NIE! Leaves of Narcissus by Somaya Ramadan

Title: Leaves of Narcissus

Author: Somaya Ramadan

Translator: Marilyn Booth

My raving about the melody of this work could never do justice. Which is why I should first offer you this wine of words, the opening paragraph of Leave of Narcisssus:

"The instant before submission is the most difficult of moments. This might be the secret to its vital attractiveness - the irresistible finality of it. The edge of resistance, a breaking point, when your being has stretched itself to its utmost and your consciousness has spun itself thin, tensile, to the finest and most transparent thread. The chasm before you is featureless: absolutely new, wholly defiant to all powers of imagination. Is it something like this that people sense as they are led to the gallows (3)." 

Alongside the Egyptian author Somaya Ramadan, Arabic to English translator Marylin Booth reconstructs a tightly woven narrative about the Arab university student Kimi in Ireland and the internal crisis of post-colonialism. Booth mentions working alongside Ramadan for this English rendition, but also notes Ramadan's contribution to the art of translation, as she as translated Virginia Woolf into Arabic.

And this connection to British literature is certainly reflected, if not necessary, in the style of the work. There is a frantic stream of consciousness, a ever-expansive deluge of empathy and consciousness, the image of a woman teetering on the divide of East and West.

The combination of Ireland and Egyptian should not be overlooked, either. Also a victim of colonialism, Ireland, a Western nation, has much more in common with the Arab world than one might expect. I am not talking of the acts of terrorism we see and have seen in the news- whether it be the IRA or Al-Qaeda; after a period of occupation there is always a lose and struggle for identity, for humanity. The emptiness left by colonial ravaging and theft must be filled.

That attempt to fill the gap left by colonialism is often experienced through a period of violence and poverty, a massive shift in society. There are cases of civil war, such as Ireland and Greece, or an eurption of violence years down the road, as we saw in Rwanda in 1994. In looking at the Egyptian timeline we see a riot or rebellion ever 10 to 20 years after the 1919 revolution.

The process of recreating an identity is a complicated one for an individual, let along a nation or mankind itself. Yet in Ramadan's work, we find it in every line.We see this attempt to break out of a binary - East and West - this madness of self in these obsolete constructs. This line may sum up the individual and communal experience of self-manifestation:

"...I set down my very life as a wager, death or survival (6-7)"

Like when I read Memory in the Flesh, when reading this translation, I often found myself caught in the current of the text, in the sounds of syllables. But the struggles for indemnity, the signals of depression, there was a sense of reading an invigorated retelling of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

This is a novel with story, sound and self. It's 110 pages of beauty and chaos, and I highly recommend it.