This is the 8th book from the Aspen Words Literary Prize 2021 longlist that I have read (halfway through the list!)…and I am pretty sure it’s going to make it onto my shortlist prediction. Because holy *deep breath* this is a powerhouse of a novel. 

Against the Loveless World is narrated by Nahr, a Palestinian woman currently serving a (likely) life-sentence in an Israeli solitary confinement prison known as the Cube. We meet her in that present state and, as the novels unfolds, she walks us through the four walls and daily life in the Cube, as well as the story of her life that led from working in beauty salons to her time, if you will, as a political activist and revolutionary. She begins the story with her time as a young wife, abandoned by her husband and led to work as a dancer and escort in Kuwait. We follow her and her family’s escape to Jordan as refugees after Iraq invades Kuwait. Her time in Jordan is marked by a loss of place and self, so she travels to Palestine to finalize her divorce and visit her own country after years away. While there, Nahr really find her stride, finding strength in who she is as a person and what she has endured, as well as a deep pride in her homeland and culture. She joins a resistance group led by Bilal, a man with whom she develops a deep personal and emotional connection, and we see her final transformation into a woman willing to risk everything to bring her native land back to her family and people. 

That was a long summary blurb, but I wanted to get all the parts of the story in there, because this review is going to really focus in on the writing and story and political messages within the novel and I wanted to make sure the scene was fully set for that. This book demonstrates the generational and intergenerational repeating trauma of forced displacement and being refugees with horrifying precision. Within Nahr’s family, she and her mother and grandmother are forced out of homes as refugees two, three, four times within their lives, having to restart over and over in places that are not and will never be their true homes, treated as outsiders in all cases. In a similar vein, Abulhawa writes the trauma of colonialism, the way that even is Nahr and her family had not been forced to flee Palestine, they would still be living within the tragedy of the “colonial logic of interlopers who cannot abide our presence or our joy.” It is such a desolate universal Indigenous experience and reading the way Abulhawa writes it, the reader cannot help but both empathize with Nahr and also completely understand the clarity of the road to radicalization. It is, in fact, such a human response to the “ceaseless accumulation of injustice” she, her family, her friends, her homeland face; one that should, truthfully, be harder not to imagine or agree with. 

I also have to mention the way Nahr herself, her life and story, are handled. Every relationship she develops has a nuanced and complicated development, one that infuses it with a believability and depth that made her, for me as the reader, seem so absolutely real. That is a testament to Abulhawa’s writing, research, knowledge and passion for this story and the topics within. Back to Nahr, her fight to be her own person, accepted for and with her flaws and passions and “ruin,” within strict boundaries that don’t allow that much obvious and loud spirit/strength for her, both a woman and a refugee, is inspiring. It takes her time, and experiencing more pain that I can even imagine (loss, violence against her own person and many of those closest to her, judgement, loneliness and more), but it makes the transformation, the personal decision to fight alongside those she loves most for something she believes in deeply, that much more stirring. Specifically, here, I want to take a moment to highlight her relationship with Bilal. It is both independent of and thanks to their Palestinian roots that their connection grows. And it is, quite simply, a gorgeous testament to the power of emotional love and connection. Their relationship, its sacrifice and openness, despite the harshness of each of their lives/truths, forges a bond that is incredibly strong and profound and that feeling I had while reading that will stay with me for a long time. Their defiance in loving that hard in the face of the “loveless world” devastated me. And Nahr’s unbelievable courage in showing vulnerability after everything and in such an uncertain and dangerous world will shatter you.         

This novel is a heartfelt love letter to Palestine; the author’s devotion to its people, culture, land, nature, traditions are demonstrated with word and action and remembrance on almost every page. This novel is also a plea to the world to recognize unbelievable colonial atrocity occurring in real time that is not just ignored, but supported, by the great world powers. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and Abulhawa’s passion as an activist is so distinct. Against the Loveless World hits with the emotional impact of a freight train, the intellectual criticism to support it, and phenomenal writing that both softens and intensifies the blows. 

 

“Nothing can move in confinement, not even the heart.” 

“But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth I never steady beneath our feet.” 

“No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.” 

“But even the best inventions for confinement and subjugation cannot account for life’s resolve to freedom.” 

“Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of a grief particular to martyrdom, where the anguish of less mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.” 

“What’s truly revolutionary in this world is to relinquish the belief that you have a right to an opinion about who another person chooses to fuck and why.” 

“Honor is an expendable luxury when you have no means or shelter in this fucking world.” 

“Western do-gooders were trying to bring Palestinian and Israeli kids together, as if our condition was just a matter of two equal sides who didn’t like each other, instead of the world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.” (THIS, why can’t we all see this?) 

“...concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured.” 

“...it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.” 

“I suppose that’s what made them revolutionaries. They were all-in, with everything they had, and that meant rummaging through defeat and disappointment to find a new plan and cause for hope.” 

“The tenacity of heartache can take a toll on the body.” 

“...but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited – to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.” 

“To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from…” 

“Tragic, how we adjusted our sense of normal.” 

“I indulge an illicit fantasy of a world that would have allowed us to simply live, raise children, hold jobs, move freely on earth, and grow old together. I allow myself to imagine the dignities of home and freedom might be the purview of the wretched of this earth.”