Love, like smoke from cigarettes, leaves its traces. We can never really get rid of its scents and memories – so often intertwined. In Alawiya Sobh’s sensorial novel This Thing Called Love (translated by Max Weiss for Seagull Books), the Lebanese author writes about these traces and fragments of love, which despite distance, heartbreak and wars, continue to sustain lives across the exhausting mechanics of time. “When I write, I reincarnate myself as the characters to bring them to life. I even sense their smells within my own body,” she says during an interaction. Shortlisted for the ERBD Prize for Literature* 2024, the novel is an opulent ode to the mystery and madness we call love.
On the surface, the novel is about the disappearance of Nahla, a middle-aged woman whose memories of youth are receding. Nahla’s life has been about the complexities of postponed, forbidden love and the challenges of desire as an Arab woman. All her life, she has loved Hani, her strapping, handsome lover from her youth, with a deep, furious passion: as a form of “worship”, she tells us in the novel. But fate had other plans.... As she confesses to the narrator of the novel about that love almost-lost in the distance of time, her body shivers and tingles, and her eyes glimmer with a sense of pleasure. She knows the challenges and risks of these confessions, but what would her life amount to, if it is not true to the wild animal within?
The feminist mystique
Sobh’s prose is charged with sensual tenderness and is often repetitive in style, perhaps to replicate the orgiastic origins of love and desire. She tells us that “the body is not something to be ashamed of, nor is it the property of men. The novel show[s] women how their bodies are theirs, and how they can love it at all ages – even when one is very old”. The novel, in its strongest moments, then, is an attempt to rediscover, reclaim and liberate the female body.
“Images of women are politically driven and media-created, shaped by dominant narratives. Women suffer from dual alienation – enforced by both societal norms and self-perception,” Sobh says, talking about her motivations to subvert oppressive gender norms in her work. She has dedicated her life to mining a vocabulary of female resistance, and for her, the idea is to simply write these bodies into immortality. Her main quest is “to express a feminine language, a sensual and very new language in the world of novels, even in sexual scenes – a heroic language”, she claims.
We are our stories
After spending her youth in a vacant marriage, Nahla decides to reclaim her body from motherhood and matrimony, and to live and tell her own story. In the event of her disappearance, Nahla’s friends Suad, Azizeh, Hoda, Nadine, and the narrator Alawiya form a Herland (an isolated society composed entirely of women as imagined by American feminist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her 1915 utopian novel) around her memory. The novel shines in documenting these multiple stories of self-determination.
Often called a ‘modern Scheherazade’, Sobh’s oeuvre is informed by her rich Arabic roots, but it smartly inverts the limits imposed on expression by modern patriarchal regimes. At the centre of her novel, too, is a woman like Scheherazade, who must tell her story, lest it should be forgotten and written off the pages of history. “Nahla is very far from a stereotype in the usual Arabic novel. She is free, and with that freedom, she can express what she wants about her body and her relationship with it in all stages of her life,” Sobh says about her protagonist. She adds that the subject of the novel is humanistic: “She is not imprisoned by propaganda or media or the regime of patriarchy….”
Love in the time of war
Love is foiled by wars, and so often defined by it too, seemingly. Set against the backdrop of the July 2006 war in Lebanon, the novel also ably reveals the public and political history of Lebanon.
In the last few months, we have collectively witnessed the calamitous effects of genocide on a culture and a people. At its core, Sobh’s novel bears witness: to the quickly receding life of a woman’s memories, her passionate capacity to love, and her unique endurance in the face of loss, but also by extension, to all those unnamed women sacrificed to the violence of wars and patriarchy. Talking about what inspires her work, Sobh simply responds: “I am affected mainly by life – women’s lives – and everything touches me and makes me explore my imagination and the world of the novel.”
The achievement of the novel is in raising questions about complicity and silence. These lines from Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul also capture the lasting message of Sobh’s novel: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.”
* The EBRD Literature Prize is a Rs 20,000 prize awarded to a work of fiction originally published in a language of a country where the EBRD Bank invests, translated into English and published for the first time in the past year.
Kartik Chauhan is a Delhi-based reviewer of literary fiction