Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 5

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Sarmada
By: Fadi Azzam
Sarmada. UK: Arabia Books, 2012. 192pp. $25.00. ISBN: 1566568722. Pbk.: 216pp. $15.00. ISBN: 1566568625.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Donna Divine, PhD
Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government Smith College
Northampton, MA
Sarmada is a remarkable book, a story that draws readers’ attention, not simply to a plot, but more importantly into a society that might otherwise
be deemed too alien to enter, let alone to understand. Fadi Azzam has crafted a brilliant narrative rendered beautifully into English by Adam Talib.
It should be required reading for all trying to become familiar with the Middle East because Sarmada is one of those books that contains the history
of an epoch. The novel opens in Paris. “And now, by the banks of the Seine, something new was flickering inside of me, bringing Sarmada back...,”
says Rafi, the narrator, whose travels give this story its energy (p. 3). Sarmada’s return to Rafi’s memory is the beginning of a journey of selfdiscovery forcing him to account for who he has become by going back to the village he routinely describes, to himself more than to anyone else, as
“a hollow shell.... [having spent his] bitterest days...there...saddled...with pain and fear and self-effacement.... [that]... had taken years to get... out of
me” (p. 3).
Had Fadi Azzam plunged us immediately into Sarmada’s disorienting otherness, he would not have been able to show how this story with all its
violations of the laws of nature is also a faithful representation of reality. Presumably by accident at a reception, Rafi meets Azza Tawfiq, a
Sorbonne science professor, who says she lived in Sarmada in a past life as Hela Mansour, a young Druze woman brutally murdered by her brothers
for running away with her Algerian lover. Expressing concern for the brothers responsible for exporting the soul that now hovers over her thoughts
and feelings, the scientist asks the narrator what he remembers of the place he thought he erased from his consciousness when he changed his home
address. Although skeptical of the story and of the belief that souls can wonder from Druze body to Druze body while marking an identity that
insures blood purity, Rafi is drawn back to Sarmada presumably to discover how and why Hela died. In fact, his trip teaches him much more about
himself.
For this is a novel about someone who no longer considers himself bound by, or to traditions, but, ironically, styles his documentaries as building
bridges between East and West though questions must be raised about what someone who has deleted genuine knowledge of the former, and not
acquired linguistic fluency in the latter can say about this intersection. At the outset, the narrator assumes a secular idiom is necessary to understand
the world and to banish the power of religious beliefs. But as he is drawn back to a village, saturated with so much tradition and so many layers of
his past, he begins to realize that even if he wishes to leave the space occupied by Sarmada, he cannot fully cast off what it has meant for the
creative energy he possesses, but has yet been unable to express. Without a candid exploration of the culture and society that gave him life and
shaped the evolution of his personality, Rafi knows he will not be able to produce anything of real value.
Until his fateful return to the place of his birth, Rafi’s life had been a series of rebellions against what he believed was a closed, static society
governed by fixed norms and traditions where men and women were simply conscripted into their roles and where they were locked into a static
social structure that denied them opportunity and individuality. People, particularly women, seemed to take submission for granted. Yet, back in
Sarmada, Rafi hears stories of a traditional order that does find ways to accommodate difference and even deviance. Drawing out the agony of
Sarmada’s women denied dignity or imprisoned in loneliness, the novel also gives them a basis for hope. Qualities of compassion, humility, and
empathy can be uncovered in the experiences of the villagers, while the actions structured by the supposedly secular and rational political world are
absolutely unforgiving and inflexible. There are no long deep discussions of politics in the novel, but politics exerts considerable gravitational pull,
and is represented in all its ferocity; its grim realities intrude on the fantasies and generate significant action. For example, Hela’s murder in 1968
follows Israel’s conquest of the Golan Heights, one local register of the national disaster. But the juxtaposition of a traditional order providing at
least the slim possibility for individual authenticity, and a political order totally denying it, is telling.
The villagers find a place for Farida, the prostitute, to dwell and work among them while th