March 25, 2021 33
Sudden Monsters
Lydia Wilson
The Frightened Ones
by Dima Wannous, translated
from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.
Knopf, 195 pp., $25.95
“Maybe fear is the only emotion with
which the soul wrestles constantly,”
Dima Wannous writes in her second
novel, The Frightened Ones, the first
to be published in English. “It is daz-
zlingly innovative and multifarious, re-
inventing itself at every turn.” Suleima,
a contemporary Syrian woman of
about forty, is contemplating why her
boyfriend, Naseem, has chosen to use a
pseudonym for his books. His decision,
she realizes, points to the sharpest fear
of all, and one she shares: the fear of
fear itself. It is “the deep current be-
neath my life,” Suleima reveals. “Fear
of fear never leaves you.”
The Frightened Ones is told through
a pair of accounts. The first is Suleima’s
journal—a chronicle that, in the book,
is “real”—and the second is Naseem’s
unfinished manuscript, which he has
sent to her from exile in Germany. The
two alternating parts are distinguish-
able only by typeface; at times Suleima
herself cannot tell the difference. (The
translator, Elisabeth Jaquette, has
spoken about her initial attempts to
separate the book’s two voices, before
realizing such a clear distinction was
not in the Arabic original.) Naseem’s
narrator, a woman who is never named,
seems to have much in common with
Suleima psychologically, if not in so-
cial background. Suleima suspects
that Naseem has stolen from her life to
write his novel: “It’s true that her fam-
ily is different, as are her memories,
but our souls clearly spin in the same
orbit,” she observes, with mounting
panic.
Since Naseem is absent, unable to
answer the many questions she has, her
worries play out in imaginary conver-
sations with him, as well as in sessions
with her therapist, Kamil. In Suleima’s
imagination, Naseem asks why she be-
lieves her own experiences—her fami-
ly’s flight from the massacre in Hama
in the 1980s, the questioning at school
about her father’s allegiance to the re-
gime, her brother’s “disappearance”
after the revolution started in 2011—
are so different from those of many
other Syrians. This suggestion that her
story is not singular threatens her sense
of self: Had Naseem, she wonders, “left
[her] without an identity?” Or was it
the opposite, and Naseem needed the
specificity of her situation to write his
novel? In Suleima’s words, “Did you
borrow my life to escape your own?”
The first account of fear belongs to
neither of these two women telling their
stories, but to Leila, Kamil’s secretary.
Suleima recounts how Leila’s brother
was driven insane after being tortured
by the Syrian secret police for dating a
woman one of the officers’ sons liked:
“They hung him from his feet for days,
left him upside down, until his mind
poured out, to the last drop.” Kamil’s
waiting room is full of people with sto-
ries “not dissimilar” from Leila’s fam-
ily’s. This becomes a central concern
of The Frightened Ones: Where are
the boundaries between individual and
collective fears in such a traumatized
society?
Suleima and Naseem first meet in
Kamil’s waiting room, beginning their
vexed, often incomprehensible fifteen-
year relationship. On their first date,
Naseem does not speak. On the second,
he breaks with social convention by sit-
ting in the back of a cab with her and
holding her hand. Suleima offers scat-
tered images of the couple’s intimacy,
hugging on the couch or lying alongside
each other in bed, and she describes
Naseem’s panic attacks, paranoia, and
self- destructive behavior in detail. Still,
he remains a mystery—a cipher for her
fears and a sounding board for her
thoughts. “Later, I realised that I loved
him best when he was silent,” Suleima
says. “When I told Kamil about it, he
tried to hide a triumphant smile: my
distaste whenever Naseem spoke was
proof that I didn’t love him as he was,
but as I imagined him to be.”
How does a Syrian write about the
revolution, ongoing, continually cat-
astrophic? Naseem tells Suleima that
the events were blocking his imagina-
tion; later, Suleima wonders whether
he’ll ever be able to write directly about
what is happening in Syria: “Maybe he
couldn’t manage to write a novel about
the revolution, and dealt with this weak-
ness by composing a fictional diary in-
stead.” Wannous, a Syrian writer born
in 1982, surely intends this as a message
to the reader; Suleima’s description of
the form of Naseem’s novel as “a diary,written in a somewhat impressionistic
and improvisatory style,” is precisely
that of The Frightened Ones.
When Naseem’s narrator—who, like
Naseem and Suleima, is a patient of
Kamil—reports that the therapist has
advised her not to keep a journal, it is
unclear whom he is advising, the woman
or the man in the relationship—one
further example of the ambiguities that
ripple out from the fiction within a fic-
tion. Likewise, the mysterious narrator’s
response, under Naseem’s pen, could be-
long to either lover: “He never told me
not to borrow from other people. I ran
away from my journal and into others’
lives. I did not tell them I wanted to es-
cape from my own memories by stealing
theirs.” There is no respite in the mind.
“My imagination blazes in service of
fear and anxiety, and baulks at comfort,”
Naseem’s narrator says.
As a child, Suleima envisioned de-
tailed scenarios of her father and
brother being taken away and tortured.
“Alone in my bed at night, I cried,” she
remembers, “even though I knew they
were nearby in their beds.” Kamil sees
this as self- flagellation. And anticipat-
ing fear offered no protection: mental
pictures of her father kissing the boots
of an officer became, with the revolu-
tion, “no longer imaginary.” Her fa-
ther winds up dying peacefully in his
sleep at seventy, although, according
to her resentful mother, this too wasowing to fear—the nameless fear of
being judged an enemy of the govern-
ment, simply by being from the city of
Hama, the Syrian base of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
Her brother, Fouad, participates in
protests against the regime and expe-
riences the joy in freedom from fear:
“I yelled and I heard my voice,” he ex-
claims. “Everyone was shouting and
clapping.... The age of silence is over!”
But soon he is arrested and becomes
one of the disappeared, for which Su-
leima berates herself further. She prays
for his death constantly, thinking it
better than the torture she has already
imagined. Naseem, for his part, prac-
tices literal self- flagellation: when he
can’t express himself to Suleima, she
hears him hitting himself during their
phone conversations: “I’d known from
the start that our call would end with
a slap.”
Naseem writes obituaries for those
he loves, even before the formality of
their deaths: “There wasn’t anyone in
his family he didn’t kill with words,
describe their funeral and come to
terms with losing, again and again and
again.” (Discovering her own obituary
in Naseem’s apartment in Syria is a new
source of terror for Suleima, who bur-
ies the paper, then has nightmares of
being buried herself.) For Naseem, this
is an attempt to exercise control: “He
wanted to decide when the fear would
strike him, rather than let it do so when
he least expected.”Naseem’s and Suleima’s terrible
thoughts are not only forms of self-
preservation. One of the most notable
features of The Frightened Ones is
its tenderness, both narrators show-
ing the love—of family, of partner, of
country—at the root of so much fear.
Jaquette, the translator, has explained
that it was precisely this mixture of an
“intimate, personal perspective” in a
book that “[grappled] with large, na-
tionwide, global events” that first drew
her in. This tone of intimacy makes
Wannous’s novel different from other
contemporary Syrian literature, such as
Zakariya Tamir’s short stories—sharp,
sometimes folkloric explorations of
the country’s sectarianism, patriarchy,
and economic oppression—or Mus-
tafa Khalifa’s unflinching The Shell, a
fictional account of the author’s brutal
thirteen- year experience in an Assad
prison, or Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is
Hard Work, a finalist for the 2019 Na-
tional Book Award. The latter is also
set during the Syrian revolution and
contains the same horror and fear that
Wannous explores.
“Fear had become the only true op-
position; it was now each individual
versus their own fear,” Khalifa writes.
His novel depicts three siblings at-
tempting to transport their father’s
body through the complex landscape
of civil conflict, one checkpoint at a
time. Over the many days it takes to
reach the father’s village, a journey
that in normal times might take five
hours, the body begins to putrefy.
Some scenes show dark humor, but
the overriding impression of this dys-
topic experience is abrasive, the cracks
observed so starkly in the civil warHosni Radwan: Couple, 2014HosniRadwan/Zawyeh^Gallery,^ Ramallah^and^Dubai