“if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.”
- Prophet Song, Paul Lynch
“I am unfinished business.
The business that did not finish me
or my parents
won’t leave my children
in peace.”
- […], Fady Joudah
I didn’t mean to read these two books back to back earlier this spring. It just turned out that way, but they formed a timely pairing.
Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a Booker winner, is a near-future dystopia written about the descent of the Republic of Ireland into a totalitarian state. It’s told from the perspective of Eilish Stack, a mother of four who holds a job within the bureaucracies of biotech. One night, some smug police officers, newly empowered by an emergency powers act, come knocking at her door looking for her husband. The husband, Larry, is not at home when they arrive, and upon hearing later of the event, he chuckles it away. He goes off the next day to his duties as an educator and a higher-up in a teachers’ union, and he never returns — ACAB — his fate uncertain. His disappearance becomes a keystone event for the Stack family, unsettling them into an agitated state that becomes their new normal.
The novel is breathless, told from Eilish’s perspective, without quotation marks or traditional paragraph breaks. Her children range from infant to a near-adult, and she must tend to their varying needs as every system unravels around her. It’s claustrophobic, propulsive, lyric; it’s the scariest narrative book I’ve read in a while. It’s full of the absolutely dismal, sad shit you know to be true in your bones about how far the things around us can be nudged towards totalitarianism without anybody doing much of anything. It’s also full of the kinds of fears that parents harbor when the world outside of their family unit is fucked in some capacity: what do I do with this life that I have created, and how do I keep it safe? How do I provide this small person a loving environment even while everything goes to shit around me and they have to witness how I harden myself against the world? How do I instill confidence in my baby about the existence of goodness as a fundamental human trait? It was hard to read this book and not to think of Gaza; I was reading this book while also observing with shock and outrage a real-time assault on civilians, on parents and children.
Then there are all these moments in the book that are about the intimacies of parenthood — motherhood, since the narrator is a mother — that must take place even when something dangerous — say, shelling — is happening. The simultaneity of motherhood.
“The child startles awake with a cry as though astonished at waking and she finds herself rising upward through sleep until her sleep lies broken in the dark room. She slides a foot towards Larry but his side of the bed is cold. She lifts the child from the cot and puts him to her breast, the small mouth gasping and devouring, the little hand clawing at her flesh. She gives him her finger and he grips it with such tiny might she knows his innate terror, the child clinging as though for dear life, as though there is nothing else to bind him to life but his mother.”
It’s hard to be the caregiver to a newborn or an infant. My son is so huge he’s practically uttering words, and I still nurse him, still observe the motion of his hands and the focus that he brings to his eating. I see every night, when I hold him, the way he relaxes when he’s near me doing the automatic consuming action he’s built to do. Their needs are so immediate. He yells “Nuh, nuh” when he wants the breast, and I know it also means he wants to be close. Babies need to be patted, to be touched and held, and the best way to do that is in a leisurely fashion, with no other obligations, which so many of us do not get to do. I was thinking, while reading this novel, about the babies in Gaza who wake to alert their mothers that they are hungry or need proximity, no matter what their surroundings look like. Thousands of people have given birth since the devastation started.
Anyway, Paul Lynch must have grown up with sisters or something; I did really and truly feel like the character of Eilish was realized and given capacity to exist as a human being even though her existence was very female. The only thing I would say is that Ben, the baby in the novel, seems to sleep a lot more than real babies sleep. This morning my son woke up in the part of the morning that most would still consider night, because he is a baby and he is relentless.
*
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American medical doctor and poet. His book, […], written in real time (from October to December 2023) after the invasion of Gaza, is a poetry collection primarily concerned with the topic of Palestinian presence — that is, the continuity even while existing under violent circumstances, even when erased from narratives, even when ghosted by media outlets in every sense of the word.
The poem I quote in the beginning of this letter is the opening of the first poem in this very good book. With the phrase “unfinished business” Joudah makes it clear that the phrase holds both Palestinian haunting and Palestinian ongoingness. Later in the same opening poem, he says “I write for the future / because my present is demolished. / I fly to the future / to retrieve my demolished present / as a legible past.” The book is an insistence on continuation, and Joudah reminds the reader: “the passive voice / is your killer’s voice.” This is who media outlets become every time they say another journalist or baby “was killed;” this is who we become if we do it too.
In this way “your killer’s voice” can also be the reader’s own voice. Not the voice of the one who kills you, but your voice, which you’d never before realized was the voice of a killer.
There are many memorable moments in the book — cue words like urgent, words people say about political-leaning poems that contain lessons — but the poem that stayed with me after reading is “Mimesis.” You might remember a poem of Joudah’s with that same name; it has been shared widely across social media in recent months. It’s the one that starts “My daughter / wouldn’t hurt a spider” and ends with the spider being compared to a refugee.
This second “Mimesis,” clearly in conversation with the first, also features a child, a parent, and an animal. It begins: “This morning, I don’t know how, / an inch-long baby frog // entered my house / during the extermination // of human animals live on TV. / I recognized the baby’s dread.”
This poem is so brutal and dynamic. Right away we are placed in a very specific reality — the speaker is watching the news coverage that I am also watching every single day. The baby frog jumps around, aimless, scared. It has no idea where it wants to go. The other baby, human, looks to see the adult’s reaction: “My son was watching. / Gently, patiently / I followed it / on my knees // with shattered heart / and plastic bag.”
The line “I recognized the baby’s dread” was what got under my skin. The baby in the line is to me so simultaneously the human baby and the baby frog: both fear what will happen next. The baby frog is agitated, jumping and leaping around the home, filled with panic for what will happen next as it fails to recognize its surroundings. The human baby, learning emotion, learning compassion, dreads what the adult will do. The adult, so weary from witnessing atrocities unfold on television, on Whatsapp, on Facebook and TikTok, scoops the frog and places it outside. “Coaxed it, caught it, / released into the yard, / and started to cry.” The adult, filled to the brim, can no longer hold back. The assumption is that the child witnesses his tears also.
In the previous poem titled “Mimesis,” the end is focused on the end point that the daughter makes: you can’t break the spiderweb because “that is how people become refugees, isn’t it?” The reader leaves the experience with an aha moment, having learnt alongside a child. It feels like a nice takeaway after which you still have control of your emotions. The reader is allowed to go, without being looked at, without being served an emotional reaction. But the culmination of the second “Mimesis” is much more of a crash — there is the resolution, the outward push of tears, and that’s the end of the poem.
A few lines before the end, it bears repeating: “My son was watching.” Sorry for the attempted lesson now at the final graph of this letter. I’m fumbling towards an ending here; I’ve been sitting on this draft for weeks trying to figure out how to end it in a way that doesn’t feel fucking corny, when what I usually send is both corny and unfinished. This is imperfect. But what I keep coming back to is that we shouldn’t need to be served astute, precocious observations to teach us how to feel in an emergency. We aren’t the child. We are the adult, even if we live in comfort, ice cream cartons in our freezers, television streaming on demand. “My son was watching.” My son is watching all the time. I have to catch the frog, and I have to let it live.