Yumna Kassab – Parramatta’s first laureate in literature – tells stories in fragments. It’s now her recognisable style: mosaic segments that coalesce into a constellation view. The author skilfully employed it in her debut story collection, The House of Youssef, where some of the tales were only a page or two long, as well as her first novel, Australiana, and in her follow-up The Lovers, which was shortlisted for last year’s Miles Franklin. But it is in her latest novel, Politica, that this approach feels most resonant, with nonlinear narrative and atomised storytelling speaking to the novel’s subject of war – its incomprehensible disorder and irreparable fissures – and a community grappling with the fallout.
Amid an unnamed conflict and location somewhere in the Middle East, Politica centres a few key characters. Abdullah is the figurehead of a resistance movement and husband to the pragmatic Khadija, who ideologically spars with him and strives to protect their family; their daughter, Yasmeen, despite her mother’s dissent, becomes her father’s successor. We’re introduced to Salma, a woman reflecting on the irreparable alteration of her life by a war decades prior. Interleafing with these narratives are vignettes of ephemeral scenes and characters: villagers who visit a town well to remember the dead; a woman losing her faith after a loved one’s death; an invasion forever upending a teenager’s education.
Told together with Kassab’s economically poetic prose, a gestalt of war’s human impact emerges. It is the evocation of trauma and its distortions that is one of Politica’s deft achievements. Kassab, who studied neuroscience at university, impresses upon the reader the psychological scarring of exposure to prolonged conflict: its attrition of identity, its untethering of the self to place and time. Though the war is long over, Salma still wakes “listening for explosives”, left to navigate unmoored days plagued by the past: “I never recovered. I am lost there still. I am no longer the person I consider to be my real self.” The future, too, becomes uncertain and thus nonexistent: “It felt like she was living the days of the end.”
Politica also navigates the fraught moral ambiguities of war, providing space for the ideology behind the violent resistance of the subjugated, while also interrogating martyrdom, the lust for bloodshed and their virulent impact on the soul: “This is a dirty business. We don’t want to end up dirtier still.” How an oppressed people should morally respond is never resolved, for how could it be? Instead, Politica is more preoccupied with a humanising aim: dispelling the largely western view of people resisting their oppression as inherently barbaric and aimless, while critically eying the hypocrisy of invading colonial powers.
Kassab could have told this story linearly, but its risk-taking, discordant collage of abrupt chapters, poetic verse, aphorisms and letters elevates its subject. As Sheila Ngọc Phạm wrote in Mascara Literary Review on The House of Youssef, Kassab’s medley style induces “the fragmentary nature of diaspora, how it feels to grow up in a displaced community”. Much of the same can be said of Politica, the structure of which elicits dispossession and displacement via narratives abruptly severed, chronologies upended. Community has always been a preoccupation of Kassab’s, and Politica’s rifts and absences – families splintered, the innumerable references to the dead – are heightened by the novel’s segmentation.
Most of the novel carefully balances its narratives and segmental offerings, maintaining a taut interplay between myriad impressionistic elements. However, near Politica’s end, its pace wanes, with an unevenness emerging that Kassab’s other novels don’t possess. The surfeit of characters starts to dilute the narrative’s communicative heft, too, and the prose occasionally snags on platitudes and clumsy imagery – “Trying to isolate the truth is like trying to find the needle in the haystack of lies”; or: “Much of politics is fiction. It is the hall of smoke and mirrors.” Thankfully, though, these are few.
Politica has allegorical allusions to international conflicts both contemporary and historical (its references to erasure and exile speak prominently to Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza) but ultimately it’s a narrative that grapples with conflict broadly and the politics that shape it. In a 2022 interview, Kassab said a responsibility of the novelist is to “write with an eye towards humanity”. And she never falters in this, with Politica always drawing us back to war’s immeasurable personal cost.
Politica by Yumna Kassab is published by Ultimo Press ($34.99)
