A review by Abdo Wazen, for Independant Arabia, April 23, 2025
At the beginning of the first chapter of Najwa Barakat’s new novel “May vanishes” (Dar Al-Adab, 2025), a voice calls out to the “heroine” while she lies half-asleep in her bed, calling her name—May. She trembles as the voice repeats and rises from her bed, convinced someone has entered her home. Frightened, she calls Yusuf, the building’s janitor, who comes and unlocks the apartment with his key, inspecting the rooms and reassuring eighty-four-year-old May that no one else is inside.
Even after gathering her strength, May continues to feel there is a woman in her living room, sitting on the couch, “looking at me as though I were the strange, intruding creature who doesn’t understand why she’s here.”
In such delusional moments, May expresses a state of dissociation—not pathological in the psychological sense, but rather a split within the self. As the poet Rimbaud once put it: “I is another.” May is caught between her past and present selves, the old woman and the young woman, the May who lives alone—or nearly alone—in her ninth-floor apartment that she calls her “elevated island,” from which she sees a world she is both present in and absent from. That world is Beirut, with its port destroyed by the explosion and its rooftops turned into a desolate city of faded shapes. And then there is young May, the stage actress she once was.
The Isolation of Old Age
The ghost of May—or rather, her many ghosts from past selves—never leaves her. These others live with her in her isolation and sometimes frighten her, especially when nightmares emerge. Yet she is in desperate need of them, particularly of the ghostly May who has no single age but contains all her former ages—from childhood to adolescence, maturity, her time at the arts college, her acting years, cohabitation, and a marriage that also ended in misery.
Najwa Barakat structures the novel through May’s voice, in a unique form of interior monologue that often shifts into a fragmented dialogue between the real May and her ghostly double. She calls out to her—“May”—and then speaks to her as if she were another woman.
This imagined inner dialogue recurs across the novel’s pages, ultimately forming what is known as the “stream of consciousness,” as exemplified in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
May refers to the ghostly woman she sees as “the strange creature” she doesn’t know “where she came from or what she wants.” But she decides to respond to the ghost’s persistent calls. In doing so, the real and imagined May merge until they become one woman, living both her present and her past. The real May admits that in some corner of her mind lives a naïve child who mixes nightmares with waking hours. The actress in her is still active, as Barakat reveals in the second chapter. In old age, May behaves as if she were an actress immersed in a role—talking to herself, responding as if playing two characters at once. In one of these performative, delusional moments (though not completely pathological), she says to herself, “Have you forgotten me, May?” or “How lovely it is to enter another skin, May.” At the height of their relationship, she asks, “Did you fall asleep, May? I’ve been talking for hours…”
Beings from the Past
May is aware that those she thinks she sees in the living room are “creatures from the past who cannot be trusted” or “imaginary visitors.” Despite her hallucinations, which worsen later, she fears the dementia that afflicted her grandmother—her father’s mother—who became “another person” after losing all memory. “Am I starting to hear voices and see ghosts like patients…?” she asks, without naming the illness, though she clearly knows it is dementia.
After an illness following her marriage, which left her in a coma for seven years, May switched from stimulants to herbal sedatives like chamomile, anise, and sage. She realized that old memories were surging from her mind, taking over her life, which now only exists between her apartment—her “elevated island”—and the balcony that offers a narrow space of freedom and a view onto the world she is both part of and removed from. That world is Beirut, with its ruined port and rooftops forming a dismal city of superficial shapes.
Despite her delusions and intermittent, mild delirium—which later turns more serious—May remains aware of what’s happening around her. She sees the Asian workers heading toward the industrial area that “crushes their bones,” and wonders why they came to this country. She’s fully conscious of the lawlessness around her, believing that “locks must protect locks and gates must protect doors.” She’s aware of thefts and murders committed “even for a gold necklace.”
One time, after the Beirut port explosion, she goes with Yusuf—the Syrian janitor and refugee—to the Gemmayzeh area to see the damage. The visit deeply affects her, and she falls briefly ill before recovering.
Through May, Najwa Barakat enters the world of aging to recount the small tragedies that a woman faces in this ambiguous stage of life—especially when living in partial isolation and psychological turmoil. The presence of the janitor softens her loneliness. He checks on her and fulfills her small needs, along with the Sri Lankan housekeeper Shamili, who visits every Saturday and whom May calls “the only intruder.” She cleans the apartment, tends to her needs, and bathes her—despite May’s dislike of bathing, as it exposes her deteriorated body and inability to use her limbs. In a sharp, cynically humorous tone, May says, “Dirt multiplies with age and spreads to the nose, arteries, under the nails, between the fingers, in the corners of the eyes, inside the ears, and behind them,” referring to “the nasty crust that covers the skin.”
The Broken Body
May exposes the broken body that once had beauty in youth. She mocks herself with a kind of self-deprecating humor. She speaks of her sagging belly—her “archenemy”—which blocks her view of what lies below it. Sometimes, she enjoys sitting in the bathroom in total darkness, not turning on the light, to relieve both her bowels and mind. “I close my eyes, then open them—it’s the same. I see nothing, hear nothing. I’m in a spaceship my size, floating in the purity of darkness, the clarity of nothingness.” It’s a rare and raw moment that captures the reality of an old body. She also mocks her large ears—“as big as a donkey’s”—and says, “My greatest wish is to live like a radish or a dog.”
She laments how her hands aged before the rest of her, how they began to shrivel and show dry skin and bulging blue veins: “As though they were aging alone.” She admits they aged after her mother let them go too soon, and her father tried to heal them with olive soap and ointments, hoping to erase “the blue stains of orphanhood.” Here, May recalls the painful past of her mother’s absence and its impact on her own later, unusual motherhood.
The Strange Cat
Then a strange cat forces its way into her apartment after meowing at the door. Though May doesn’t like it and refuses to name it—because it isn’t hers—she ends up spending time with it in playful, conspiratorial companionship. When the cat falls ill, she takes it with Yusuf to the vet, who’s surprised to learn it has no name and is a stray. He diagnoses it with cancer. As the cat fades, May cradles it, remembering her mother who died of cancer.
Incomplete Motherhood
Motherhood never truly leaves May in her old age. Her mother, who died young, appears as a ghost. Her twin sons, who live in America, also remind her of her distant motherhood. May confesses she never got enough of her mother’s love—she died too soon, and even before that, May, who had grown up an orphan, had never learned the basics of maternal affection. She resents her mother and holds herself accountable too, recognizing her own motherhood was incomplete and postponed. “I was a damaged mother, denied my own motherhood,” she says.
Her father, however, was vividly present in her childhood and youth. She remembers his features more clearly than her mother’s—recalling only the image of a woman leaning on his arm. The framed photo of her mother felt unfamiliar. Her father replaced the deceased mother, raising his daughter, bathing her, cooking, teaching her, taking her on outings, singing and dancing with her. He refused to let his mother and three sisters raise her, and he refused to remarry. She remembers how gently he poured water on her while bathing her. May also recalls her paternal grandmother and three aunts, who became her warm refuge after her father—though the youngest—passed away before them.
Barakat draws vivid portraits of these aunts as if they were characters in a play or film: Widad, the youngest, was closest to her heart; Nabiha, the eldest, a widow who had lost her only child and returned home to support the family; Zakia, the middle one, a seamstress and knitter, who still waits for a suitor, her wedding bag packed and ready.
May the Actress
As a mother, May realizes her motherhood was incomplete. After falling into a seven-year coma, she was unable to raise her twins or care for them: “As though another woman carried and gave birth to them.” These seven years were lost, sliced from her life like a knife wound. When she awoke and returned to a minimal existence, the twins were strangers, born and raised without her.
When her husband, the doctor who rescued her from her emotionally barren youth, was dying of cancer, she insisted on kissing his feet in the coffin. After her recovery and his passing, the twins decided to emigrate to America. May didn’t hesitate to let them go, certain that “the lease had expired, and the time for their departure had come.”
Her younger life as an actress resurfaces in a kind of conspiratorial harmony between her old and young selves. She recalls her admission to Beirut’s arts institute in the 1960s, and her audition—playing a woman at a funeral, entering to offer condolences. It is fitting, given May’s nature, that her acting life began with a funeral, which would come to define her later years.
At the institute, she meets her first love—a leftist writer, a theater graduate from Russia, ten years her senior. She was a bored, semi-bourgeois, semi-existential girl at the time, like Simone de Beauvoir’s heroine in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. “I lay in my room, my eyes fixed on the ceiling, feeling the crawling of boredom’s insects on my skin,” she says. She had just performed the tense lover in Jean Cocteau’s monodrama The Human Voice, holding a phone and speaking to an absent lover. The writer, impressed by her performance, approached her under the pretext of writing a play for her to star in. She fell for him and ended up writing the script herself—improvising her own monologue. The story he proposed was about a woman who lost part of her life, which now lay in an abyss before her—perhaps a prophetic image of the coma that would one day consume her.
