Reviewed by Aneeqa Wattoo

“Whatever does not belong to me wholly and eternally/ Means nothing to me”, wrote 18th-century German poet, Friedrich Holderlin. It is telling that Moroccan writer, Mohammed Achaari, chooses these verses as an epigraph to his new novel The Arch and the Butterfly. The verses suggest a sentiment that runs through the length of the novel: can anything — an experience, person or memory — be meaningful in its transient form? And if so, is there any possibility for its absolute possession in the human experience?

The life of the novel’s 51-year-old protagonist, Youssef al-Firsiwi, presents the reader with a rather desolate answer. The novel opens with Youssef learning the news of the death of his 19-year-old son Yacine; he is astounded to read in an anonymous letter that his son, believed to have been studying engineering in Paris, had suddenly died in strange circumstances after he had secretly gone to Afghanistan and joined the “ranks of the mujahideen” there.

For Youssef, a journalist and relatively successful writer, who describes himself as a “pure socialist” since his youth, the news is shocking on various levels. Writing in the first person, Achaari brings the reader very close to Youssef’s anguish as he is seized with the disturbing conviction that the life he has lived so far has been “an appalling mistake” and that “it would have been impossible for all this to happen unless [he] had spent all those years going in the wrong direction”. Youssef’s inability, in the following months, to identify, much less understand the “poisoned seed” that caused his son’s decision to join the terrorist group, suggests a question that pervades all the relationships depicted in the novel: can we know each other at all, much less possess each other “wholly (or) eternally” as Holderlin writes?

Originally written in Arabic and translated into English by writer Aida Bamia, the novel garnered international attention when it won Achaari, along with Saudi writer, Raja’a Alem, the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Part of the delight of reading Achaari’s novel is its sheer unpredictability. Just as the reader finds himself becoming comfortable in a novel that she guesses will be about the aftermath of losing a child, Achaari steers the narrative in new, unexpected directions. In the days following the news of Yacine’s death, we see a man who, rather than retreating from life, attacks it with a ferocity of spirit and sense of abandon that distances him from his wife, Bahia.

Youssef, we are told, loses his “sense of smell” and more intriguingly, becomes obsessively seized with the memory of “a woman he [had] loved and somehow lost” many years ago. Thus begins the reader’s magical and sometimes fantastical journey of travelling, with Youssef, through a year in which everything improbable happens: we see Youssef becoming involved with Layla, a woman who appears accidentally in his life and who he belatedly recognises as his old, lost love, and occasionally having conversations with his dead son, Yacine, who appears intermittently at Youssef’s side and discusses love, life and his childhood with his father. Thus, the reader begins to glimpse a keen sense of the magical and the absurd in the novel; the ease with which Achaari describes the father-son encounters, for example, renders a rather Marquez-esque kind of beauty to Achaari’s prose.

As the reader reads excerpts from Youssef’s fictional collection Letters to My Beloved, she begins to see that this is a man who recounts both his current and past romantic relationships in the language of memory and fantasy rather than actual lived experience. Youssef’s real battle, then, one realises is, more than anything else, against the resilience of the past on one side and the force of forgetfulness on the other.

It is this dichotomy that also lies at the heart of the novel’s beautiful and detailed portrayal of the relationships characters build with physical spaces: houses, landscapes, entire cities. Desire, memory and nostalgia are all navigated by characters in the novel, chiefly, through their relationships with places; both those they remember and those they forget, those they fight for and those they give up. When Layla persuades Youssef to stop visiting Marrakesh, a city he has loved and shared with his closest friends, for instance, he realises that Layla is the “woman [of] his life”. Describing his thoughts, Achaari writes: “When a woman can make a city drop from your life like a dead leaf, it means that she has built countless cities inside you”. Yet, the most memorable example is of Youssef’s father, Mohammed al-Firsiwi, the blind guide of Walili, Morocco’s ancient city, who enigmatically explains to a group of bewildered tourists: “some of you may wonder how a blind guide can lead you … but [Walili] is nothing but darkness and only the blind know how to walk through it well”.

Mohammed’s single-minded obsession with the ruins of Walili and his insistence on preserving its grand Roman past, is one story amongst several in the novel that suggest a fight by characters and cities against the rapid capitalist expansion that has seized Morocco in the last few decades. Achaari paints a vivid picture of a country being ushered into the 21st-century through large-scale development and ostensible economic progress; yet, this picture of material grandeur belies a tragic and irreversible loss of individual and collective memory for the inhabitants of Morocco. As palaces, bridges and posh hotels are built to boost tourism, what is lost, Achaari suggests, is the history of those places and the stories that constitute their identity.

Reading the novel, I could not escape the inevitable feeling of loss that accompanies the reading of almost any translated work; I wanted to hear the novel in Arabic, close as it is to Urdu, my mother-tongue. At a few points, the reader also feels that certain descriptions become a little stilted and awkward, losing their natural force in the process of translation. Yet, for the most part, the translator, Bamia has rendered Achaari’s style and voice relatively well. Through the reader’s journey of travelling with Youssef, in the difficult aftermath of his son’s death, the beauty of Achaari’s prose shines on every page; the language is dreamy, sensual and unapologetically poetic.

Though this novel has attracted a great deal of attention for its attempt to engage with Islamic terrorism as a complex process that defies any simplistic explanations, it seems to be, beneath the surface, about much more. As Youssef finds himself unable to understand a young boy’s decision to join the Islamic resistance, his larger struggle has to do with the anguish involved in deriving any coherent sense of identity, or any comforting understanding of life in a world that is so rapidly changing. At some level, the novel seems to suggest, we are all, like Mohammed, blind guides in our own rights; zealously protecting and clinging to our own sacred territories; the places, experiences and memories that we hold on to because we are unable to either let go of the past or reconcile, without its support, the present as we know it.

The Arch and the Butterfly

(NOVEL)

By Mohammed Achaari

Edited by Erica Jarnes

Translated by Aida Bamia

Bloomsbury, USA

ISBN 978-9992179055

336pp.