Over the last two decades, Joe Sacco has helped invent a new genre: comic-book journalism. He’s reported from Sarajevo and Gorazde during the Bosnian War and from the Palestinian Territories during the two Intifadas. His first book is Palestine, and after a number of years reporting from Bosnia, Sacco returned to Palestine and the result is Footnotes in Gaza.

A lot has been said about Sacco’s work. He has received praise for his work, but once you  reread his books, you cannot but feel there is no praise that can truly point the readers to the subtle qualities of his books. An essay long introduction to Palestine by Edward Said shows more than any review or a scholarly article all the feelings and thoughts Sacco is able the produce in the reader. Said becomes overtly emotional even though his academic style remains sharp. This, to me, signals a true and engaged reader whose erudite response is inextricable from the emotional impact the book has on him.

It may be an old cliché that war stories are best told with a doze of humour, but from my own experiences from the aggression on Bosnia, and from my own writing about war, I feel that is true. The fact that an author can see what is bizarre and amusing even in the most horrible of situations signals to me a form of intimacy with the material, and a good sense of oneself, a self-distance. Sacco is often making his own persona funny, or even ridiculous at times, but it never feels artificial. Take for instance the scene in which a Palestinian man keeps asking him about the point of his work, the significance of reporting from Palestine, because, according to the man, all the articles in the world have helped no one. Sacco is so aware that he is reporting in a particular form of comics, an art that could only guarantee ridicule. It is the potency of Sacco’s work that turns the tables and makes the comic genre more serious than any conventional documentary.

Speaking of humor, a lot of scenes from Palestine, as well as his other books, are both funny and gut wrenching at the same time. Chapter 4 begins with a big drawing of a camp and the following text:

“The way Palestinians talk about prison, it ain’t normal … I’m not saying they enjoy a long stint behind Israeli barbed wire, but i’m hardly going out on a limb to say that usually they appreciate it, that sometimes they savor it, and that always it’s a distinction … and with 90,000 arrests in the intifada’s first four years, it’s all but impossible not to sit beside a prison or jail story in the taxies and tea joints … and in the universities and refugee camps I’m numbered by so many accounts of incarceration that the sort of thing that raises my brow is a male in his mid-20s who hasn’t been arrested, I want to ask him why the hell not?”

On the next page, Sacco meets a man who introduces his daughter to him, and says her name is Ansar, and Sacco writes, “And her father didn’t have to tell me if or where he’d done his time ‘cose there’s a prison in the desert called ANSAR III.”

Footnotes in Gaza is Sacco’s attempt to delve back into history of the region and explore the marginal elements of history, the marginalized but in fact the most important. He writes (on a picture of a city surveyed by helicopters): “Footnotes are inessential at best. At worst they trip up the greater narrative. From time to time, as bolder, more streamlined editions appear, history shakes off some footnotes altogether. … History chokes on fresh episodes and swallows whatever old ones it can. The war of 1956? Hunh?”

Sacco interviews as many survivors as he can find. Some have their memories more or less intact. Some have been so traumatized over the years, like an old woman in black, that they remember events and fragments but cannot place them neatly on the timeline. Sacco shows everything, no just what the people tell him, but hos they feel, how they behave while recounting their pasts. If he is focusing on a single event, for instance the 1956 events when Israeli soldiers announced that all men of military age assemble and go to a local school, Sacco find many witness, and even though there are smaller deviations in their stories, their memories of details not always the best, Sacco relates both the things they all agree on as well as the differences. On the way to the school the men are beaten, shot at, and it all finishes with the infamous school gate, where the men must enter like cattle and where they are met by 3-4 soldiers with bats who hit as many as possible. Some people remember barbed wire and some do not. Some remember a ditch. Some may have jumped over it without noticing it, having dodged the bats and running into the yard as fast possible.

Footnotes from Gaza manages not only to relate both the present and the past, but more importantly the relations between now and then. Not every Palestinian has the same feelings about the past. Not every person feels same events are equally important to tell. A former fedayee wants to tell a chain of events unrelated to what Sacco is asking him to relate. Some younger people do not care about the past. Sacco goes back and forth, creating a brilliant narrative that does not rely on linearity but follows human sentiments as well.

Sacco’s portrayal of individuals is amazing. There are dozens of characters and every single one of them leaps off the page in his or her particularity. When we speak about people who have suffered or people who have been militants, we tend to speak about them very much in general terms, creating an abstract mush, easily accepted or refuted. Sacco does not allow us to do that. There are hardly any people that are no given full individual attention. We hear as many different views on the occupation and the possibilities of coexistence and the means of struggle as there are characters in this book. Take for example the man who paces in front of his house in Rafah chasing off occasional militants who are hiding behind it. The militants use it as a cover, they just happened to be there, but he is not with them, and he knows the Israeli’s will take that as an excuse to bulldoze his home. Sacco portrays a bitter man who is trying to protect himself from both Israelis, journalists, militants and anyone else who can harm his family even indirectly. Sacco writes: He’s wound up, pacing back and forth. For the photographers his house is an image. For the militants it’s a cover. For the internationals it’s a cause. For the bulldozer operator it’s a day’s work. But for him? I want to have a word, human to human. I put away my notepad and walk up. He shakes my hand reluctantly. But he won’t look me in the eye. Or talk. He knows it’s rubble that’s brought me too” (191).

I have always been amazed at the fact that Sacco manages to portray all the people he meets so realistically despite the comic elements of his medium. At one point, reading Palestine, I was skeptical whether or not its portraits were really particular or influenced by his chosen medium, but having read his work on Bosnia, Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer, and being Bosnian myself, I find the comic book medium quite perfect for this type of journalism. To me an important trait a journalist must keep, and Sacco is one of the few who have it, is not to take oneself too seriously. The bulk of journalism does not only report events but always also the grand import of the very profession. Sacco consistently downplays his own importance. He highlight his character as someone who is far more privileged than the people he visits for a few months, people who live in those circumstance for year. He cannot but be humbled even when he makes himself appear arrogant. It is for this reason that he can capture the life in his subjects. I can see the people’s complexities, shown to me in every parts of the project. Sacco does not easily move into abstractions, making sweeping gestures. He is honest about how he feels about things and that he is indeed affected by everything to the extent that he cannot always be the perfect ear, the most emphatic man in the word, as for instance when he is irritated by the fedayee who refuses to tell him about 1956 and veers off to tell about other things. This is particularly true when it comes to the youth, the children that keep pestering him with question he does not want to answer. And wherever he goes, he is sure to attract groups of kids and he is very pleased when he can shake them off without too much hustle. He does not want to get angry, so he is quite pleased when his Palestinian colleagues shoo them away.

On a final note, if you have not read Sacco before, do not expect to flip through the hundreds of pages the way you would flip through a typical comic book. I usually feel I need to take a break after a few short chapters because they are quite packed, not only with plain information and facts, but incredible emotions. Reading his work, I feel I want to dwell upon everything and not slant anything. The books do not let you read them quickly and then forget. They teach you to read slowly and carefully, and move slowly through history, noticing the margins, the footnotes, and not only the spectacular and grand.

Listen to an interview with Sacco. Read an article in the Guardian.

OR Books gives you this heartfelt and intellectual collection of essays on the event that happened in the Eastern Mediterranean, Monday, May 31st, 2010, 4.30am – the Israeli attack on Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in the humanitarian aid flotilla.

Israeli commandos, boarding from sea and air, attack the six boats of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it sails through international waters bringing humanitarian relief to the beleaguered Palestinians of Gaza. Nine peace activists are shot. The 700 people on board the ships are arrested, transported to detention centers in Israel and then deported.

I myself followed the events very closely. In Stockholm, where I live and work, there was a manifestation organized to welcome the Swedish participants such Henning Mankell, Dror Freiler, Mattias Gardel and others. Spontaneous demonstrations took place in other European countries as well.

The raid on the Flotilla was almost nothing compared to the war of the media that ensued. Moustafa Bayoumi gleaned dozens of articles and blogs written about this event, which indeed changed a lot in the course of Israeli/Palestinian history.

The value of this collection lies in the wide range of contributors. It is in this sense a trully transnational work. It mixes first-hand testimony, documentary record, and illustration, with hard-headed analysis and historical overview.

All articles are short but precise even when the authors invariably vent their frustrations with the sheer fact that the attacks could have happened in the first place. Since each article or commentary was published in some of the world’s newspapers, the book does not read like a single narrative that progresses from one point to another as an extensive analysis would do. However, the necessary repetitions (due to the face that each author had to state some basic facts before expressing further opinions or analyses), do not make this work less of a page turner. The collection of such a variety of individual intellectual voices delivers an incredible punch. The common ground is neither national nor ideological. It is above all moral.

Order the book directly from OR Books.

Don Draper’s Language Trap
In the pilot, when Draper meets Rachel Menken, the rich department store owner, at a cocktail bar, their conversation works as an introduction to the language theme in Mad Men. Menken speaks from a position of power in that she is the rich client who requires their services. However, she is verbally diminished by Draper. She fights him off, but he confidently dismantles her defense, by showing her that her beliefs are the product of men like him, that without him she would have no identity. When Menken tells Draper that she has never been in love, he replies, “The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” Draper seems so confident that he does not even have to hide his ideological workings. He admits that he/man has dominated these categories, and thus produced desires and ideas. Draper tells Menken that even if she is richer, he will always be the most powerful, and in control of her.

Draper shows what Dale Spender has explained the eternal paradox of language: it offers both wonderful opportunities and limitations. In “Language and Reality: Who Made the World?” Spender argues that language has an ability to shape the world. While language provides space for creativity, “We are constricted by that creation, limited to its confines, and it appears we resist, fear and dread any modifications to the structures we have initially created” (146). The problem is that men are the ones “who have created the world, dominated the categories, constructed sexism and its justification and developed a language trap which is in their interest” (147).

Nice legs Peggy, come on show them!
Reflecting on Mad Men from a modern perspective can be disturbing. Not just because of the obvious male domination, but because the female characters accept it. According to Spender, in Man Made Language, “Men have generated a reality which the women are required to share and they do not usually have reason to believe that their reality is questionable.  This is not just because they can dismiss any alternative meanings which women may offer as unreal but because women may also collude in preserving male illusion”  (90). This preservation of male illusion is obvious in the pilot “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” At Sterling Cooper, the men consider it to be feminine to have a good figure and show legs. Even though the women know that this presumption is not accurate, they keep the illusion to get respect from the men. They preserve the male idea of “femininity.”

When Peggy starts working at Sterling Cooper as Draper’s secretary, she is told to show her legs. It is interesting that it is actually the women who tell her that. The only man who instructs her to show more legs is Pete Campbell (her future lover), and in fact Draper apologizes for Campbell’s behavior.  The question is why does Draper ask Campbell to apologize? Is it because he thinks that women should dress more comfortable? Is he trying to change the standards for skirts in the office? Given Draper’s treatment of women in general this is unlikely. He corrects Campbell because he knows that the women in the office know how to dress. He knows that Peggy will be naturalized into the environment by secretaries like Joan. Draper, in other words, has full confidence in the system.

Draper’s wife, Betty is a housewife, whose mother wanted her to be beautiful, so she could find a man. Betty is aware of the male description of a housewife as a happy woman, who has pretty clothes, kids, a nanny, and a big house. But she also knows that the life of a housewife is lonely and boring, “There’s nothing wrong with that. But then what? Just sit and smoke and let it go ‘til you’re in a box?” Most of the time she walks around in the house, waiting for her husband to come home. We never see her reading a book or watching television. She engages in small talk only, and she never divulges her thoughts, because her friends would chide her for being dissatisfied with her perfect life.

The Muted Woman
What if the women in Mad Men suddenly chose to express and liberate themselves? What if they opposed the male definition of reality? This would require a total reinvention of language, because at that time language missed several important words for woman to express feelings. Here Peggy Olson tries to express her frustration through a metaphor, “Why is it that every time a man takes you out to lunch, you are the dessert?” From a modern perspective the central word missing in Peggy’s vocabulary is “sexual harassment.” She feels it but cannot conceptualize it. According to Joanne Hollows, “Sexual harassment” was invented only in 1973.

Another missing expression in Mad Men is “female pleasure.” In episode 11 (“Indian Summer”), Don gives Peggy the weight-loss machine. She discovers its sideeffect: “It vibrates and that coincides with how you wear it. … It’s probably unrelated to weight loss.” The problem is when Peggy presents this “Rejuvenator” for the other copywriters, she cannot articulate this second function. Draper takes over with this central line, “It gives the pleasure of a man, without the man.” Formulating women’s pleasure without the man would give women power, but here they still try to deny that women are able to satisfy themselves. The Rejuvenator is a substitute for a man, but still the pleasure it gives is that of a man.

Home at the Drapers, Betty is not stimulated sexually, but she cannot express her frustration except through her fantasies about other men and masturbation on the (vibrating) laundry machine. The paradox is of course that she has a man who is every woman’s desire, a man who leaves no woman unsatisfied but his own wife.

Peggy Olsen and Language
According to Spender, “At no stage of this process were females in a position to promote alternatives, or even to disagree” (152). In Mad Men, Peggy presents a female in position to promote alternatives. In a lipsticks workshop for Belle Jolie, the Sterling Cooper boys notice that Peggy has a talent for words. Actually they need her “woman know-how” so much that she gets the responsibility for the ad. The question is how Peggy manages this responsibility to invent an alternative language in the male dominated industry? It would mean that she either redefines terms already in use, or invents a new language, with new words and new rules. When Peggy comes up with the slogan, “I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box,” she actually articulates that beauty is not about satisfying men. This corresponds to the female copywriter Ilon Specht’s 1973 L’Oreal slogan “Because I’m worth it.”

Peggy’s future as an inventor of a “female” or “female-friendly” language does not look too bright. Her potentially subversive words are presented by men. Becoming a junior copywriter boosts her self-confidence, but at the same time it puts her in an even more dependent relationship to Draper. She has to speak his language and his codes. Her language must develop in terms of his own. She gives her newborn son away, talks down to other woman, and even joins the men at a strip club. When her first copy is accepted in “The Hobo Code,” she asks why the text is different from her first copy, the men laugh, and say “You may be a writer honey, you’re arrogant.”

The men in Mad Men control language in several ways. They control definitions of words and meanings. Even though one word has two meanings the male definition dominates. In a sense, even though Peggy’s hidden feminist subversion in the lipstick campaign is brilliant, it will not be fully experienced. It serves merely to express a desire for emancipation.

Even though many women today work in media business and with advertising, a lot of meanings of words are still dominated by men. An example could be advertisements for woman hair-removal products. All in all even though we have put some feminism into our lives and language, Mad Men is reminding us that we are not done yet.

Sources
Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. Pandora Press, 1980.

Spender, Dale. “Language and Reality.” The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. 2000.

Ryan, Maureen. “Wild about ‘Mad Men:’ A Talk with Creator Matthew Weiner.” Chicago Tribune. 15 October 2007.

The Jewel of Medina shows the importance of A’isha not only for Islamic history but also history in general. The daughter of Muhammad’s best friend and the inheritor of the khalifa, Abu Bakr, A’isha became the most influential woman in her time. She was the youngest of Muhammad’s wives, a spiritual leader after his death, as well as a warrior and commander of an army. For some she is an inspiration, for others she is a curse because she caused the split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims. In her novels, Jones offers her interpretation of A’isha’s childhood, her secret love, her marriage, and her conflict with Muhammad’s nephew Ali. Above all, Jones narrates Islamic history as a love story. She makes it a story of choices, struggle and reform, rather than subjugation and mindless obedience.

The Sword of Medina takes place after Muhammad’s death, the time when different political factions fought for the position of Caliph. A’isha stands for her principles as well as her feelings against the agendas of many powerful men. As the Mother of the Believers she has much influence over her community. A’isha is more mature now. While her feelings of love and hate do push her in certain directions, she is much more oriented to reflection and understanding of those with whom she fiercely disagrees, such as Ali. Jones switches between A’isha and Ali’s perspectives to show how they change with respect to each other, and above all, how differently they interpret Islam and their socio-political climate. The double perspective shows us the significance of interpretation in decision-making. A’isha and Ali are both right and wrong, but above all, they are human, limited, and the more their power increases, the greater the mistakes they make.

Jones’ decision to focus on the political struggles after Muhammad’s death has strong resonance today, especially as we in the West question Islam in terms of governance and religion, particularly the separation of the two. Looking back and making genuine attempts to imagine and understand what might have caused Islam to develop as it has, seems a most important act to undertake for anyone who is concerned with this religion (whether or not they are a practitioner). Very little is known about Islam and so much is read into its history. Jones’ books are important because they highlight the act of imagination in the understanding of history, showing how one of the major pitfalls with so-called fundamentalists is their inability to understand how personal bias colors interpretation of the faith, that they are susceptible to re-imagining historical figures and events they claim to care for in order to advance their own political agendas, just as some of those first Muslim did after Muhammad’s death. History repeats itself, but Jones’ A’isha learns her lessons and changes the course of her life despite strong forces that pull her apart. Is there a moral to her story? Readers will have to decide for themselves.

This review and the interview below were originally published on Roses&Thorns Blog.

The Jewel of Medina and The Sword of Medina.

Interview with Sherry Jones

AM: Thank you for conversing with me about your two novels, The Jewel of Medina, and The Sword of Medina, which deal with some of the most interesting parts of Islamic history through the eyes of Muhammad’s youngest wife, A’isha.

SJ: I agree; this is very interesting history and worthwhile for all, Muslim and non-Muslim, to know. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about it with you and your readers. For more information on me and my books, go to my website.

AM: I want to begin by saying a few words about the importance of A’isha and your interpretation of her history. First of all, tackling any historical personality, let alone a controversial figure from the inception of a world religion, is a daunting task. I read your work both critically and with admiration. A’isha is prominent for so many different reasons: the youngest wife of a major prophet, an outspoken and feisty girl married to a man frequently accused of subjugating women through his religion, a female warrior who has lead an army of Muslims against other Muslims, a spiritual and religious guide (the Mother of the Believers). Tell us how you approached A’isha, why her, and did you have any doubts about writing her history the way you did? Did you ever think of giving up?

SJ: I first came to this project with the idea that I would honor all the women in the Prophet Muhammad’s harim by bringing them to life through fiction. I wanted to tell his story through their eyes, and explore the relationship of Muslim women to their religion by exploring Muhammad’s relationship to his wives and concubines. A’isha emerged as the heroine by virtue of her personality – I love her sense of humor – and her inspiring story. Her courage and strength inspired me, and continue to do so.

The biggest challenge for me in writing her tale was finding information not only about Muhammad’s wives but also about Arabic life in general in 600 A.D. What did they wear? What did they eat? What did their houses look like? What were the customs of the time? Finding the answers to these questions was very difficult. I tried diligently to be accurate to the time and place. I worked very hard not to exoticize the living conditions, but to portray the harsh realities of heat, dust, tribal warfare, and privation.

I worked on The Jewel of Medina for five years, researching, writing, and revising while a single parent of a young child, a part-time newspaper journalist, and a part-time college student. I revised it seven times before it was published. But no, I never felt like giving up. A’isha’s story called to me; she called to me, urging me to tell her story. As I wrote, I was imbued with a sense of discovery and also with excitement at being able to bring this remarkable woman to life for audiences who had never heard of her before as well as to those who know her well. No matter how well-versed you might be in the Islamic ahadith, or stories about Muhammad, reading fiction about A’isha is bound to bring her to life in a new way for you. Fiction, by taking the reader into the hearts and minds of its characters, has the power to create empathy in the reader, which is a powerful force for human understanding and peace.

AM: Your first novel about A’isha dealt with her childhood, her secret love, her marriage, and in fact her conflict with Muhammad’s nephew Ali. Ali famously told Muhammad to divorce her because she was too unwieldy. In a sense, in the eyes of some more patriarchal men, he was too soft. You show how much she loved Muhammad and he loved her. I quite appreciate your decision to narrate such a history as a love story, especially since Muhammad’s marriages have been considered political acts. He went from a monogamous relationship with an older woman, to a polygamous marriage obviously constructed to create bonds with powerful tribes.

SJ: The story of Muhammad and A’isha is one of the greatest love stories in the history of humanity. Yes, his marriage to her was political, but he obviously fell in love with her during their ten years together. I love their interplay, the romance between them, the conflicts and the making up, how they grow stronger and their love increases over time. I love how she called Muhammad on things, too. Like when he had a revelation from God telling him to marry his adopted son’s wife, Zaynab. “My, how Allah hastens to do your bidding!” A’isha said. I can just see the smirk on her lips, the hand on her hip.

My favorite scene in The Jewel of Medina comes when A’isha climbs the tree next to the attic room where Muhammad has sequestered himself for a month. She pours her heart out to him there, singing, she says, like a nightingale, opening herself to him. How he responds later is so moving. And then, as he lay dying, he called for A’isha – and all his other wives gave up their allotted nights with him so that he could be with her until the end. He died with his head on her breast, and was buried under her bed. What a great romance! What a great, great love!

Muhammad loved women. Was he too soft on women? I know some of his male Companions – Umar, for instance – thought so. But if, as the Qur’an says, we are all created from the same soul, then why would women not be the same as men in God’s eyes? Muhammad saw beyond the patriarchal desire for control over women that was so prevalent in his culture. He saw with the eyes of the Divine, which considers all – men, women, children, poor, rich, black, white, brown – to be equal. Therefore, he gave women rights they had never had before. Women were empowered in the early Islamic umma; they prayed alongside men in mosques, fought alongside men in wars, and were among the Prophet’s chief Companions. Muslim women during Muhammad’s time were the envy of their neighbors not only in Arabia but also in Persia and the Byzantine Empire.

When the men of the umma began to balk at all these rights being given to women, Muhammad must have known that he was at risk of losing his male followers. Or, if you believe the Qur’an is the word of God, then God must have known this. So he made compromises – making the testimony of two women equal to that of one man, for example. Because to lose his male followers in a tribal warfare society would have meant the death of Islam. So I think there was a bit of a sacrifice in order to serve the greater good. Muhammad would have done more for women if he could have, but he was ahead of his time.

AM: For anyone to write about A’isha, it seems unavoidable to tackle the issue of her age. Different sources relate her age at marriage from nine to fifteen. You decide to make A’isha a nine-year-old. Why?

SJ: Any writer of history, fiction or non-fiction, has to make choices. I have read opinions placing her age at marriage as high as nineteen. There is no way we can know what really happened; her history was transmitted orally for 140 years after she died, which allows for easy manipulation of the facts to serve one political agenda or another. I took the middle path.

Marrying a nine-year-old girl was virtually unheard-of – the custom was to wait until a girl began her menstrual cycle – but Muhammad’s situation was unique. I show how her father, Abu Bakr, pushed for an early marriage so as to cement his position as Muhammad’s chief Companion. But even if he did marry her when she was still a child, I am certain that he did not have sex with her until she had her menarche. Muhammad was not a pedophile – A’isha was his only child bride – and he was not a rapist. So I delayed the consummation until she was older. This served the narrative nicely, and it also gave A’isha room to grow in a way that would have produced the smart, sharp, strong woman she became.

AM: Two things struck me as both bold and brilliant in your interpretation of A’isha’s alleged adultery and her childlessness. First, A’isha was accused of having a relationship with her childhood love. The community put enormous pressure on Muhammad to do something about it, because she shamed him out. He refused, but at the same time he kept away from her. In the end, the divine message stated that A’isha was innocent, and the event was used in the Qur’an to condemn all form of gossip. You narrate this event in a fantastic, daring way. You have A’isha elope with her young love (though not lover). She returns to her much older husband, not because she must, but because she realizes she truly loves him. You make it all about her choice. You emphasize her agency in that she chose Muhammad despite all troubles and life in poverty. Please, tell us about your decision to do so, and the implication you thought it would have.

SJ: I wanted to honor A’isha by portraying her as a real, well-rounded human being. I wanted to explore how a girl raised in such a patriarchal environment as Mecca could grow up to be the empowered leader that she became. Obviously, she had internal weaknesses and external obstacles to overcome. My task was to try to discern what some of those might have been.

She was accused of adultery, for instance. I thought, what really happened out there in the desert? Is her tale of losing her necklace in the sand – and losing an entire caravan while she searched for it – really plausible? What if she really did stay behind on purpose to meet with Safwan? But then, she had this great love with Muhammad, so she must have made the choice to stay with him. Real love doesn’t happen when we “fall,” but when we consciously choose our partner, when we know his or her faults and accept them as part of the whole, lovable package.

I knew that some readers wouldn’t appreciate my giving A’isha flaws, weaknesses, and obstacles. I knew some would dislike my giving Muhammad flaws and weaknesses, too. But I don’t know how else we grow except by struggle, how we learn except from our mistakes. And I find little inspiration in a person who is “perfect.”

AM: The second thing was A’isha’s childlessness. Your explanation is that Muhammad did not have sex with A’isha for many years. A’isha is a nine-year-old child, but later also a girl in puberty, who desires her husband, but he refuses to see her as a woman. He avoids intercourse because she is too young. This platonic relationship explains the fact she did not get pregnant. Could you share your thoughts behind this call?

SJ: Only one of Muhammad’s twelve wives and concubines became pregnant, and he had only one daughter by his first wife, Khadija. Of course, she was forty when he married her, but he was, apparently, not hugely fertile. My Arabic professor said Sunni Muslims believe God didn’t want him to leave a male heir – but then, his daughter Fatima had two sons. At any rate, the Muhammad I came to know in my research would not have raped a nine-year-old girl. So I delayed his and A’isha’s conjugal relations. Such a delay made sense to me on a narrative level, certainly, because of the tension that it creates, and also on a practical level, since Muhammad was almost continually taking new women into his household. The marriages were politically arranged, but there was also competition in the harim for his time and attention, which tells me that he was having sexual relations with them.

An interesting thing happened as I was writing The Jewel of Medina. A’isha’s being young and presumably fertile during her marriage, I decided to have her become pregnant but then to miscarry the fetus. Later, as I researched something in my four-volume biography of Muhammad written in the tenth century, I found a footnote stating that A’isha had become pregnant but had miscarried! That’s a very impressive coincidence.

AM: I didn’t know that. Amazing coincidence. Writer’s intuition, maybe? In The Jewel of Medina, we can see how much A’isha hates Ali, Muhammad’s nephew. She cannot understand why he treats her like a child, why he wants to separate her from her husband, etc. In The Sword of Medina, where A’isha leads an army against Ali and his followers, which caused the famous Sunni-Shia split, you have a slightly different perspective. I can tell you that after reviewing Kamran Pasha’s novel about A’isha on my blog, I was reproached by a Bosnian Shia-Muslim (a rare thing), whose own poetry I had reviewed earlier. She found my interest in A’isha insulting. I wonder how did you approach the political struggles after Muhammad’s death? I can see you had no particular bias, which makes it all the more interesting.

SJ: Yes, whenever people ask what right I, a non-Muslim, have to write about these people and this history, I point out that my lack of an “agenda” perhaps makes my story more credible. I approached A’isha’s story with an open mind, having little prior knowledge of her life or of Islam. So I was completely objective, not trying to convert anyone to my form of spirituality. However, since I believe all religions are invented by humans in effort to impose a narrative structure on spiritual experience, then my portrayal of the struggles over Islam that happened after Muhammad’s death does reflect that belief. Whenever the spiritual visionary who inspires a new religion dies, ordinary humans always muck things up with their own greed and lust for power.

In The Jewel of Medina, A’isha tells her own tale. She does not like Ali, and so says very little about him that is positive. He gets a bad rap. He comes off as a big jerk, because that is how A’isha would have seen him.

Because The Sword of Medina culminates in the battle between A’isha and Ali that began the Sunni-Shia split, the whole book involves a buildup of tension between them. To enhance that effect, I tell the tale from alternating points of view: First A’isha’s, then Ali’s. This gives the reader a more well-rounded picture of Ali. He is redeemed. Also, we see his perspective regarding A’isha, which gives her an added dimension, too.

AM: Since the two Sunni and Shia both use Muhammad’s well-known love for Abu-Bakr (A’isha’s father) and Ali to justify their preferences, the love theme cannot be taken out of the historical equation. I find this emphasis most important. Tell us more about love and history.

SJ: “History is composed of wars,” a professor told a class of mine a few years ago. As you might imagine, my hand shot up in protest. War is not the only component of history; it’s just the part that men tend to focus on, probably because it involves men almost exclusively. But I think love is humanity’s driving force, and it has always been so. Love for country, for god, for our children, for our parents – most of us spend our entire lives trying to gain the love of our parents, even after they are dead – shape our decisions both conscious and unconscious, both trivial and momentous. Love is the engine driving everything: religion, work, commerce, art, and yes, war. However, if we focused more on giving love and less on getting it, this would be a much different world. Love is a verb.

AM: I agree, absolutely. This is indeed the reason I love fiction. When Tony Morrison received Nobel Prize the justification was that she gave back the blacks their history. To me, the history is not just that of slavery and overcoming of it, but the history of love.

I like how you switch between A’isha and Ali, and how they change with respect to each other more than they do in any of their other relationships. At times there is tenderness and even love behind their hate for one another.

SJ: Yes, they are both very complex and, as is so often the case with enemies, much more alike than they realize. They both loved Muhammad very much, and wanted to protect Islam from the changes being made in it after Muhammad’s death.

A’isha and Ali come to recognize their similarities during the course of the book and also to respect their differences. Because A’isha is the symbolic leader of the Sunnis and Ali, of the Shi’a, the same might be true of these two factions of Islam. They are much more alike than they realize. As a non-Muslim, I see their differences as being very minor. And the same is true of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. All worship the same God, so what are we fighting about?

AM: So very true. The rule of caliphs ranged over two decades. How did you select events to include? Were there any events you wanted to include but decided not to, and for what reasons?

SJ: One of the most difficult aspects of historical fiction is deciding what to leave out. In revising The Jewel of Medina, I had to cut several chapters from the first draft because, although they told interesting tales, they weren’t crucial to the main themes of the book. In The Sword of Medina, I did leave out quite a bit of history. The conquest of the Persian Empire, for instance, gets very little mention. But I was much more interested in exploring the personalities of the caliphs, and how they changed Islam to suit their own political and personal agendas. The Qur’an, although revered as the exact word of God, was hotly debated at the time, with some claiming that men had made changes to benefit themselves or their own points of view, for instance – and women’s power, so enhanced during Muhammad’s time, was decimated in subsequent years. I wanted to look at what happens to a religion when the visionary founder dies and ordinary humans – and their ordinary motives of greed, lust, and power, take hold.

I also chose not to spend so much time in the harim in The Sword of Medina as I did in Jewel. I loved the sister-wives in Jewel, and I would have loved to explore more fully how they dealt with being denied male companionship after Muhammad died. None of them was allowed to remarry. How did they compensate? Surely some of them, at least, continued to have a sexual life, although secretly. Did they have lovers? Did they turn to one another for pleasure and love? But to speculate about this would have seemed sensationalistic and would have detracted from the themes that I was most interested in exploring.

AM: The collection of the Qur’an fragments into one book was a major endeavor that several of the caliphs worked on. I wonder why this is not a part of the narrative? Would it draw attention from the other more profane struggles? There is a certain separation of religion and governance in the novel, or at least spiritual faith and worldly matters.

SJ: Well, I did touch on this matter a couple of times, but it just didn’t seem to relate to the A’isha-Ali struggle that is at the heart of The Sword of Medina. I did include a scene where an elder who is a reciter of the Qur’an informs the caliph Uthman that his scribes are making changes in the language, that they are deviating from the exact words of the Prophet. And I believe religion and religious faith had less to do with governance than Muslims might like to believe. So many of the decisions that were made seemed to focus on expansion of empire, on attainment of power and wealth.

AM: The reason I asked the previous question is partly due to the fact that A’isha has been the one who has transmitted a great deal of the Islamic history and Muhammad’s sayings about different aspects of everyday life and spirituality. You do mention this, but it becomes important for A’isha only after her battle against Ali.

SJ: Yes, she had twenty years or more to transmit ahadith after she exited public life. Of course, many of her sayings were thrown out later as coming from “unreliable” sources, and those she disputed at the time – especially those of Abu Hurayra, which were particularly misogynistic – were allowed to remain. This shows us how politics infuse every aspect of the story. We don’t know what’s true about A’isha or anything else of that time. Little was written, so we can only speculate.

At the end of the day, however, we do know at least one thing about A’isha: She was a kick-ass woman, strong and confident, courageous and intelligent, outspoken and funny and fierce, the most famous and influential woman in Islam and an example for us all. She rocks!

AM: Thank you very much for talking with me about your work.

SJ: I am so honored to have the opportunity. Thanks for reading my books and for taking the time to formulate these terrific, and challenging, questions.

Vowler’s collection is not only a strong piece of work, but also a promise, an overture to a great writing career. Vowler writes with confidence, easily inhabiting any type of character, and point of view. The eponymous story, “The Method,” which opens the book, takes me by surprise. I usually quite dislike stories about writing, about the importance of story-telling and all that. “The Method” is quite brilliant, serious in its dramatization of a writer who slowly turns into a character from his own story in order to establish perfect verisimilitude. The metamorphosis is sad and funny, and most importantly, it does not feel stilted and artificial, even though it is basically a lesson in creative writing.

Each of Vowler’s stories makes an impact, and it is hard to read more than two-three pieces in one sitting. This is a good thing. I love when I need to stop and think, to digest what I have just read and enjoy the multiple layers of the texts.

What strikes me as important in Vowler’s collection is the very order of stories. There are a number of ways to put together a collection, but to produce some kind of flow and rhythm in a series of unconnected narratives is as difficult as making top 5 or top 10 mixed tapes (remember High Fidelity?). I am particularly fond of the last story, “Little Man.” It is not just an excellent piece, but the effect it has on me is to send me back to the beginning, with a desire to reread, which is the best compliment I can give any fictional work.

Vowler’s collection can be bought from Amazon or directly from Salt Publishing.

Interview with Tom Vowler

AM: Tom, tell us a little about your collection. How did it come about?

TV:  Hi Adnan. I needed 25,000 words of fiction for my creative writing dissertation. There was a clumsy first novel, gathering dust at home, that would likely have got me a pass, but my tutor suggested I challenge myself with something different. In the year following the MA, the collection doubled in length and was fortunate enough to win the Scott Prize last year.

AM: At what point in your writing did you work on “The Method”? I have read on you blog that you have recently finished a novel and that your agent asked you to make changes, something about a character that did not work. Are the two connected?

TV: Ha, no, that story came long before the novel. I’d just listened to an interview with the boxer Barry McGuigan, where he talked about training Daniel Day Lewis for a film role. McGuigan said that, with the exception of the top five middleweights in the country, the actor had become as good as anyone else. This staggered me: the lengths Day Lewis went to gain insight into a character. I just took this concept to a comic and macabre level. But, no, the story is (almost) entirely non-autobiographical.

AM: That is very interesting, Tom. That’s one of the films about boxing. When I read the story I thought of DeNiro and of course the old master Brando. To switch to another issue, at one point you use the phrase “sacred mundaneity.” The way I understand it seems to pertain to most of your stories. What does it mean to you?

TV: I think that’s a story where the characters suffer a terrible and very public loss. The event and their subsequent grief became a public narrative, pored over and dissected by the media. And so when life for one character begins to assume a degree of normality, when things others regard as mundane return to his life, he regards this as sacred.

AM: I very much liked this sentence: “a calmness that suggests insanity.” Again, several stories give me this impression. I mean several of the characters can be, at times, described like this. Can you tell me something about this? How important was the question of sanity/insanity in your stories?

TV: It’s often said, It’s the quiet ones you need to watch. When everyone’s losing their head, ranting, exploding with rage, there’s something more sinister about the person who looks calmly but intensely on. There’s real power in that. I knew someone like this once: not necessarily insane, but you knew when events were about to turn nasty, when he was capable of terrible things, his serenity utterly incongruous.

AM: Your stories are really quite intelligently crafted, but at the same time the emotional impact is very strong, either because of the fact that I can sense the craftsman-at-work, or maybe despite that, maybe because there is tension between the emotional and intellectual impacts. Is this something you worked on consciously, deliberately? Can you tell us a little about the process?

TV: The question of composition and its contrivance is a fascinating one, and, as you no doubt know, not something the writer can always easily identify. Stories, for me, tend to start with, not necessarily a theme, but an event or specific emotional encounter. And from this a series of ‘What if’ questions draw the piece along. As for creating emotional resonance, I think all you can do is draw on your own experience, which although may be disparate, can usually act as a metaphor for what your characters are going through. So their pain or hatred, love or fear, whilst contextually different, can be evoked by summoning my own. Again, though, a lot of this happens at an unconscious level, seeping unseen from the writer’s mind into the prose. For example, I was aware that the past, its inexorable grip on the present, themed heavily in the collection, but people have also been quick to point out the recurrence of revenge, something I’d barely considered.

AM: Tom, thank you for talking with me about your book.

Sabbagh moves comfortably through language and yet not always very comforting themes, issues, images. His poesis shows confidence, skill, mastery, but also playfulness. There is particular quality in the ways Sabbagh juxtaposes words in order to bring about new connotations, new meanings, new sensibility. He highlights his use of standard poetic devices. Alliteration and assonance, for instance,are sometimes used in unexpected places, and together with other poetic gestures produce a form of gracious awkwardness: “they cauterise my universe / like the surgeon’s mystical specimens / specified by tools” (42). This gives us the sense of love and what it is like, the feelings between parents and children, which are already so skilfully evoked in the title of the collection.This double sense of harmony and conflict between words that produces the sense of human relationships. There is a sense of penetration until“what is left is only a skeleton, a skinnier version / of our former belief in ourselves, but settled, rested” (23).

Most poems are dedicated to parents, friends, etc. The poems dedicated to Sabbagh’s father deal with love as poignant as the verses are sharp and controlled. Yet, a part of this love, and the complexity of Sabbagh’s work, resides exactly in those verses that seem out of control, and when the mastery of language, form, poeticity take a turn, and partly fail. The reader gets a sense that something raw and disturbing enters the picture.

My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint is published by Cinnamon Press (November 2010)

This review was originally published in Sentinel Literary Quarterly

I must say I tried to stay cool before reading Gebbie’s new collection of short stories and flash fiction. Her first collection Words From a Glass Bubble was exquisite: the stories were unique and authentic, the characters felt like I’d known them for years, and the narrative voices were both peculiar and particular, and all the more endearing for that. I was both excited and a little skeptical, thinking, No way Gebbie can pull it off again.

She did.

And she made every aspect of story-telling appear so natural and unconstrained. It’s almost like slipping on ice, Oops, she did it again, made us fall in love with her.

There are many stories that stayed with me. Since I have been through war, I can relate and quite appreciate the way Gebbie treats war. I have particular love for sappers (ever since I read The English Patient), and like Gebbie’s treatment of that bizarre profession (I think her father was a sapper).

There is one story that stands out for me, “Letters from Kilburn”, which has an epistolary form, and consists of the letters exchanged between an Iraqi boy Karim Hussein and Her Majesty’s Deputy Secretary. Karim writes to the Queen to ask for help and after a few standard answers, suddenly we discover a human being, a person behind the “function.” I will not reveal much more, but want to stress that for someone who has written fiction myself, this story is a masterclass in this kind of voice. Stories that use this form to make a certain point are most often than not preachy, un-engaging, stiff, formulaic, you get the point. “Letters from Kilburn” gets under my skin.

I cannot recommend Gebbie enough. And I am looking forward to her upcoming novel The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury).

Jo Cannon’s Insignificant Gestures speaks through the half-sealed wounds of outsiders, different kinds of refugees, immigrants in and from Africa, and women and children. Cannon’s stories make readers live through the transitions and transformations of her characters. She crafts with care, and here I do not mean only that the prose is exquisitely wrought, but that the stories ooze with a certain comforting care for the characters. In “Theresa’s Spear,” the protagonist explains how Chichewa have “seven words for washing, but none for the emotions that sluiced through me.” In another story, we find a sick woman who thinks she has contaminated her dog and caused its seizures.

Cannon makes these snippets of life appear long. The short moments she narrates open up her characters’ pasts and histories. Also, we get the sense that wounds take a long time to heal. This healing is like a race towards zeroing out, where everything will return to normal or neutral. Characters as different as an obese man Mick and a traumatised woman such as Nasma grow from this same sensibility. Struggling to lose weight, Mick jokes about wanting to reach a body mass index of zero, a goal that acts as metaphor for what many of the characters are working toward — achieving a trauma-index of zero, where zero would not be the perfect state (of mind), but would entail forgetting and, therefore, represents a different kind of loss.

What struck me most in Cannon’s stories was the lack of desire. Desire applies to many yearnings: the desire for something or someone, the wish for a return of one’s affection, or the desire for resolutions, for a new life, for peace. So why not a desire to forget? Cannon’s characters indeed seem to move in certain directions, but without possessing much desire to push them on. Often their movement is forward, however insignificant it may seem at times. For this reason, the tiny gestures explored in these stories seem all the more miraculous. A touch, a look, a word, things that are barely perceptible, things that may not last more than a second become the long lasting ground for a new life. They are not desired, not even fantasised about. They come as surprises, as openings onto something new, “a pleasant sucking like a child’s lovebite.”

Interview with Jo Cannon

AM: Welcome, Jo.

JC: Thanks for inviting me to Sweden, Adnan. Great to be here. It’s warmer.

AM: Insignificant Gestures is your first collection, but you’ve been writing stories for some years now. Tell us a little about things that pulled you into writing fiction.

JC: I started my writing life in a support group for doctors. We used reflective writing to help with the emotional side of our work. One exercise was to write in the voice of a patient we found troubling or perplexing. I discovered that I became that person in my imagination and could relate to their problems with greater insight and empathy. Real life stories tend to be tangled and the outcomes can be very sad. I found I enjoyed the creative act of writing, and because I’ve always read fiction, felt inclined to make up ‘better’ ones! Of course, I could never use real stories as material. I wanted to share my work beyond our confidential group, so I turned to fiction, where I could control my characters’ behaviour and destinies and inject the narratives with a little hope.

AM: I must say that I began reading your book in the waiting room of a hospital with lots of pregnant women and children around me. I do not know if that affected me so that I was more attentive to all the child characters in your stories. Children seem incredibly important, even when they are not the part of an event, as in “Running on the Right Side of the Brain” where you describe an experience as, “a pleasant sucking like a child’s lovebite.” Can you say something about your focus on children?

JC: I was surprised you thought my book focused on children, but a quick count confirmed they feature in twenty out of twenty-five stories. Kids aren’t very visible in western societies but, of course, are a normal part of life and in other places are far more apparent and underfoot. For me, the epiphany of parenthood was the protectiveness I felt towards my children. This rapidly extended to friends’ children and then to everyone’s. My sons are teenagers now, so I’m conscious of the difficulties of being a young adult. Children suffer most in any adverse situation and are damaged by adult dramas in which they are powerless. I suppose in my stories they are a metaphor for the vulnerability of human beings and the need to protect one another.

AM: I’ll go straight to an image in the collection which not only stayed with me but which somehow became a metaphor for many other stories, or rather, the things your characters struggle with. In the story “The Alphabet Diet” the character Mick is extremely obese and in the process of losing weight, he uses this body mass index. Now, the ideal index is zero. To me this became a metaphor of the existential issues that most of your characters deal with. They seem to reach for some state of being which is zero, that is, without the things that burden them. Yet, paradoxically, I assume in the state zero they’d also boil down to nothing, they’d disappear. I may be pushing it a little but that was the sense I got, that they both want to rid themselves of their burdens and also fear that zero-point in life.

JC: That is certainly the point made by Mick in “The Alphabet Diet.” He’s joking because the ideal BMI is 18 to 25. Most of my characters, as you point out, are in existential crisis. With the exception perhaps of Eve, they all have troubled minds as a result of difficult life events. Each one has developed a different strategy for dealing with this because the human psyche reaches naturally towards light and hope. Sometimes the strategy is harmful to others, as is Andre’s obsessive love in “Shutters.” Others chose work, or running, or exhibitionism. Most of my characters are imprisoned by habits of thought and behaviour and need the input of another to change their lives.

AM: How did you decide to write about different kinds of refugees, or immigrants? What drew you to this?

JC: I’m a G.P. in an inner city practice and most of my patients are from ethnic minorities. Many have settled for several generations; others are recent immigrants. Sheffield prides itself as “The City of Sanctuary” and some of the people I work with are refugees. The fantastical journeys, the stringencies and courage that take people from one side of the world to another, astound me. Post traumatic stress syndrome, common in this group, affects the brain biochemically. As with most altered mental states—panic disorder, depression—a protective brain reaction outlives its usefulness and takes on an existential meaning. In “Nasma’s Malady,” I describe the psychological sequel rather than the harrowing details of her attack. Other characters—in “One Hundred Days” and “A Good Match”—experience PTSD due to an assault on their sense of self. In “Needle-stick baby” and “Fairy Story,” the protagonists suffer similar altered brain chemistry following emotional trauma. The capacity of the mind to respond to shocking events in the same way connects us as human beings.

AM: Some of your characters are Muslim. The issue of what it means to be a Muslim has been dealt with in terms of a lot of stereotypes. How did you approach it? Can you give me a few examples of how you dealt with the identity of someone for instance from Pakistan as in “A Good Match?” Arranged marriage is one of those overexploited themes.

JC: Although some of my characters are Muslim, this isn’t their defining feature. Nor is their faith central to their lives. “A Good Match” describes an imaginary family in a group with a specific history and alludes to the pressures put on some young people to maintain marriages that seem predestined to fail. But really, this story isn’t about arranged marriage, which is practiced diversely by different families and groups, any more than it is about religion. Mainly, I wanted to explore why a young man who is not violent by nature might become so and the devastating effect this has on him. Rather than concentrate on the victim of domestic violence, I hoped to show that Siddique, the perpetrator, is a casualty too.

AM: Religion seems to play an important role in several stories. It is both important and tangential. I mentioned the Muslims, but there is also the “missionary” theme. Tell us about your relationship to religion. How do you look upon work with refugees? What part does religion have in it?

JC: Many religious experiences are compelling because they are caused by altered brain biochemistry. In “Hand of God,” for example, Ryan’s religiosity is a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder and the aura of migraine. At some level he recognises this, so his relationship with the cult is ambivalent from the start. He sees John, the group’s spiritual leader, manipulate the piety of others to deceive and control: a commonplace abuse of religious power. The protagonist in “Eye of the Storm” believes that faith should not be flaunted, or even discussed, but practiced as discretely as any other deeply personal activity. The nun in “Theresa’s Spear” chooses a life of emotional deprivation until she realises that her craving to give and receive love is completely normal. She finds she can no longer conceive of a deity who allows extreme suffering. Like her, I believe we should hold hands as we creep through the dark forest because no one else is going to help us.

Professionally, I notice that the significance of religion to an individual varies and cannot be assumed. For some it is the profound centre of their lives; for others it is mild sentimentality, superstition, or a set of cultural customs. Inner resources and sustaining relationships seem to have more bearing on the ability of a human being to negotiate the difficulties of life and death. Many patients deliberately choose a doctor who does not share their faith, or any faith, assuming they will be less judgmental. Of course I respect people’s observances—they impact on medical management—but beliefs are less important than the humanity we share.

AM: I couldn’t help thinking about certain recurring names, such as Eve, which appears a few times. The book ends with “Jam” where Eve returns as the protagonist.

JC: Eve is a recurring character who appears, at different stages of her life, throughout the collection. We meet her first as a child in “Evo-stik” and the book ends with her death in “Jam.”

Eve is a contrast to the more lost and isolated characters. In some ways, she is an outsider too—an observer who doesn’t quite fit in. But she is grounded in family, so signifies ‘belonging.’ Her long-running love story with Tim threads through the book. “Jam” is a metaphor for her life, or any life.

AM: I wonder about your style. At times, in your stories about immigrants, I felt I wanted to see a different way of narrating, maybe some different sensibility, or tone, or voice. Then it struck me that the fact that my expectations were not met, actually added to the sense of the gap between the character and his or her environment, a sense of discomfort. The feeling that the voice and the character did not quite fit produced the effect of characters standing outside themselves. I had a similar experience reading Leila Aboulela’s novels The Translator and Minaret.

JC: I don’t know Abouela’s novels so have just ordered The Translator! Many of my characters—the protagonists in “One Hundred Days,” “Nasma’s Malady,” “A Good Match,” and Abida in “Daddy’s Girl” are intelligent people rendered powerless by their poor command of English. I’ve seen this often with patients, and it is deeply frustrating for people articulate in their own languages. My stories don’t attempt to convey the sound of their limited speech but rather the content of their inner worlds. Although their experiences are unique, their mental reactions are universal—hence the commonality. I want to give a voice to people who would otherwise be speechless.

AM: Do you want to say anything else, something I have not picked upon but you feel you want to convey to your readers.

JC: No, thank you, Adnan. You have really stretched my brain!

AM: Thank you for this conversation.

JC: Thanks so much for this opportunity to talk about my book and for the close interest and respect you have shown my work.

Insignificant Gestures is available from Pewter Rose Press or Amazon. Visit Jo Cannon at jocannon.co.uk

Perring’s stories are accompanied by minimalist drawings that remind me of Paul Klee’s drawings of angels. A perfect match.

There is magic in Perrings realism. It’s a mundane magic. Perring sometimes opens a story with something like a girl spitting fire in “Not Nitro”, but quickly and in a few lines the peculiar talent bursts with emotional complexity, metaphoric quality, and yes, something quite ordinary, typical maybe, but presented in a new light, in fact, extraordinary. Another favorite of mine is “The Mechanical Woman,” incredibly suggestive, and funny. I recommend it to men to read aloud to their wives/girlfriends/… .

You can get a taste of the book in this video based on the story “When you’re Frightened, Honey, Think of Strawberries” on Perring’s fan page on Facebook. Buy the book on amazon.

The stories in Gebbie’s collection are like bubbles within bubbles, magical and multilayered. Simple, mundane lives of her characters ooze emotive richness, often against the background of Biblical contexts, which Gebbie truly brings down to earth and explores in their everyday implications for human lives.

I read it at one sitting, so it was quite a page turner, but then the second, slower reading was a far more enriching experience. There is a lot of mass below the tip of this iceberg of a book.

Buy here. Visit her quirky site.