with fewer resources than the poorest person in this country of ours, the solution fits the need admirably.

What it doesn't, can't do is prepare Rima for one of the personal calamities that even the mildest "police action" or "guerrilla war" engenders: The loss of a parent. In this case, an only parent...her father's never even been a presence for his absence to be felt. What this means is her world is effectively over. And yet her life goes on, in her mother's permanent absence and her brother's disappearance into the guerrillas' ranks.

What makes this such a perfect read for this moment is the Belarus-vs-Poland manufactured refugee crisis permeating the news cycle right now. It's a necessary and salutary reminder that the world's not in good shape, plague aside; the people, living breathing people, who are caught between two sets of disgusting racist piece-of-shit countries and who will continue to die of exposure as the world idly watches it happen, aren't going to get what they need any more than Rima did.

Mirabile dictu, Rima's brother shows up! He finds her! And they begin the refugee's eternal dance, the homeless and placeless and stateless state of being, of non-personhood. Of course to Rima it's not that way...she simply does. She lives. She is in touch with something utterly invaluable for a refugee: Her self. It is clear to her who she is, she is Rima and she reads, she sings the Qu'ran's sutras, she draws. It is a saving grace. What it isn't is easy for a storyteller to sell. She is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, ignorant and wise and way over her head.

Let me show you:

You will understand that I don't have enough time to explain to you about forgetting. Later, you can throw away whatever pages you want to. What matters to me is {the old caretaking woman} who wanted to understand how I knew how to use tartil in reciting the Qu'ran. Really, it was difficult to explain to her, because my tongue was stopped, and like {her} I don't understand much of what surrounds me.
–and–
I am a story, I too will disappear (or maybe I am with you now as you read my scattered words) like the Cheshire Cat did in the story of Alice.

That is some very sophisticated abstract thought for someone with the neurodivergence Rima has displayed...in the circumstances of her upbringing, I'd be impressed with that level of eloquent abstraction in a neurotypical young adult.

All in all, though, as a work of fiction, I was compelled by the story, by the character, by the narrative's timeliness and timelessness. I'm very impressed as this is the first work I've read by Author Yazbek. It is, as she has Rima say of her own storytelling, one of those "circular stories with intersecting centers which are only completed by retellings and new details."

The problem is reassembling my heart after the story ends....

This is a very special, very timely yet a timeless read...there is no realistic chance the subject matter will lose its relevance. It is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Translated Literature category at the National Book Awards! The winner will be announced this evening.