THE DISSENTERS

A son steps into his Egyptian mother’s life.

Rakha’s ambitious new novel begins with a man named Nour’s letter to his sister: “Dear Shimo: Do you remember the disused attic on the way to the roof of our one-story house?” Their mother, it quickly emerges, has recently died, leaving the one-story house empty, and leaving Nour with the feeling that “something has come unstuck in my access to time…I can experience events that happened before I was born just as well as the episodes that marked me.” It’s in the attic that Nour finds himself thrust into these intense, immersive visions of their Egyptian mother’s life. At various points in time, she is called Amna, Nimo, and Mouna, and from her enforced arranged marriage as a young girl in the 1950s to a man said to be a communist, it’s clear that the trajectory of her personal beliefs is meant to reflect the political and philosophical developments of her country. Rakha’s project is an admirable and inspired one, and each of his characters, in all sorts of ways, plays against the stereotypical depiction of Arab characters so often seen in Western writers’ works. The trope of the utterly repressed, sexually null, hijab-clad Arab woman, for example, is exploded in Rakha’s pages. But Rakha’s style also leans so heavily toward the experimental that it can frequently be difficult to make out, in practical terms, what is actually happening. Literal meaning seems to be sacrificed to lyricism more frequently than not. This can be frustrating when trying to untangle timelines or simply understand how certain characters are connected to each other. Still, Rakha addresses his larger questions—about gender roles, power, and autonomy in the context of Egyptian history—with a startling freshness.

One woman’s life becomes a microcosm for the history of modern Egypt.