20 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2020WHEN WE SPEAKof aworld, we are often
speaking of both the most intimate of hu-
man interiors and the land and nations that
surround it: our ribcages and throats and
dreams, yes, but also our neighborhoods,
our hillsides, our harbors ending in seas.
Considered in this light, is there anything
capable of surviving the apocalyptic
wreckage of a world? It’s one of the central
questions in “Zo,” the debut novel by Xan-
der Miller. And while Miller seeks the an-
swer in a situation whose narratives are so
familiar as to feel quotidian — romantic
love, desperate to cross socioeconomic
class — the novel’s setting, Haiti, may yet
have something surprisingly new to say.
We meet the novel’s namesake as a 5-
year-old orphan in a humble coastal vil-
lage, from which he quickly decamps as a
young adult, on a string of throwaway jobs
that help establish the tone and terms of
his world — including, apparently, a cen-
tral concern with the carnal. There are at
least three sex scenes in the first 20 pages,
more than one of his partners of advanced
age. But then he meets Anaya, a dazzling
young woman who hails from a privileged
upbringing and will become the focus of
the rest of Zo’s life.
The real strength of this opening section
lies not in the interiority of the characters
or the chance of a surprise plot twist. In-
stead, interest and momentum emerge
from the specificity of place Miller estab-
lishes around us: the daily rhythms of
Haiti, the stark demands of a life lived amid
capricious, grinding poverty, and the mar-
velous, salty exchanges that occur along-
side it all: “I was hoping you’d be the one to
help,” Anaya says, as she’s building a
makeshift children’s clinic. He asks her
why, “because you’ve seen me naked?”
She grins at him: “Because I’ve seen how
well you carry furniture into the grass.”
Still, the novel’s arc is largely familiar:
Boy meets girl, boy pursues girl, boy en-
counters the apparently insurmountable
gulf of their class differences. The charac-
ters deepen some, but not in ways that
truly drive the plot. Passion — almost en-
tirely physical, it’s worth noting — yet wins
the day. Anaya’s father intervenes, of
course, and we wonder how the lovers will
triumph; only once they do, the pace starts
to flag. The novel’s perspective often ap-
pears troublingly traditional and mascu-
line, Zo’s lovesick ambitions rendered in
colonialist terms: “Zo looked on that city
like the first conquistadores looked upon
the New World. To sack it, to burn it, to de-
stroy every last soul, would be nothing in
pursuit of the treasure and the dream.”
But then there is a schism. A disaster oc-
curs, truly harrowing in the scale and se-
verity of its damage. Everything appears
lost. Here the language is particularly ar-
resting, its power at once direct and name-
less; as elsewhere in the novel, Miller’s
writing manages to be both passionate and
economical, and when dialogue and physi-
cal scenes pop, they pop off. If the notes of
drama here are occasionally struck too
hard — in this scene’s climax, Zo is momen-
tarily toosuperhuman — it’s nevertheless
effective.
What’s more important is what we see
on the other side. Witness the ambivalence
with which many Haitians might experi-
ence the arrival of the West in moments of
crisis: “Their conversation was full of ac-ronyms,” Anaya and her fellow nursing
graduates think. “M.S.F., W.F.P., UNICEF,
DINEPA, M.D.M., I.O.M., U.S.A.I.D. The
country had been overrun by international
aid organizations, and what the girls
wanted to know most of all was who paid
best.” The survivor’s calculus is frank,
even as we witness those same nurses
muscling their way through spartan uni-
versity conditions, knowingly graduating
into the teeth of the disaster’s wreckage.. If
anyone’s going to get Haiti through this,
Miller seems to be saying, it will be
Haitians themselves.
The novel’s final third carries some of
the bleakest moments of the entire story,
full of emotional self-immolation and
death. For a while, one wonders if the con-
clusion will be as bad as it seems, but
thankfully this isn’t that sort of novel. In
the end there’s much that satisfies, not the
least of which is bearing witness to tender-
ness and heroism, the depths of loneliness
and peaks of romance — and, perhaps
most important, the courage of an entire
nation. 0Boy Meets World
Impossible love in a disaster-stricken Haiti.
By KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN
ZO
By Xander Miller
327 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
EXHAUSTED WRITERSsometimes try to sim-
plify their trade by boiling all stories down to
only two essential trajectories: Someone
comes to town, or someone moves away.But
Susan Abulhawa’s third novel, “Against the
Loveless World,” disproves this reductive hy-
perbole, artfully looping together comings
and goings, entrances and exoduses, burials
and birthdays in a humming narrative of hu-
man movement.Nahr, the novel’s middle-aged narrator, is a
daughter of migration. A Palestinian who has
never known Palestine, she recalls her com-
ing-of-age in Kuwait with her exiled mother,
brother and snippy grandmother. She has no
interest in the traumas of her ancestry, and is
instead enamored of all things Kuwaiti. “It
was my home,” she says of her adoptive
country, “and I was a loyal subject of the roy-
als. I lined up every day of school with the
other students to sing the national anthem.... I even taught myself to speak their dialect
and could dance Khaleeji ‘better than their
best.’ That’s what someone told me.”
Snubbed in her youth by an Independence
Day dance troupe because “such an honor
should be reserved for Kuwaiti kids,” Nahr
doesn’t flinch, or feel offended as her mother
does — “for her, everything came down to be-
ing Palestinian, and the whole world was out
to get us.”
Instead the young Nahr seeks belonging
elsewhere, breaking rules and expecta-
tions as she goes. She “back-talks” and
steals, is promiscuous and unapologetical-
ly grounded in her body. Her premature
marriage to a Palestinian war hero, the re-
sult of her sexual curiosity, is believable in
both its hope and desperation. Abandoned
and confused, Nahr cedes control of her
sexuality to Um Buraq, a worldly Kuwaiti
woman who sends her to work as a high-
end prostitute.
Initially appalled by the job require-
ments, Nahr is intrigued by the power of
her earnings, and soon it is she who pays
her family’s bills, her brother’s school fees.
When she is gang-raped on the eve of Sad-
dam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, she
leaves sex work and becomes involved
with an Iraqi soldier. “I wasn’t yet ready to
give up on men,” she thinks. “Part of me
wanted to know if men could be good.”
A rebellious spirit propels this story of
statelessness, but the unburdened tone can
also come off as unrealistic. Soon after the
Kuwaiti police torture her brother (they
consider Palestinians Hussein’s collabora-
tors), the family flees to Jordan, where
Nahr runs a successful beauty business out
of their living room. From there, though, it’s
back to Palestine to finalize her divorce and
fall in love again, this time with her hand-
some former brother-in-law, Bilal, a resist-
ance fighter. Following a period of action-
and romance-laced sequences of arrests
and homecomings, weapons smuggling
and lockdowns, Nahr is caught and sen-
tenced to solitary confinement in an Israeli
prison she calls “the Cube.” There she re-
serves her spirit for reliving the past, for
dancing and taking showers under a show-
erhead she names Attar.
Known for her beautiful and urgent
chronicling of the Palestinian struggle in
fiction and poetry, Abulhawa skillfully situ-
ates Nahr in a life of friendship and family
that is consistently upset by geopolitical
changes and a volatile police state. In this
sense, Nahr is a 21st-century everywoman,
strong in her own mind but angry about
how little control she has over her own life.
Given the persistent attacks on her self-de-
termination, it is easy to understand Nahr’s
commitment to justice at any cost. But it’s
less easy to feelit. Her toughness and sass
are rarely counterbalanced with moments
of vulnerability, or grief. The self-reflection
in the novel often comes from the head
rather than the heart, unidimensional inte-
rior monologues flecked with facts that
serve more as platforms to explain the
plight of Palestinian refugees, sex workers,
liberation fighters. Nahr encounters so
many tragedies that she can at times come
off as a composite of women and the issues
that plague them in this region, the novel
too rarely pausing in her moments of weak-
ness and exhaustion that might have dis-
tinguished her, illuminated the cost of pas-
sion for the powerless.
Those forced to leave the places of their
birth to live elsewhere then have to tell
stories to the people they encounter there.
Not all communities are willing to listen to
these messy narratives of displacement. In
our current climate of isolationism, the trans-
national storyteller must do more than enter-
tain — she must educate. In response to this
demand, Abulhawa has created a spirited
protagonist who lives invisibly and in opposi-
tion to her “loveless world,” telling her own
story on her own terms lest either her com-
ings or goings be forgotten. 0Seeking Refuge
A Palestinian-born prisoner reflects on a life of exile.
By LALEH KHADIVIAGAINST THE LOVELESS WORLD
By Susan Abulhawa
366 pp. Atria. $27.LALEH KHADIVIteaches creative writing at the
University of San Francisco, and is the author,
most recently, of “A Good Country.”Susan AbulhawaKAWAI STRONG WASHBURN’Sdebut novel is
“Sharks in the Time of Saviors.”
Xander MillerMiller’s writing is passionate;
when dialogue and physical
scenes pop, they pop off.PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM LEFT: DANAE BLACKBURN: T. SAUPPE