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January 29, 2025
Deutschlandfunk reviews Yazbek’s “The wind’s abode”: “Not a political perspective, but a counterpoint of poetry, and the beauty of nature”

Deutschlandfunk reviews Yazbek’s “The wind’s abode”: “Not a political perspective, but a counterpoint of poetry, and the beauty of nature”

By Von Dina Netz, for Deutschlandfunk, September 9th, 2024

(…) Like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Ali wakes up at the beginning of the book, lying under a tree and unable to move. While Ali tries to get his bearings, memories of his life before the military return. Samar Yazbek lets her novel oscillate between the narrative present and these memories, which come to Ali in the form of visions in non-chronological order.

They mainly include his family, his brother who died in the war, his tirelessly working mother. En passant, however, these memories also create a picture of village society in which the sons of the poor are cannon fodder, the women have no say, the farmers are dispossessed by the state. “Ali stopped and listened to the farmers arguing with a government representative, who, as it turned out, owned the cars. He said that the farmers were unable to cultivate the land and that the state would therefore confiscate it. ‘We have given our sons and our lives to the state, and the state is stealing our land!’ one replied, and another shouted ‘You thieves!'”

Counterpoint of poetry and nature

The army and various militias fight each other at the expense of the population. Almost as an aside, Samar Yazbek conveys a pessimistic view of her homeland, where after 13 years of war everyone is just trying to save their own skin. The author does not outline a political perspective, but a counterworld of poetry and the beauty of nature. For Ali, who gradually becomes aware of his injuries, nature provides the link between past and present – the clouds that he observes in the sky like he used to in his village. The tree under which he lies and which he tries to pull himself up onto, just as he retreated to his tree house at home. Ali is familiar with natural phenomena; they give him support in politically and socially uncertain situations. “At that moment, when the sky was dark gray, suddenly pillars of light appeared in the middle of the gray darkness, connecting the earth with the sky, enormous ropes of light. Then he tilted his head to see the gray clouds moving on, and set sail with them and the pillars of light. And when the gray clouds dissolved and made room for the released light, he saw a festival of colors running into each other, white, gray, blue, black, yellow… colors that undulated and blurred into each other and constantly took on new forms in a constant movement. Then he believed that this was paradise.”

Warmth and poetry

While the author describes the hard life of Ali’s mother in brief, sometimes harsh sentences, she tells of Ali’s inner world full of warmth and poetry, which Larissa Bender has translated into a flowing and equally poetic German.  Samar Yazbek doesn’t make Ali into a hero, but she still lets him shine in the darkness that surrounds him. Yazbek’s novel has absolutely nothing agitating about it, but its casualness makes the idea all the more compelling: If more people had such a direct relationship to nature and life as Ali, the world would be a better place.