Suslov's Daughter by Habib Abdulrab Sarori

Since we'd first met in my sister's house, we'd know nothing aside from life inside a flat with the shutters closed tight. We'd never gone out on the balcony, or into the street. We'd never walked under the sun together, on the beach or in the mountains. We'd never sat in a cafe, or a square, or on the roof of a building. We'd never lounged on a desert dune or under the moon. We'd never shared an umbrella in the rani. We did nothing but fuck like mice in a dark cellar.

There was no way of knowing how shocked I would be (and how shocked she would be, too) if I were to see Hawiya in front of me in the square, or if I ran into her on the street. Even for me, who spent half my Paris nights imagining us traveling the world together.

The unnamed narrator of Habib Abdulrab Sarori's Suslov's Daughter is a committed secularist and communist. As a young man, it seems to him that the communist revolution that has already succeeded in ousting the colonizing British cannot help but succeed, and that soon Yemeni society will be transformed. When he meets Faten--whom he calls "Hawiya," the abyss--for the first time she is only twelve, and the daughter of a high-ranking Marxist official. By the time he returns to Yemen from Paris--his pregnant wife having been killed in the Metro by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists--Hawiya has become a committed Salafist, dedicating her life to the theocratic government of North Yemen, the victors in the country's civil war. Despite these immense differences, the two are still drawn together through love and lust, the secularist and the fundamentalist, the communist and the theocrat. The narrator battles his own cognitive dissonance, weighing his commitment to his principles against his love for Hawiya; outside of his bedroom they are enemies.

Yemen, to the best of my knowledge, is in a bad state. It is one of the poorest and least developed states in the world, and there the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring seems only to have left an opening for more civil war and the Houthi movement. Suslov's Daughter, written in the wake of the Arab Spring, tracks Yemeni history over the past half-century, illustrating the strange divisions--and alliances--that characterize the various movements and moments of its instability. The narrator meets Hawiyah's father on the street: how did this committed Marxist become the kind of man who will refuse to shake your hand because he doesn't want to compromise his ritual ablutions? The love and war between the narrator and Hawiya comes to stand in for the civil war and all its civil strife, and encourages the reader to think about that which the secularists and fundamentalists have in common, despite everything. Hawiya, like the narrator, is a revolutionary, only the nature and the engine of her revolution is very different. All this comes full circle during the Arab Spring, when Hawiya and the narrator find themselves on the same side again, agitating for the downfall of the ruling elites. The reconciliation is not an easy one, nor is it, I think, essentially hopeful. The alliance, Sarori suggests, could only ever have been ephemeral, and ten years after its publication one might say that Yemenis are living in the aftermath of its breakdown.

Suslov's Daughter has a couple of goofy fictional tricks: the first is that it frames the narrator as telling his story to Azazeel, the "Reaper" who has come to collect his soul. On his deathbed, it seems, the narrator only wants to talk about Hawiya, to try to figure out the mystery of her once more. The second is that each chapter is preceded by a post from the narrator's Facebook wall, a long boomer-like rant about Yemeni history or the ruling regime. It seems a little silly, but it makes more sense later on when the narrator describes how crucial Facebook was to the organization of the Arab Spring. It's crucial to the relationship between the narrator and Hawiya, also: she is a massively popular fundamentalist figure; he has a smaller pseudonymous account with which he comments on her post, pressing back against her ideals. It's never clear whether she knows this commenter is him, but the repartee is another facet of their complex relationship.

As a book, Suslov's Daughter was fine. The prose has its flourishes, but often relies on really goofy cliches. I found it more interesting, perhaps, than good. But I do think it finds a fascinating way to present the history of one country in the life of two people, and the way their shifting relationship follows the shifting political and cultural scene in Yemen really works.

With the addition of Yemen, my "Countries Read" list is up to 94!