{"id":462,"date":"2020-11-02T13:22:43","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T13:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/readrespond\/?page_id=462"},"modified":"2022-02-22T17:51:56","modified_gmt":"2022-02-22T17:51:56","slug":"past-events","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/site.uit.no\/readrespond\/past-events\/","title":{"rendered":"Past Events"},"content":{"rendered":"

Past Events<\/strong><\/em><\/h1>\n
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If you could not attend any of our past events, you can check out the page below. We’ve invited both scholars and students to submit written responses to the different events.<\/p>\n

August\u00a0 26.\u00a0 15:00-16:30 (GMT+2)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In August, Hanna Meretoja<\/a>,\u00a0a Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Turku Finland and\u00a0the Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, led a discussion on Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel\u00a0Go, Went, Gone\u00a0<\/em>(2015).<\/p>\n

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Response by\u00a0Miriam Muccione, Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Italian), Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago<\/h3>\n

Towards More Explorative Modes of Memory: Hanna Meretoja\u2019s reading of Erpenbeck\u2019s Go, Went, Gone<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

When the Berlin wall fell on November 9, 1989, the celebrated German author Jenny Erpenbeck was a twenty-two-year-old young woman attending the university in \u201ca half of the city [that] was the whole city\u201d for her, as she recalls talking about her youth in East Berlin. When the West met the East, Erpenbeck writes in her essay \u201cHomesickness for Sadness\u201d (2014), \u201ceverything that had been called the present up to that point was now the past\u201d and the world as she knew suddenly collided with a new, juxtaposed order of things. \u201cEveryday life was no longer everyday life \u2014 she writes \u2014 it was an adventure that had been survived. Our customs were now a sideshow attraction. Everything that had been self-evident forfeited its self-evidence within the span of a few weeks. [\u2026] From this point on, my childhood became a museum exhibit.\u201d Her life and the life of the people around suddenly stopped to be current to became shadows of a past life. Erpenbeck\u2019s work as a novelist has been since then the effort to preserve the multitude of experiences that was life in East-Berlin, that self-contained world \u201cat the ends of the earth\u201d before it disappeared forever in people\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

In Go, Went, Gone<\/em> [Gehen, ging, gegangen]<\/em> (2017), Erpenbeck multiplies the number of worlds in collision. Herself and her experience of East Berlin as a world that ended meets with those of African refugees whose lives have been tragically disrupted and had to flee their home countries to escape war and poverty to find themselves with neither civil nor human rights, but as second-class people pleading European countries to give them asylum.<\/p>\n

The protagonist of the novel is a professor from East Germany, like her father, John Erpenbeck, who was a physicist and philosopher. However, Richard is more of a humanist. He is a retired professor of classical philology who lives alone after his wife passed away. At the beginning of the novel, the reader follows Richard in an uneventful routine that nothing seems to disturb, apart from the gloomy news of a man who drowned in a lake near the city and whose body after months has not yet been found. Then one summer day, Richard notices a group of men protesting in Alexanderplatz. At first, Richard goes on with his life, and only later he suddenly decides for unprecise reasons, inexplicable even to himself, to interview the refugees to understand their situation which he feels ignorant about. Before becoming their friend, Richard enters the stories of their lives in the same way he would have started a new research project, that is, by asking questions. Erpenbeck herself interviewed thirteen refugees and Go, Went, Gone<\/em> is the result of those interviews that gradually led her to a deeper encounter between them.<\/p>\n

In her reading of Erpenbeck\u2019s novel, Professor Hanna Meretoja reflected on narrative and memory as modes of understanding others, with a focus on the sub-subsumptive and non-subsumptive elements of memory and narrative in Richard\u2019s understanding of the refugees\u2019 experiences. Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku and director of the research center SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory<\/em>, Meretoja is author of The Ethics of Storytelling<\/em> (Oxford, 2018). Meretoja\u2019s reading of the novel explored how the novel represents memory as the starting point of a learning process that entails a dialogical understanding of others through curiosity and open listening, something she analyzed at length in her recent essay \u201cNon-subsumptive memory and narrative empathy\u201d (2021).<\/p>\n

What follows is an overview of Meretoja\u2019s presentation for the History, Literature, and Human Rights<\/em> reading group, and the discussion that it stimulated. Because of the multifaced aspects of Meretojas\u2019s reading of Gone, Went, Gone<\/em>, the short titles at the beginning of each paragraph below offer a quick summary of the main points of Meretoja\u2019s complex and enlightening analysis of the novel. The first question Meretoja addressed concerned memory as mode of understanding and sense making of new experiences.<\/p>\n

Memory is an act<\/em> \u2014 According to Meretoja, if traditionally, memory has been considering as the act of retrieving the past, recent memory studies have complemented that perspective by exploring the rather dynamic, productive, and performative nature of memory. As a performative act, memory shapes our present and constructs our social reality. Recalling Nietzsche\u2019s belief that \u201cevery concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent,\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis Levinas\u2019 and Derrida\u2019s claim that language and narrative are inherently violent, Meretoja enclosed the question of memory in an ethical framework, asking how to discern violent and non-violent elements in narrative memory.<\/p>\n

Sub-subsumptive and non-subsumptive elements of memory<\/em> \u2014 Focusing on memory and how it shapes our understanding of others, Meretoja argued that practices of memory can be placed on a continuum between sub-subsumptive and non-subsumptive forms of memory. Meretoja referred to this categorization as a heuristic tool that is useful to analyses the presence of sub-subsumptive and non-subsumptive elements in memory making and, consequently, to understand the role memory plays in dealing with novelty, that is, how old experiences informs the way we make sense of new ones.<\/p>\n

Perception of sameness can either hide or reveal differences<\/em> \u2014 Predominantly sub-subsumptive forms of memory are, for instance, culturally dominant ones, those functioning as \u201csense making models\u201d when, to understand a culturally specific, local situation, we equate it to an event belonging to the history of another national context. Although a comparative approach, Meretoja stressed, is somewhat inevitable, a more ethical understanding of otherness should not lose sight of the specificities of the events held in comparison. Predominantly non-subsumptive forms of memory are those \u201copen in both directions,\u201d Meretoja said, since, while using earlier experiences as the starting point to understand something new, they use what we remember as the beginning of dialogical understanding, through which not only we learn something new, but we renegotiate the significance of our past experiences as well.<\/p>\n

Richard\u2019s sense making between subsumptive and non-subsumptive memory<\/em> \u2014 According to Meretoja, Gone, Went, Gone<\/em> explores the continuum and the ethical difference between sub-subsumptive and non-subsumptive forms of memory, as it sheds the light on a how openended narrative memory is the condition of possibility for a dialogical and more ethical encounter with the other, in which the other regains narrative agency.<\/p>\n

The relationality of memory<\/em> \u2014 Meretoja showed how the novel deals with the relationality of memory by displaying how we relate to new situations based on memory of past experiences. Richard\u2019s East German past as well as the Nazi Germany past function as mnemonic filters that mold Richard\u2019s sense making of new experiences, including his encounter with the refugees and how Germany was dealing with the 2015 migrants\u2019 crisis in Germany. Those mnemonic filters are a double edge sward for they both enable and prevent his understanding, influencing Richard\u2019s way to relate to the uniqueness of the refugees\u2019 experience of exile. In other words, Richard\u2019s past both helps him and does not help him understand the lives of the refugees and their stories.<\/p>\n

The dishonesty of knowing already<\/em> \u2014 At the beginning of his encounter with the refugees, the narrator pays close attention to what the protagonist does not receive. What does he not receive? For instance, he does not receive the silence in Alexanderplatz, despite its magnitude: \u201cWhy is it that Richard, walking past all these black and white people sitting and standing that afternoon, doesn\u2019t hear this silence? \u2013 the narrative voice asks \u2013 \u201cHe\u2019s thinking of Rzesz\u00f3w. [\u2026] Just like in Rzesz\u00f3w\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 10-20), assimilating that silence to the underground tunnels of the Polish city he once visited with his wife. Hence, at first, Richard does not hear the specificity of that silence; he only perceived the sameness between the two events and stops seeing what is going on in the square; he thinks he understands because he uses another context, the knowledge of another context as a point of reference, which instead leads him astray.<\/p>\n

The humility of not-knowing yet<\/em> \u2014 Instead, it is the humility of when he admits his ignorance and the curiosity to want to know more that leads him to understand something new. Yet, new experiences do not sink in a mnemonic vacuum. Therefore, also in these instances his past functions as a template. Richards draws from personal experiences of feeling lost and disoriented, estranged to others and himself to relate to the experience of disruption of the refugees, when their \u201cformer life came to an end\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 135).<\/p>\n

Revising as better understanding<\/em> \u2014 Meretoja analyzed how one of the questions the novel poses concerns finding \u201cshared points of reference\u201d without subsuming others to our expectations and preconceptions. In this respect, if crucial is our ability to understand, equally important is the willingness and ability to revise our understanding. Over the course of the novel, Richard revises his initial understanding of the refugees\u2019 experience. If at first Richard uses what is most familiar to him and even renames the African refugees after heroes of Western mythology and literary canon (Apollo, Tristan, and so on), as he becomes a better listener or as \u201che becomes better at dialogical listening,\u201d Meretoja specificized, he also reconsiders the validity of his culturally predominant preconceptions. In other words, the more Richard learns about the refugees the more he can see the limits of his earlier categories; also, the more he listens the more he learns, showing how the process of learning from others also helps someone becoming more open.<\/p>\n

The limits of empathy<\/em> \u2014 The cultural background of Richard and that of the refugees is so different that it would be pretentious to think that he can feel with them what they are feeling. Meretoja pinpointed that what Richard does instead is trying to imagine what they are going through by drawing on his experiences of foreignness. For instance, he remembers how when he visited the US he was \u201cbeside himself with the foreignness\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 278). Similarly, when one of the refugees does not know how to take care of one of Richard\u2019s friends\u2019 grandmother, Richard imagines a reversed situation and ask himself the following: \u201cWould he have any idea how to look after an African grandmother? Nana<\/em>?\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 278). Richard starts accounting for cultural and social differences between him and the refugees. Based on those examples, Meretoja argued that \u201ctranscultural empathy\u201d \u2014 as a non-subsumptive understanding of the other \u2014 is based on curiosity and wonder, rather than on the traditional assumption that with empathy someone \u201ccan feel what the other feels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The privileges of empathy<\/em> \u2014 Furthermore, Meretoja reflected on how both practices of memory and processes of empathy are socially embedded and occur in situations in which power and agency are unequally distributed: \u201csome people have the privilege to empathize with those lacking such a privilege,\u201d she argued. Some people empathize with others because they are in the privileged position to do so. Although Richard feels like a second-class citizen because in United Germany because, for instance, he has a lower salary compared to his colleague from West Germany, he is unquestionably a highly privileged man when compared to the refugees and their lack of civil\/human rights. Throughout the novel, Richard becomes increasingly more aware of his position of privilege and power.<\/p>\n

The contingent differences of one humanity<\/em> \u2014 At the same time, his East German past makes him think about the possibility of role reversal, like, Sylvia, one of Richard\u2019s friends says at some point: \u201c\u201cI keep imagining that someday it\u2019ll be us having to flee, and no one will help us\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 143). The possibility of role reversal implies that what is most important for Richard is the understanding of a shared humanity, beyond the social and political contingences determining someone\u2019s life, beyond power differences. On this point, Meretoja showed how, for instance, for Richard the encounter with the refugees sheds new light on his personal past, on Nazi Germany. In fact, Richards asserts that how we now treat the refugees is the real test of whether Hitler won in the end or did not: \u201cThe Africans probably had no idea who Hitler was, but even so: only if they survived Germany now would Hitler truly have lost the war,\u201d he thinks (GWG<\/em>, 78). According to Richard, how Germany treats the refugees shows us whether we can see everyone under the same, shared humanity or if, instead, we still build our world upon the differences between first-class and second-class humans, with no basic human rights. In this second case, Hitler won the war, then.<\/p>\n

Non authoritative narrative voice<\/em> \u2014 According to Meretoja, the same narrative strategies of Gone, Went, Gone<\/em> convey a non-subsumptive approach to the other. First, in the novel there is no authoritative narrative voice. As readers, we only know how something may appear to someone, speculations about the possible reasons for the characters actions and reactions, as well as possible future developments. The uncertainty of the narrative voice invites the reader to participate to the process of interpretation, which is therefore open-ended. Meretoja highlighted how forms of narrative that are less certain of themselves invite to a dialogical, explorative engagement with the text, as they open the horizons to asking questions.<\/p>\n

The \u201cprimacy of questions\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Indeed, the novel actively examines questions as a form of engagement with others that begins with listening: \u201c\u201cthe act of listening always contains the questions: What should you understand? What do you want to understand? What will you never understand but want to have confirmed?\u201d Richard says while reflecting on how everything depends on asking the right questions (GWG<\/em>, 114). The memories the refugees share with him over the course of this dialogical process constitute a process of exploration in which what is at stake is \u201cwho they are and how they exercise their power of narrative agency by telling their own stories,\u201d stressing how agency and sense of self are entangled in their stories, \u201cthe ones they have started, those in which they have being thrown, and those who they took from the culturally available repertoire of narrative templates,\u201d Meritoja stated.<\/p>\n

Stories that elude the plot<\/em> \u2014 In addition, Richard\u2019s narrative templates are in tension with stories eludes traditional narrative understanding. In the novel, we see Richard looking for narratives that could help him understand what it means to be a refugee, how they transitioned from a full existence to a life of a refugee, which is open in all directions. To do so, at first, he thinks he must know what it was \u201che has to know what was at the beginning, what was in the middle, and what is now\u201d (GWG<\/em>, 60). However, the stories of the refugees resist such preconceived narrative pattern. The stories they tell are so overwhelming and so full of pain that their stories show that how Richard\u2019s Westerns narrative world is not ready to receive them. Those stories do not fit in Richards\u2019 search for a plot. Eventually, instead, Richard asks himself whether \u201cwill he too occupy some place in their stories?\u201d and whether in the end this is even a relevant question to ask himself.<\/p>\n

The human right to tell one\u2019s own story<\/em> \u2014 Finally, Meretoja argued that the novel shows how not everyone as an equal right to excise their narrative agency. Agency, including narrative agency, are unequally distributed within society. Some people have more power than others to determine which stories get told. People with more freedom decide the stories to tell. The question of power is essential because it determines the narrative memory that we all are: \u201cwithout memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet\u2019s surface,\u201d Richard catches himself thinking (GWG<\/em>, 226). In conclusion, according to Meretoja, if memory gives us the sense of a shared humanity with specific social and cultural difference, the novel suggests that we should draw from our experiences of foreignness, marginalization, to keep ourselves open to the suffering for others. At the same time, this means accepting that we cannot fully understand another human being and that all we can do is to learn from one another, resisting the temptation of subsuming someone\u2019s narrative agency to our own.<\/p>\n

The discussion that followed Meretoja\u2019s critique focused on some problematic aspects of Richard\u2019s rather subsumptive modes of engagement with the experiences of the refugees at the beginning of the novel.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s intended readership<\/em> \u2014 A problem that emerged from the discussion concerned the novel\u2019s intended readership and whether the novel accompanies the reader to the progressive realization of one\u2019s own privileges. Who is the novel addressing? Who is the novel trying to teach to, even? Is Richard, the retired professor, and his path to relearn also a sort of mise en abyme of the readers\u2019 expected learning process throughout the novel? Perhaps, Erpenbeck is writing for other Westerners, especially for those who think of themselves as liberal and do not realize that in their dialogue with others they are still very limited and dogmatic. Yet, readers pointed out how to reveal with more distinctiveness his later process of opening, the novel presents a rather slow, too long setup of Richard\u2019s initial close-mindedness, who is indeed almost the only character at the beginning of the novel. That long initial setup is in contrast with the rather delayed focus on the stories of the refugees.<\/p>\n

Richard as a cultural mediator \/ translator<\/em> \u2014 Another question concerned whether Richard can be seen as a mediator, because on the threshold between cultures, as well as in-between academic and non-academic world. Meretoja opened the discussion on the different aspects of Richard\u2019s past that anticipate the mediating role he may play in the novel. Richard already mediated different worlds, the East German one where he grew up and the one of United Germany. Yet, although Richard experienced marginalization, there is a dramatic difference between the Richard\u2019s marginalization and that of the refugees. According to Meretoja this is part of the novel\u2019s exploration of how people experience different degrees of marginalization because different are the difficulties people face in their lives. When it comes to Richard as an intellectual bridging academia and social life, Meretoja thinks that the novel can be read as a criticism or self-criticism of the European tradition of humanism. In fact, Nazi Germany showed us how European humanism did not save us from the horrors of WWII and does not make us automatically good. Meretoja suggested that Erpenbeck treats Richard\u2019s humanism with irony. For instance, the way he tries to use this classical mythology and paintings to make sense of the life of the refugees is very problematic, and only later he understands he was wrong, although, still with his own limits. Yet, if the novel criticizes Richard\u2019s pretentious humanism, there is also some hope in the possibility of growth by listening, since he appears to learn along the way.<\/p>\n

Renaming as a subsumptive act<\/em> \u2014 A reader reflected on Richard\u2019s subsumptive way of renaming the African refugees and the extent in which it influences the readers\u2019 experience to also function in a subsumptive way, so much so that after reading the novel we may remember the refugees with the name Richard assigns them, which obliterates their self-identification by their own name prior to meeting Richard. Is the narrator\u2019s irony towards Richard\u2019s subsumptive renaming something that informs the reading experience? Perhaps the narrator\u2019s irony of Richard\u2019s renaming encourages the reader to engage in self-criticism when employing similar subsumptive acts and embracing the primacy of questions as a more ethical way of understanding.<\/p>\n

Memory as the basis for asking questions<\/em> \u2014 At the same time, not all questions are the same and, indeed, Richard\u2019s questions change over the course of the novel showing his subtle development. Meretoja suggested that if at first Richard\u2019s questions are rather mechanic, towards the end of the novel they are more genuine, creating the conditions for a two-way dialogue with the refugees. A meaningful, open dialogue can improve the awareness of our individual and collective limitations, embedded in our memory, and make us more humble, exploratory, and friendly in our encounter with the other. Memory, therefore, can be the starting point for not-knowing, to become aware of the things we take for granted and beginning by asking question with curiosity rather than by looking for answers. Since questions are informative of the perspective we hold, finding new ways of asking questions means also overcoming some of our limits to see beyond our initial horizon and meet new ones.<\/p>\n

Gone, Went, Gone<\/em> and Meretoja\u2019s critique of the novel invited us readers to become more aware of how we use the past and what we remember when approaching something new, being it the present we are in or the lives of others and their experiences. How did Erpenbeck\u2019s own understanding of the performativity of memory develop after her encounter with the African refugees and their stories? How did her approach to narrative memory change after writing a novel about that encounter? Erpenbeck\u2019s recent, structurally more fragmented work Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces<\/em> (2018) [Kein Roman. Texte und Reden<\/em> 1992-2018<\/em>] could be a new starting point to continue our dialogue with her. In light of the discussion on Gone, Went, Gone<\/em>, a question I would like to ask Erpenbeck is to which extent the experience of disruption of the refugees as well as their tragic stories influenced her decision to opt for more fragmented narrative templates, such as the short essay, rather than the novel. Is the collection of short pieces a better suited medium to explore that shared humanity that experiences of marginality and disruption reveal?<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Erpenbeck, Jenny, and Susan Bernofsky. “Homesick for Sadness: A Childhood in Incompletion.” The Hudson Review<\/em> 67, no. 4 (2015): 549-562.<\/p>\n

Erpenbeck, Jenny. Go, Went, Gone<\/em>, trans. Susan Bernofsky, New Directions, New York (2017).<\/p>\n

Erpenbeck, Jenny, and Kurt Beals. Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces<\/em>. New York: A New Directions Book, 2020.<\/p>\n

Meretoja, Hanna. The ethics of storytelling: Narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible.<\/em> Oxford University Press, 2017.<\/p>\n

Meretoja, Hanna. “Non-subsumptive memory and narrative empathy.” Memory Studies 14, no. 1<\/em> (2021): 24-40. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/1750698020976458<\/p>\n

July 2nd 17:00-18:30 CES<\/strong>T\/GMT+2<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In July 2021, Brigitte Herremans, a research fellow in the Justice Visions project at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University, led a discussion on\u00a0Khaled Khalifa novel\u00a0Death Is Hard Work\u00a0<\/em>(2016).<\/p>\n

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Response by Anne-Marie McManus, Principle Investigator, ERC Project SYRASP<\/h2>\n

Death is Hard Work: Insolvent Violence and the Persistence of Literature<\/strong><\/p>\n

A leading figure of contemporary Syrian literature, Khaled Khalifa has dedicated multiple novels to writing the repressed violences experienced by Syrian society under the Assad regime (1970-present). His most recent novel translated into English, Death is Hard Work <\/em>(2016; translated by Leri Price, 2019), continues Khalifa\u2019s work of paying painstaking attention to how ordinary Syrians experience monumental historical events of displacement and loss, and how these events accumulate in individual lives and bodies, in families, and in Syrian society.<\/p>\n

Death is Hard Work <\/em>writes the ongoing war in Syria through three estranged siblings: Hussein, Fatima, and Bolbol (meaning nightingale), the novel\u2019s central character. A story of crossing Syria in a minibus over several days, the novel opens with the death of \u2018Abdel Latif, their father, whose dying wish is to be buried in the family village, Anabiya. The village lies outside Aleppo, and the journey of bringing the corpse to its burial site would, in ordinary times, have taken mere hours from Damascus, where the novel begins. Yet the mission to fulfill \u2018Abdel Latif\u2019s last wish instigates the novel\u2019s arduous plot. Checkpoints, conflict zones, shellings, and even the arrest of the corpse (along with its children) all slow them down. In the final pages, Khalifa is unflinching in his descriptions of the corpse\u2019s decomposition as the siblings race (if the verb can be used in the context of a war that has settled like lead over the hopes and desires of Syria\u2019s inhabitants) to reach Anabiya before it splits open. In the final scenes, Fatima, the least explored character of the three siblings, is struck mute by the horror of her father\u2019s rapid decay and infestation by maggots.<\/p>\n

Brigitte Herremans contextualized Khalifa\u2019s work in a tradition of dissident literature in Syria, notably since the 1990s, citing the novelist\u2019s belief that literature\u2019s \u201cresponse to dispossession is [the] strongest form of resistance [to] oppression.\u201d Khalifa, she explained, has remained in wartorn Syria due to his commitment to bearing witness to the war and to telling Syrians\u2019 stories in literature. Herremans noted the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar\u2019s commentary on the novel\u2019s title in translation, which suggested \u201clabor\u201d as an alternative to \u201cwork\u201d that foregrounds the existential dimensions of the novel\u2019s task. Drawing on her interviews with the author, Herremans underscored Khalifa\u2019s refusal to write within the accepted categories and discourses of Syrian politics as well as to cultivate the empathy of his readers. He chooses an unheroic protagonist in Bolbol: an ordinary citizen, resentful of the regime\u2019s power but too afraid to act (most of the time). Bolbol fits the profile of a post-2011 category in Syrian politics and society: \u201cthe grey (al-ramadiyyin<\/em>).\u201d A sizable portion of the population, they refused to act with the revolutionaries and thus placed \u201csystemic limits on the uprising\u201d (Wedeen 22). As a result, the grey have been a target of opposition anger and mocking typologies in cultural production over the past decade (Wedeen 70-1).<\/p>\n

In contrast, Khalifa centers Bolbol, a man plagued by ambivalence and weakness. With this choice, Khalifa brings into view what Herremans calls social violence: the quotidian slights and exclusions that preoccupy Bolbol, whose daily concerns \u2013 when he is not delivering his father\u2019s corpse across the country — focus on securing his neighbors\u2019 approval and living as invisibly as possible. This social violence intertwines with the military violence that is everywhere in the novel, breaking the siblings\u2019 journey, even besieging the spaces where characters find moments of temporary respite. Amidst so much abjection, we find in Bolbol a portrait of fear and isolation, but also of the most ordinary of hopes and desires. Herremans drew on writings by Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler to argue that these dimensions of the novel insist on the humanity and vulnerability of Syrian lives, too often obscured and dehumanized today.<\/p>\n

The discussion that followed Herremans\u2019 comments was lively and multifaceted. Participants expressed their admiration for Khalifa\u2019s capacity to capture the dignity of his characters amidst degradation and destruction, as well as the ongoing meaning of rituals surrounding death. Khalifa\u2019s narrative thematizes the banalization of death in the war, with Bolbol grumbling to himself that in the presence of constant loss and annihilation, \u201crites and rituals meant nothing now [\u2026] death wasn\u2019t even a source of distress anymore: it had become an escape much envied by the living\u201d (6). \u201cThe Syrian war novel,\u201d states the late Hassan \u2018Abbas, \u201cis a mass grave\u201d (112). A pervasive, anonymizing violence even governs Khalifa\u2019s style. His earlier novel, In Praise of Hatred <\/em>(2006), <\/em>had marked the explosions of violence in 1980s Aleppo with sharp shifts in language and style. In contrast, Death is Hard Work <\/em>lets death and loss to suffuse its prose from beginning to end. In this context of relentless loss, the main characters repeatedly question the point of observing pieties around death, particularly when the journey exposes the siblings to so much danger. Hussein threatens to throw his father\u2019s corpse to wild dogs. Bolbol contemplates giving up and burying the body anywhere.<\/p>\n

There are no moments of sentimental realization, no affirmations of filial duty to counterbalance the siblings\u2019 intense desires to abandon their task, to stop pretending there is any meaning in honoring their father\u2019s last wish. The novel and their journey simply continue. The siblings\u2019 movement across time and space, paralleling the linear movement of the novel itself, becomes a gesture of persistence — \u201ca mode of living-on with the eternal dread of the present\u201d — rather than progress, growth, or triumph (Berlant, 180). When the siblings finally reach Anabiya, the extended family is waiting and gives them refuge. They bury \u2018Abdel Latif in haste, but it is no source of catharsis or closure. They even neglect to bury him next to his sister, Layla, as the dying \u2018Abdel Latif had asked. What little relief that may be found lies in Bolbol\u2019s decision to scurry back to his dull existence \u2013 \u201clike a large rat,\u201d concludes the text — in the capital where he hopes to avoid regime scrutiny and the hatred of his neighbors \u2013 and above all, to sleep (144).<\/p>\n

Very little can be recuperated from these closing scenes. Readers hoping for an uplifting celebration of the human spirit will be disappointed. Yet Khalifa is far from veering into nihilism. Resilience suffuses the text, exploding in expressions of love and childlike joy that seem anarchically out of place: \u2018Abdel Latif joins the revolution in his seventies and marries his childhood love. They frolic and kiss across the ruins of rebel territory as their aging bodies, like those of the younger rebels, slowly starve. The revolution assuages \u2018Abdel Latif\u2019s bitter disillusionment at the hollow promises of the 1960s \u2013 Arab nationalist glory, anti-colonialism, resistance to imperialism \u2013 in ways that appear unavailable to his son. This generational mapping of the 2011 revolution is a curious one in Death is Hard Work, <\/em>as the protests and military rebellions in Syria were dominated by the young. Khalifa\u2019s choice implicitly suggests that Bolbol\u2019s life under the Assad dictatorship has robbed him of certain extremes in his political imagination and actions. His horizon stretches as far as making bargains with his surroundings to evade social violence and exclusion. Utopia is foreclosed. Only unrequited love permits Bolbol to glimpse other futures, perhaps precisely because they remain unrealized. He adores Lamia, a beacon of courage and solidarity in the novel whom we meet hosting and feeding displaced families with her husband, impervious to the dangers they face in welcoming the state\u2019s opponents into their home. Bolbol muses that she gives him \u201cthe courage\u201d to be otherwise, even reckless (53). Through Bolbol Death is Hard Work<\/em> suggests, with Khalifa\u2019s characteristic compassion for human weakness and inconsistency, that we are not revolutionaries, brave, or for that matter grey in abstraction and isolation. Rather than \u201cundivided selves,\u201d we are embedded in networks of social belonging, dependence, and recognition (Morales 86).<\/p>\n

What is the fate of this entangled individual in a society that has been silenced, intimidated, and torn apart over decades, but most intensively in the past ten years? Death is Hard Work<\/em>\u2019s only reply is to offer nothing that resembles ordinary character development. This literary yardstick entered the discussion as a way to think about Bolbol\u2019s trajectory: had he changed by the end of the novel, asked the participants? On one hand, he sheds his nickname for his real name, Nabil, meaning \u201cnoble.\u201d On the other, he crawls into bed, \u201csuperfluous\u201d and exhausted \u2013 hardly words that promises noble acts ahead (144). One discussant noted that despite the completed journey, much remains unfinished at the novel\u2019s deeply unsettling conclusion. If we are used to understanding plot as showing character development, whether in self-understanding or relationships with others, Death is Hard Work <\/em>defies our expectations.<\/p>\n

Something else accumulates along with the rot and maggots in the patriarch\u2019s corpse: an ambient trauma that tears subjectivities apart, silencing Fatima and deflating the brothers\u2019 dreams. Khalifa names this trauma, the offspring of decades of political oppression layered by the contemporary war, in a moment when the narrative muses on a figure of debts unpaid: \u201cthe shame and the silence they had lived through for years were exacting a price, and everyone would pay it, executioners and victims alike\u201d (122).<\/p>\n

Debts are relations. As narrative objects, they arrange time, causality, and ethics (Bouju). For Khalifa, these invisible bonds capture the proliferating, unnameable, perhaps even invisible trauma at the heart of this and his previous novels, accumulating in bodies and memory, soldering Syrians to one another in the very years of their most rancorous divisions. It is not that death and suffering form a currency for new relations between Syrians in the novel (or indeed for sympathy from the reader). In a passage that recurred in Herremans\u2019 discussion, a taxi driver laughs when he learns of the siblings\u2019 loss (8). Similarly, \u201cthe story of [\u2018Abdel Latif\u2019s] body got no sympathy\u201d from other displaced Syrians, numb and disinterested (48). Nor does Khalifa turn to debt to raise questions of settling accounts, a core topic of transitional justice that is still postponed in Syria. The novel makes this clear through the ubiquitous presence of armed men at checkpoints, some driven by payback and profit, others by sympathy. The siblings narrowly escape the battles around checkpoints, waged increasingly by foreigners as the novel progresses, suggesting Syria has been engulfed by scores that may kill, but do not concern, ordinary Syrians.<\/p>\n

Instead, Khalifa uses literature to gesture to the impossibility of paying back a price that won\u2019t stop growing for Syrians: too many losses, too dear to too many, accumulated over too much time. In this sense, Death Is Hard Work <\/em>performs what Emmanual Bouju terms a poetics of insolvency, with its persistent living-on figuring the necessary work of living, dying, and bearing witness amidst all that may never be settled. It is for this reason that the novel\u2019s plot is driven by a debt paid only partially (a debt, noted David Graeber, is a promise perverted by \u201cmath and violence\u201d). The burial of \u2018Abdel Latif does not offer a full release for Bolbol (or, indeed, the novel), and his dying command is only partially fulfilled because he is not buried next to his sister Layla. Much as \u2018Abdel Latif\u2019s corpse invites its own reading as a symbol of the ravaged Syrian nation (\u2018Abbas 123), Layla, a specter of the past and its patriarchal violence, asks to be read as the symbol of feminist revolt in Syria. When their father tried to force her into marriage decades earlier, Layla lit herself on fire on the roof of her wedding party, \u201ca blazing torch [\u2026] lighting the way for other women\u201d (104). Yet another debt of insolvent violence, Layla\u2019s story resurfaces again and again. The family tries to bury it in multiplying stories, but her burning figure never collapses into ashes. In this sense, she is never fully dead, but nor can she or the resistance she embodies be reborn, triumphant and phoenix-like. Khalifa\u2019s decision to leave the siblings\u2019 corpses at a distance in the family land in the north, their wishes still unfulfilled, is thus a fitting end to Death is Hard Work<\/em>. Although their corpses disappear into the earth, the siblings remain: lonely and irreconcilable symbols of promises squandered and debts unpayable around which new Syrian narratives will proliferate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018Abbas, Hassan, al-Jasad fi Riwayat al-Harb al-Suriyah <\/em>[The Body in the Syrian War Novel<\/em>] Presses d\u2019IFPO, 2021. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition<\/em>. 2nd<\/sup> edition. University of Chicago Press, 1998.<\/p>\n

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism<\/em>. Duke University Press 2011.<\/p>\n

Bouju, Emmanuel. \u201cThe Debt Narrative and the Credit Crunch of Democracy.\u201d differences <\/em>31:3, (2020): 59-75.<\/p>\n

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence<\/em>. Verso, 2006.<\/p>\n

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years. <\/em>Melville House, 2014.<\/p>\n

Morales, Rafael Acosta. “Splitting the Colonizer: Discarding Centrality as Freedom.”\u00a0Comparative Literature<\/em>\u00a071.1 (2019): 86-107.<\/p>\n

Wedeen, Lisa. Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. <\/em>University of Chicago Press 2019.<\/p>\n

June 15th 16:00-17:30 (CEST\/GMT+2)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In June 2021, Greg Forter<\/a>, a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina, led a discussion on Kamila Shamsie’s novel\u00a0Burnt Shadows <\/em>(2009)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Response by Janet Handley, UiT, The Arctic University of Norway: Burnt Shadows<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n

Kamila Shamsie\u00b4s novel Burnt Shadows <\/em>(2009) spans a vast history of political upheaval. It begins in Nagasaki, 1945, moves through the partition of India in 1947, from Delhi to Pakistan, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, America\u00b4s proxy wars, to New York post 9\/11 and its aftermath. It ends in 2002 with an innocent man sent to Guantanamo Bay. This final location takes us full circle back to the prologue, providing a neat structural frame for the novel. Written in present tense, the prologue hints at its location with the simple reference to a cell and an orange jumpsuit \u2013 symbols so ingrained in the public imagination that Shamsie needs not name it. The final words of the prologue pose a question: How did it come to this?<\/em> By the end of the book, readers are in a position to form their own responses. This question, according to Shamsie, also defines the role of the novelist. In a panel debate on Literature and Political Violence (Royal Society of Literature 2009), shortly before Burnt Shadows <\/em>was published, she was asked about the form of the novel and how it could possibly keep up with the fast-moving events in the world as documented by journalists. Shamsie clarified that in this context, journalists and novelists play complimentary roles. Journalists provide the daily updates, whereas novelists have the time to explore \u201chow we came to this\u201d. Events do not occur in isolation, and Shamsie\u00b4s linking of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 to 9\/11 and its aftermath, underline what Professor Greg Forter describes as \u201ca deep, structural relationship between the two events \u2026 part of the history of U.S. world hegemony\u201d.<\/p>\n

Forter\u00b4s introduction to the novel began by directing attention to an article Shamsie wrote for Guernica<\/em> magazine in 2012: The Storytellers of Empire<\/em>. It provides both a general frame for the novel and intervenes in the debate surrounding 9\/11 fiction, especially as represented by U.S. authors. Here, Shamsie draws attention to another question, one asked by many Americans immediately after 9\/11: \u201cwhy do they hate us\u201d? Rather than pondering this deeply, Shamsie states, the question was answered swiftly and simplistically: \u201cthey hate our freedoms\u201d. Expecting novelists to \u201cproffer\u201d more complex explanations, Shamsie is disappointed. She cannot find U.S. authors who \u201csee its stories bound up with the stories of other places\u201d. The national calamity of 9\/11 lacks any historical context or understanding of causality. It is viewed as a singular event: the day itself. She quotes John Freeman, editor of Granta magazine, who reflecting back 10 years later admitted: \u201cWe [Americans] read less about the world and more about ourselves\u201d. Shamsie\u00b4s novel, Burnt Shadows<\/em>, can thus be seen to counter the seeming inability of U.S. writers to free themselves from an insular, domestic focus. The novel decenters the narrative in order to tell stories from a different perspective: one that inhabits the exterior. In this way it provides a broad historical context in which to address and reconsider these pertinent questions: \u201cHow did it come to this?\u201d; \u201cwhy do they hate us?\u201d.<\/p>\n

Burnt Shadows<\/em> follows two families over three generations, as their lives interweave. The family histories represent what Forter highlights as one of the main concerns of the novel: uprootedness, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The Weiss-Burtons, German (Konrad, Ilse), English (James), American (Harry, Kim), travel freely and settle where it benefits them most, their country heritages aligned with colonial and neo-imperialist powers. The Tanaka-Ashrafs, Japanese (Hiroko), Indian (Sajjad), Pakistani (Raza) move out of necessity: Hiroko leaves Japan to escape the label of \u201chibakusha\u201d (affected by the bomb) and later Pakistan due to the threat of nuclear conflict; Sajjad is denied entry to his home in Delhi after Partition and forced to live in Pakistan where he is eventually killed; Raza flees to Canada suspected of Harry\u00b4s murder. Forter points out that the families \u201cembody the power dynamics that shape historical violence along racial-national lines\u201d. Beginning with the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Hiroko recounts to Sajjad: \u201cthe American with the gentle face said the bomb was a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives\u201d (BS 62). Similar reasoning is applied by Kim in the final pages of the novel, who by reporting Abdullah, inadvertently leads to Raza\u00b4s arrest: \u201cIf I did look at him and see the man who killed my father, isn\u00b4t that understandable?\u201d (BS 361). A clear distinction operates between those whose lives matter and those whose lives do not count as lives at all.<\/p>\n

The justification that dominant military powers use to \u201cwrite-off\u201d civilian populations as collateral damage, draws attention to the violation of human rights. In Burnt Shadows, <\/em>Forter argues, the novel looks more to the question of \u201cthe right to have rights\u201d as posed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em> (1951), and what happens to those rights when people are dispossessed, forced to flee, exiled. Uprootedness is everywhere in this novel. Aside from the focus on the two families, Shamsie provides a broader narrative that captures the voices of those on the margins: the migrant taxi drivers working in the U.S.; market traders in Karachi; Afghan refugees; the training camps for the Mujahideen; an Afghan farmer who accepts the Taliban so he can watch his sons \u201cmeasure hand-span against a pomegranate, not a grenade\u201d (BS 320); and those who smuggle Raza to Canada via Iran and Oman. The boat journey to Muscat, so cramped it makes Raza think of the mass graves in Kosovo, leads to the question: \u201cWhat kind of world made men have to endure this?\u201d (BS 337). Burnt Shadows <\/em>examines how social forces are mediated by individuals, and how different histories of violence impact on different social groups and the complex relationships that arise. Spanning five countries and sixty years, Shamsie connects both readers and characters to intimate scenes within the more impersonal context of war and destruction: we witness the interplay of history in the personal lives of those who live it.<\/p>\n

This draws us to the title, Burnt Shadows<\/em>, upon which Shamsie elaborates further in the Guernica article. Awaiting inspiration for her next novel, the image of an atom bomb dropping on Nagasaki kept coming to mind. Her lack of knowledge led to a book by John Hersey: Hiroshima<\/em> (1946), where she read about the effects of the atom bomb on human survivors: \u201cOn some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns \u2026 the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos\u201d. This leads to the \u201cthree bird-shaped burns\u201d, literally \u201cburnt shadows\u201d imprinted onto the flesh of Hiroko\u00b4s back from the kimono she was wearing. In the novel, Hiroko\u00b4s wounded body becomes a metaphor for the wounded world: \u201cUrakami Valley has become her flesh. Her flesh has become Urakami Valley\u201d (BS 27). As she states later, \u201cSome days she could feel the dead on her back\u201d (BS 49). Described as a \u201cdiagonal script\u201d, the wounds that history has inscribed on Hiroko\u00b4s back also become part of the novel\u00b4s focus upon language and translation, or what Forter describes as the \u201cpossibilities\u201d of translation. Hiroko\u00b4s own linguistic facilities not only provide employment and an ability to embrace world citizenship, but love is borne in and through translation, in her relationships with Konrad and Sajjad, and the skills she passes onto her son Raza. In contrast, the reluctance of the Weiss-Burtons to adapt linguistically, is expressed by James: \u201cIf there ever was a time we were interested in entering your world in that way, it\u00b4s long past\u201d (BS 40). The final scene of the novel depicts the inability of Kim to translate and thus to understand any connection between the atomic bomb in 1945 to the present \u201cwar on terror\u201d: \u201cThe silence that followed was the silence of intimates who find themselves strangers. The dark birds were between them, their burnt feathers everywhere\u201d (BS 362).<\/p>\n

The notion of \u201cshadows\u201d haunts the book from beginning to end. Shamsie uses this symbol to connect sequences in the text. Explaining the significance of a shadow on a rock, Hiroko asks: \u201cDo you know about the shadows, Sajjad?\u201d (BS 76). The horror of the bomb and its consequences are vividly captured, not only in the wounds that Hiroko bears and the description of her father, but in those for whom there were no remains: \u201cThose nearest the epicentre of the blast were eradicated completely, only the fat from their bodies sticking to the walls and rocks around them like shadows\u201d (BS 76). The tenderness with which Hiroko recounts her search for Konrad\u00b4s \u201clanky shadow\u201d and the burial of the rock she felt sure bore his imprint, stands in stark contrast to the brutal act of military warfare. Later, when Sajjad is killed by one of Harry\u00b4s operatives, Hiroko turns away, \u201cso that even his [Harry\u00b4s] shadow was out of her sight\u201d (BS 243). On hearing of Yoshi Watanabe\u00b4s cancer \u201cmushrooming\u201d in his body, and the news that Pakistan had decided to drop the nuclear tests, Hiroko is unable to escape from the image of \u201cKarachi manifest in a post-bomb landscape by shadows overlying shadows overlying shadows\u201d (BS 291). As Raza is arrested at the end of the novel, he notes: \u201cThere was the spider and its shadow. Two families, two versions of the spider dance. The Ashraf-Tanakas, the Weiss-Burtons \u2013 their story together the story of a bomb, the story of a lost homeland, the story of a man shot dead by the docks, the story of body-armour ignored, of running alone from the world\u00b4s greatest power\u201d (BS 355). The distinction between those who cast the shadows and those who live in those shadows highlights how the world is safe for some but not for others.<\/p>\n

Professor Forter\u00b4s presentation of the novel led to a lively and interesting debate. One question drew attention to the fact that as a 9\/11 novel, 9\/11 only plays a small role in Shamsie\u00b4s account. In Burnt Shadows, <\/em>Shamsie emphasizes that you cannot tell the story of 9\/11 without telling all the other stories. Shamsie makes connections between the atomic bomb, the military bases, the covert bases, the proxy wars and the creation of economic borders that the U.S. benefits from, whilst presenting us with counter-narratives that trace the stories of those who are displaced, who fight back, who suffer, who long for their homelands. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the sense of brotherhood and loyalty established between Raza and Abdullah, and Harry and Kim\u00b4s world view. Harry tries to dissuade Raza from tracing Abdullah to which Raza responds: \u201cHow long ago was it that you decided to justify your life by transforming responsibility into a disease?\u201d (BS 286). This attitude is echoed as Raza is arrested. Kim thinks: \u201cShe didn\u00b4t want him to be caught, she didn\u00b4t want him to escape, she didn\u00b4t want to be responsible either way\u201d (BS 353). This lack of responsibility underlines the fact that Kim and her father Harry comprehend the narrative of 9\/11 only in terms of themselves and their lives. They fail to reflect upon or grasp their own complicity in events. Rather, Harry dreams the dream of U.S. imperialism, of a \u201cmap of the world with countries appearing as mere outlines, waiting to be shaded in with stripes of red, white and blue\u201d (BS 203). You make Americans into world citizens by making the world itself American. As Forter points out: This is a profit-making enterprise: \u201cHere was internationalism, powered by capitalism\u201d (BS 204). Kim embodies the liberal-minded U.S. citizen whose sense of self is toxic; she has no idea of the crimes committed in her name.<\/p>\n

In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence <\/em>(2004), Judith Butler draws attention to the value of narratives: \u201c[t]he ability to narrate ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position of the third, or to receive an account delivered in the second, can actually work to expand our understanding of the forms that global power has taken\u201d (8). She argues that the dominant narrative in the U.S. post 9\/11 split humanity simplistically into two groups: those \u201cwith us\u201d and those \u201cagainst us\u201d. This polarisation operated as a way to justify the violent response of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq as it removed the ability \u201cto consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others\u201d (7). Shamsie highlights the dangers of such a narrow world view. The inability to understand, connect and respect lives beyond our own, as represented by the Weiss-Burtons in the novel, is summed up in Hiroko\u00b4s final words: \u201cIn the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that\u00b4s what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable \u2026 right now, because of you [Kim], I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb\u201d (BS 362).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. <\/em>New York. Verso. 2004.<\/p>\n

Forter, Greg. Literary analysis\/presentation of Burnt Shadows. <\/em>ReadRespond: UiT. June 2021. https:\/\/site.uit.no\/readrespond\/books\/burnt-shadows\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows<\/em>. London. Bloombury. 2009. (Quotations referred to as BS)<\/p>\n

Shamsie, Kamila. \u201cLiterature and Political Violence\u201d. Royal Society of Literature. https:\/\/rsliterature.org\/library-article\/literature-and-political-violence\/<\/a> 2009.<\/p>\n

Shamsie, Kamila. \u201cStorytellers of Empire\u201d. Guernica Magazine. February 2012. https:\/\/www.guernicamag.com\/shamsie_02_01_2012\/<\/a><\/p>\n

May 10th 16:00-17:30\u00a0<\/strong>(CEST\/GMT+2)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In May 2021,\u00a0James Dawes<\/a>, a Professor of English at Macalester College, a private liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota, led a discussion on Chang-rae Lee’s novel The Surrendered\u00a0<\/em>(2011)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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April 29th 17:00-18:30 (CEST\/GMT+2)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In April 2021, Stef Craps<\/a>, a professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative, led a discussion on Octavia Butler’s novel\u00a0Parable of The Sower\u00a0<\/em>(1993)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Response by Marijana Miki\u0107, University of Klagenfurt<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Octavia E. Butler\u2019s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower<\/em> has become eerily prescient in recent times. The resurge in popularity largely rests on Butler\u2019s uncanny ability to predict the future: not by conjuring up one<\/em> apocalyptic, earth-shattering event, but rather by thinking through the future consequences that will follow if existing problems are not addressed. The fact that Butler became a New York Times<\/em> bestselling author in 2020, 14 years after her death, is a recognition long overdue. And yet, it is hardly possible to celebrate the overwhelming resonance of the novel, without also understanding the success as a warning that we are coming closer and closer to the planetary doom that Butler is imagining. For all these reasons, Dr. Stef Craps reminds us, Parable of the Sower<\/em> offers fertile ground for a discussion of literature, history, and human rights in the contemporary day and age.<\/p>\n

Dr. Craps opened his introduction to the novel with the following question: \u201cWhy is this book being rediscovered now?\u201d Set during the years 2024\u20132027, Parable of the Sower<\/em> presents a nightmarish vision of social and environmental collapse that is all too recognizable for readers today. Moreover, the lack of confidence in the political system portrayed in the novel may only have become more pronounced in recent years. Corporate greed, climate change denial, a zero-tolerance border policy, executive orders against immigrants, and the mindless promotion of anti-democracy and anti-science views are only some of the ways in which the Trump era tragically reinvested in an old order that is not only responsible for many past and present injustices, but fundamentally opposed to change as \u201cthe only lasting truth\u201d\u2014one of the key tenets of Butler\u2019s Earthseed belief system (3).<\/p>\n

Butler, who has been declared the mother of Afrofuturism, resonates in this time of intense political activism that calls for a future in which the matter of Black lives is no longer contested. Dr. Craps referred to the Derek Chauvin trial and the jury\u2019s \u201cgood sense to deliver a guilty verdict.\u201d He noted that Chauvin\u2019s acquittal in the murder of George Floyd would have likely (and understandably) led to riots on a national and possibly international scale, much like the 1992 L.A. riots following the acquittal of four white police officers over the brutal beating of Rodney King. In \u201cthe cynical cycle that is race relations and white supremacy in America\u201d (Thomas 38), the guilty verdict provides a measure of accountability, relief, and hope. And yet, it is \u201cless justice than an unusually strident effort toward self-preservation,\u201d as Cheney-Rice observes. Self-preservation, however, will not fix a system that is broken beyond repair. Radical reform will. Butler\u2019s storytelling highlights how present-day injustices are inextricably linked to historical injustices that are often not even properly acknowledged, let alone repaired. By participating in the African American literary tradition of the neo-slave narrative, Parable of the Sower<\/em> presents a searing indictment of redemptive accounts of US history and linear progress narratives that give social currency to \u201cpost-racial\u201d ideologies. Butler urges us to understand that we must reckon with the realities of injustice, both past and present, to generate a future imaginary that makes possible intersectional justice.<\/p>\n

In and through her fiction, Butler provides a blueprint for a sustainable future, which relies on community-building, mutual trust, inclusivity, and interdependence. The protagonist Lauren Olamina\u2019s hyperempathy syndrome\u2014a disability that is also a superpower\u2014plays an important role in facilitating the creation of a progressive community in Parable of the Sower<\/em>. Dr. Craps drew an intriguing parallel between Lauren\u2019s hyperempathy and Greta Thunberg\u2019s autism. On the one hand, their neurodivergence helps them to act purposefully. On the other hand, it is used against them by their opponents. A passage in the novel when Lauren\u2019s father advises her to stop talking about the dangers she foresees illustrates the connection particularly well. \u201cThese things frighten people. It\u2019s best not to talk about them,\u201d her father tells her, to which Lauren responds: \u201cBut, Dad, that\u2019s like \u2026 like ignoring a fire in the living room because we\u2019re all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about\u201d (Butler 59). In her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, Greta drew on very similar imagery to communicate climate urgency: \u201cI want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Craps concluded his talk by raising questions about the viability of Butler\u2019s imaginary agrarian community, the effectiveness of change which happens on a communal rather than on a political level, the commitment to interstellar exploration rather than planetary conservation, the anthropocentrism of Butler\u2019s imagination of empathy, and the role of (hyper-)empathy in the context of real-world political change.<\/p>\n

The first question from the audience raises the concern that a dystopian, sci-fi imaginary may act as a form of escapism which directs attention away from real-world issues that require immediate solutions. Indeed, Parable of the Sower<\/em> was ahead of its time because Butler combined her dedication to follow already existing problems to their logical conclusions with a yearning for imagining an alternate, more hopeful future. Dr. Craps pointed out that the recent trend toward utopianism seems to suggest that doomsday fatigue has set in for many readers. Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s The Ministry for the Future<\/em> (2020) exemplifies this utopian revival particularly well. Rather than imagining the end of the world, the novel takes up the arguably more difficult challenge of imagining a credible alternative to the global challenges facing us. Whether environmentally engaged novels seek to invite fear or hope in readers, or both, there is, as Alexa Weik von Mossner suggests, \u201ca certain consensus that emotionally powerful renderings of human\u2013nature relationships play an important role in our engagement with environmental narrative and that such engagements can have substantial repercussions in the real world\u201d (2017, 9). The exciting research done in the field of empirical ecocriticism promises to provide some answers to questions concerning the impact of climate fiction on real readers (e.g. Schneider-Mayerson 2020).<\/p>\n

How, then, can literature help us to tackle the barriers that get in the way of our own commitments to hope and change? Rather than providing readers with exact blueprints for a better future, the potential of novels like Parable of the Sower<\/em> lies in the ability to convey that change is indeed possible. The novel refuses, however, to fall into the trap of na\u00efve optimism. By drawing attention to the ever-present tension between seeds of hope and seeds of destruction, Butler is invested in evoking hopeful visions, while never losing sight of the ambivalence and complexity of viable change. The discussion emphasizes the legitimacy of both literal and figurative interpretations of literary utopianism in the context of contemporary debates about more sustainable futures.<\/p>\n

Considering Butler\u2019s ability to envisage our future, it might not come as a surprise that she also predicted the bestseller status of her fiction in a private journal: \u201cI shall be a bestselling writer . . . So be it! See to it!\u201d The fact that we have largely failed to see to<\/em> the conservation of the human and nonhuman world in the decades following the publication of Parable of the Sower<\/em> has certainly contributed to its contemporary resonance. In this regard, the discussion closed with a pronounced hope that the current resurgence of the novel comes not only with a realization that Butler\u2019s future has in many ways materialized, but also a recognition of the central importance of individual and communal responsibility necessary for imagining and creating change. The fascinating and thought-provoking book discussion led by Dr. Stef Craps invites all of us to consider the potential value of fictional writing about the world but also \u201cfor<\/em> the world\u201d (an expression brought up during Dr. Mieke Bal\u2019s discussion that seems particularly compelling in this context).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cBehold Octavia Butler\u2019s Motivational Notes to Self.\u201d Open Culture<\/em>, 29 Jun. 2020. www.openculture.com\/2020\/06\/behold-octavia-butlers-motivational-notes-to-self.html.<\/p>\n

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower.<\/em> Headline, 2014.<\/p>\n

Cheney-Rice, Zak. \u201cThis Is Not Justice. It\u2019s Self-Preservation.\u201d New York Magazine<\/em>, 20 Apr. 2021. nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2021\/04\/the-chauvin-trial-guilty-verdict-is-police-self-preservation.html.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Our house is on fire\u2019: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 25 Jan. 2019, www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2019\/jan\/25\/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate.<\/p>\n

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future<\/em>. Orbit, 2020.<\/p>\n

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. \u201c\u2018Just as in the Book\u2019? The Influence of Literature on Readers\u2019 Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants.\u201d ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment<\/em>, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 337\u2013364.<\/p>\n

Thomas, Sheree R. \u201cDangerous Muses: Black Women Writers Creating at the Forefront of Afrofuturism.\u201d Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century<\/em>, edited by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek. Ohio State UP, 2020, pp. 37\u201355.<\/p>\n

Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative<\/em>. Ohio State UP, 2017.<\/p>\n

March 2021 19th 17:00-18:30\u00a0<\/strong>(CET\/GMT+1)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In March 2021,\u00a0Yasmine Motawy, a Senior Instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo, led a discussion on\u00a0Leila Aboulela’s novel\u00a0Kindness of Enemies\u00a0<\/em>(2015).<\/p>\n

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Response by Dr. Neriman Kuyucu, Ko\u00e7 University, Istanbul<\/h2>\n

Leila Aboulela\u2019s novel The Kindness of Enemies<\/em> (2015) moves back and forth between modern-day Scotland in a post-9\/11 context and the nineteenth century Caucasus during the Crimean War. Dr. Yasmine Motawy started the discussion with an introduction to the complex characters whose stories are intertwined across time and space throughout the novel.<\/p>\n

The Kindness of Enemies<\/em> is divided into four different strains. Sudanese Russian Scottish history professor Natasha Wilson Hussein\u2019s present-day narrative is weaved with the story of the Sufi leader Imam Shamil who fascinated the west and the Russian Empire with his unyielding ambition and faith during the Crimean War. The historical narrative also follows the curious trajectory of Shamil\u2019s eldest son, Jamaleldin who was captured by the Russian Czar and of Anna Chavchavadze, the Princess of Georgia who was, in return, held hostage by Imam Shamil. Through these different stories of yearning and belonging, as Dr. Motawy pointed out, Aboulela challenges the stereotypical depictions of Islam that perpetually dehumanize Muslim identities.\u00a0 The historicity of the text allows Aboulela to unveil the trials and tribulations that Muslims have suffered over the centuries. The past then serves as a powerful tool that illuminates our understanding of Muslimness in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Aboulela further shifts the discursive focus from the neo-Orientalist tropes of radical and threatening Muslims towards the complexity of Muslim identities. The two plotlines unfold against the backdrop of anti-Muslim discourse in different centuries, which serves as a springboard for an in-depth exploration of the right to religious freedom, the right to safe space, and the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of race or religion. From Natasha, Oz, and Malak to Imam Shamil, Anna, and Jamaleldin, the characters\u2019 struggles with what it means to be home, to belong, and to remain true to their faith bring to light how their basic human rights are perpetually relegated to the periphery. Aboulela thus contests the construction of identity and faith as a monolith, asking for a deeper engagement from the reader beyond the negative stereotypes that have long defined Muslimness.<\/p>\n

Dr. Motawy\u2019s first question to Aboulela during the discussion, whether she was consciously thinking about human rights while writing the novel, was a compelling one within this context. No, Aboulela replied, she was not deliberately considering human rights challenges when she started to work on the novel. And she did not have to. The issues surrounding human rights and rights of citizenship are implicated in the true stories that inspired the construction of her characters and their stories. Oz\u2019s harrowing experience, for instance, is based on the true story of a college student who got arrested after he\u2019d downloaded the al-Qaeda training manual for a research project on the concept of terrorism. Oz then represents the large number of Muslims (conservative, liberal, secular, or \u201clapsed\u201d) who are targeted by counter-terrorism strategies such as PREVENT and CONTEST. What happens, Aboulela asked during the discussion- as she does throughout the novel, when counter-terrorism laws falsely persecute innocent people?<\/p>\n

In a society that perceives its minority groups as a threat to its national unity\u2014 its culture, language, and economy\u2014, such mandates can be problematic and perilous, when implemented without meticulous care. A risky conflation of terrorism and piety may facilitate anti-terror operations, which threatens a Muslim\u2019s right to practice conservative Islam without becoming a target. As Natasha meditates on the plight of Muslims in the current political climate:<\/p>\n

Many Muslims in Britain wished that no one knew they were Muslim. They would change their names if they could and dissolve into the mainstream, for it was not enough for them to openly condemn 9\/11 and 7\/7, not enough to walk against the wall, to raise a glass of champagne, to eat in the light of Ramadan and never step into a mosque or say the shahada or touch the Qur\u2019an. All this was not enough, though most people were too polite to say it. All these actions somehow fell short of the complete irrevocable dissolution that was required. (6)<\/p>\n

Oz\u2019s arrest and its serious ramifications point to the various ways in which Muslim identity is reduced to a single entity that evokes a sense of threat and terror. Moreover, it is not only Oz who suffers the consequences of the polarizing rhetoric that labels all Muslims as intrinsically radical. His family, friends, and teachers too find themselves in a precarious situation, where they have to prove their allegiance and loyalty to their country.<\/p>\n

In the second half of the event, the discussion delved further into the question of conditional citizenship. The right to religious freedom, Dr. Motawy went on, \u201cwhile enshrined by laws, are undermined by others,\u201d compels some young Muslims to \u201clive under a constant shadow of suspicion.\u201d Particularly young Muslims in Europe today are given an ultimatum: you are welcome to stay only if you erase your Muslimness\u2014 your otherness. In the novel, characters are forced to leave places to practice their religion and to remain true to who they are: What are its implications today? Dr. Motawy asked Aboulela. The important question she raised, as well as Aboulela\u2019s reflection on the question of forced displacement and integration opened up a discussion on the fact that the integration of Muslims often depends on their depoliticization and secularization.<\/p>\n

The inflammatory rhetoric of othering speaks to the various ways in which Muslims \u201chave been called upon to prove their citizenship and commitment to the secular nation state\u201d (Chambers and Herbert 2015; 2). The pressure to prove one\u2019s loyalty to the nation takes on various forms, Aboulela suggested. Looking at the issue through a human rights perspective, she underlined the fact that all minorities feel a sense of threat in their home countries. The discussion then turned towards a crucial point often overlooked in debates on immigrants and refugees: displacement as a shared experience. Aboulela explained that her personal experiences in the west inform not only her writing; her positionality as a Muslim immigrant woman allows her to comprehend and sympathize with the struggles of Christians in Sudan and Egypt, for instance.<\/p>\n

This emphasis on similarities and commonalities is at the heart of The Kindness of Enemies<\/em>, rendering the novel a must-read as we reflect on the issues of discrimination, prejudice, and Islamophobia. The participants\u2019 questions and comments throughout the event broached a wide range of topics, including but not limited to hybridity, the concept of terrorism, readership, and the process of writing and publication. The inquiries about Muslim writing and representations of Muslim identity further tied into the discussion on shared experiences. As the event was wrapping up, I recognized, once again, the need and the demand for texts like The Kindness of Enemies<\/em> and for literary representations of multifaceted, diverse Muslim identities in the ongoing debates on integration and social cohesion. Through its characters\u2019 intersecting stories that transcend time and space, The Kindness of Enemies<\/em> reveals how the Eurocentric discourse on Islam and minorities finds its articulations in recent history and in contemporary society\u2014<\/em>but the novel simultaneously does something new. It offers a refreshing perspective that moves beyond differences and the rhetoric of \u2018us vs. them\u2019 (and certainly a glimmer of hope), emphasizing kindness<\/em> and understanding that can emerge in the midst of war, social unrest, and polarized times.<\/p>\n

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Works Cited<\/p>\n

Aboulela, Leila. The Kindness of Enemies: A Novel.<\/em> Reprint Ed. Grove Press, 2017.<\/p>\n

Chamber, Claire, Caroline Herbert. \u201cIntroduction.\u201d Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations. Routledge, 2014. pp. 1-14.<\/p>\n

Kuyucu, Neriman. Transnational Spaces, Transitional Places: Muslimness in Contemporary Literary Imaginations. <\/em>2020. University of Missouri, PhD Dissertation. pp. 55-142.<\/p>\n

February 2021 25th 17:00-18:30 (CET\/GMT+1)<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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In February 2021,\u00a0\u00a0Mieke Bal, a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and occasional curator who co-founded the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, led a discussion on Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra<\/em> (1983).<\/p>\n

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Picture taken by Lena Verhoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2020 she made an \u201cessay film\u201d on Cassandra, time, and history, titled \u201cIt\u2019s About Time! Reflections on urgency\u201d. You can check out the full film in the video player down below:
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