In the Belly of the Queen E-Book

Karosh Taha

• Herausgeber: V&Q Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Amal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal – and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds unexpected refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq's gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father. Raffiq's friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood – thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq's girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq's world begins to break apart. He attempts to sabotage their plans. The question is: what does Raffiq actually want to do with his life? In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives.

Leseprobe

Karosh Taha, born in 1987 in Zaxo, Iraq, has lived in Germany since 1997. Her essays have appeared in various literary magazines. In the Belly of the Queen is her second novel and won her the Alfred Döblin Prize. Karosh Taha lives in Cologne.

Grashina Gabelmann is editor-in-chief and a founding member of Flaneur Magazine, a site-specific, interdisciplinary and award-winning publication focusing on one street per issue. She writes psychogeographic prose and works as a translator.

In the Belly of the Queen

By Karosh Taha

Translated from German by Grashina Gabelmann

The translator’s work on this book was supported by the German Translator Fund as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR programme, financed by the German Government Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

V&Q Books, Berlin 2023

An imprint of Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH

Original German title: Im Bauch der Königin

© 2020 DuMont Buchverlag, Köln

Translation © Grashina Gabelmann

Editing: Katy Derbyshire

Copy editing: Angela Hirons

Cover photo: Shadèn Al-Alas

Cover design: pingundpong

Typesetting: Fred Uhde

Printing and binding: PBtisk, Příbram, Czech Republic

ISBN: 978-3-86391-364-9eISBN: 978-3-86391-365-6

www.vq-books.eu

Inhalt

Über den Autor

IN THE BELLY OF THE QUEEN

A MISSING WORD’S NOT A MISSING WOMAN

FROM ALL DIRECTIONS

BODY OF THE BOOK

THE ABSENCE IN LANGUAGE

TELL THE STORY AS IF I’M NOT THERE, SAID SHAHIRA.

SHAHIRA

Translator’s Note

IN THE BELLY OF THE QUEEN

Read this essay after reading both parts

A MISSING WORD’S NOT A MISSING WOMAN

FROM ALL DIRECTIONS

Looking at the painting La robe de l’aventure by René Magritte I realise: the painting is readable from all directions. Its symbols undergo fundamental or minor changes in how they can be interpreted: depending on the direction, the woman is falling or flying in the sky, in the water, to the horizon, through the desert. Underneath her, next to her or on top of her is a turtle or an aerial bomb or a cliff. The constellations, their relationships and meanings change as I rotate the image. If I eliminate the reading direction, I allow all interpretations simultaneously. The woman falling or rising into the sky is not the same woman falling into the water and yet it is the same woman; she dies in both cases – the chronology has become meaningless, what is important is the direction of the fall. I realise: a story can be written and read from all directions or from no direction at all. A story’s chronology doesn’t synchronise with the writing of the story; some authors say they wrote the last page of a novel first. Imagine readers were to read the ending first, then continue reading, change the direction of reading. I’m sure that a text, like a painting, can be read in many directions and that the symbolism changes with every direction – if, as a writer, I freed myself from the corset of chronologically told stories, from the compulsion of order, and instead considered any other order as also being meaningful, I’d write differently and think differently, read differently, understand differently.

BODY OF THE BOOK

Picking up a book, looking at it, reading its back cover, its blurbs, and opening it are the unconscious, conditioned actions of readers – automatisms. A book has a beginning and an end – not just on a conceptional level, also on a textual level and regarding its content. The automatic interaction with the book’s physical form continues with the expectation of a narrated text, if not in terms of chronology, then at least in terms of a logical sequence, an inner order.

The challenge is to mutate the readers’ approach, to question habits, even when it comes to something as simple as opening the book. On opening a book – with the clear allocation of the front and back cover – the decision has been made for us readers about what is the beginning and what is the end, and we accept that there must be a beginning and an end. A mutation of the classic book format can break open this unconscious, conditioned acceptance. In the Belly of the Queen is an attempt to challenge these automatisms; literature should break with traditions. Tradition: the translation of past situations into the future. Breaking with: the refusal of this translation, the avoidance of repetition. Education works with repetition; manipulation and hypnosis work with repetition. Torture works with repetition of repetition of repetition. Literature, on the other hand, has to break with repetition.

Suspicion of anything material, sensual and thus also the Christian suspicion of the carnal continues in the suspicion of the body of the book: the rotation is not trusted, the turning is not accepted as a new beginning, as if this act were only an effect, a gimmick, and not the questioning of the format of books, and with that, the idea of storytelling. I want to say: every story can be told in any other way, can be read in any other way.

THE ABSENCE IN LANGUAGE

A missing word is the suppression of a reality – language and the belief in language’s ability to express everything serve to negate a reality. I became aware that language doesn’t have borders, but rather language is used as a border, through the character of Shahira; not through writing the character, not through thinking about the book, but through reading the final manuscript. How could I speak about this character without degrading her? The language available to me devalues my character and her lifestyle: femme fatale, vamp, man-eater – the German terms are harsher: Dorfmatratze, Wanderpokal, Sexbombe. There are more positive or neutral terms describing a man’s right to countless sexual partners without being ostracised: player, womaniser, Casanova, Romeo, Don Juan. When, at the end of the story, Don Juan descends into hell’s abyss for breaking with convention, his handed-down reputation as a lover remains intact, revealing that damnation is just a variation of the hero’s journey. Female characters have to pay for a single affair with their life, their image as a home wrecker and anti-hero serving as a warning: Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne. There is no tradition Shahira could turn to for support; she might be related to the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the language of Anaïs Nin. But no terms exist for women like Shahira – which doesn’t mean women like Shahira don’t exist. A missing word’s not a missing woman. A woman absent in language is negated by language or is only allowed to exist through the use of specific (supposedly positive but in essence sexist) adjectives, for example ‘openhearted’ or ‘liberal’. There are many words without reality, but there’s more reality without words.

TELL THE STORY AS IF I’M NOT THERE, SAID SHAHIRA.

It would be a great injustice if there were only one truth, says Amal’s father; he could have also said: it would be unjust if only one story got told. He could have said: it would be unjust to tell a story in only one language. In the novel, the engagement with language takes place not just through obvious references (Shahrazad, the gifting of stories, father reading stories) but also through the town square acting as a stage, the neighbours on their balconies as the audience. The listing of objects and shops in the neighbourhood shouldn’t just be read as the neighbourhood’s limitation, but also as a description of props; that’s why Amal repeats the list. This theatrical device establishes Amal on the one hand as a character in the play – since she is being watched – but also as a director who, through her description, decides what readers are allowed to see. The narrator Raffiq also has a dual role. (see below: SHAHIRA)

Amal’s mother doesn’t communicate with her daughter using words but uses gestures: the taming of hair, the veiling of the body, the washing of sore fingers with rose water, the ring as a sham, the family album as a chronicle, the mixing of spices as the deciphering of a code, and of course her relationship to the Qur’an, a book that is not a book but a recitation. The description of her prayer is a description of a mime, a body language communicating with God.

The swapping of symbols, like the ring with the headscarf, underlines that we are constantly telling stories about ourselves without being explicit. The ring loses its meaning, the proof of a husband’s existence, and is replaced by a headscarf. God takes the husband’s place – the headscarf becomes a linguistic device for the body; the headscarf is not an article of clothing but, like the ring, a sign, an answer to a question before it is posed, before an encroachment can take place. When women’s spoken words are ignored, some women experiment with a reversion to socially accepted symbols like wedding rings – in this case a headscarf – to fight off harassment.

There is an ambiguity in narration. Christianity, for example, has the tradition of confession: those who speak, those who confess, speak the truth – those who keep quiet arouse suspicion; telling stories is associated with a position of power, as those who possess time, space and language can tell stories. Silence, on the other hand, is associated with powerlessness. The storyteller Shahrazad of One Thousand and One Nights merges this ambiguity within herself; she’s forced to tell stories, which is why Amal is scared she will run out of material one day. Telling stories makes us vulnerable; the telling of stories has consequences for Amal (which do not exist for Raffiq) because of her gender. When she speaks of having beaten up the new boy, she is punished – the punishment is not just for beating him up, but for telling stories about it, for her role as a girl. In the end she decides to keep quiet for emancipatory reasons. Yet, at the same time, she knows storytelling also means existing, or else she wouldn’t tell her story. What reasons are there for telling stories, for writing? By writing we can hide, hide in a text, hide from pain and shame, and flee from fear. Or as Max Frisch put it:

We, in our language say, to paint the devil on the wall. So as to know him and to ban him.

I can turn into Cassandra without having been cursed, when I speak in someone else’s voice. When I say ‘I’ and don’t mean myself. When I speak, I enshroud the worst of it in fiction, insert it into the belly of a book, just as Younes was protected from the wrath of God in the belly of the whale; the belly was not just punishment. A metaphor can offer protection. But storytelling also means imagining other people’s reality without attempting a simulation; it means questioning our reality, our language. What are characters if not the things we expel from ourselves? The author Deniz Utlu writes to me: ‘There’s no extinction, just an attempt at freedom. Maybe that’s what our characters attempt to do for us. Maybe Shahira’s thought fits into that context: telling stories to forgive oneself.’

The video installation The Cloth/Kras û fistan by the artist Havin Al-Sindy clarifies something fundamental, something I sometimes forget: art isn’t the simulation of reality, is not an imitation. If we were to attempt this, one would only expose one’s own limited view of reality. It’d be wrong to believe artworks are imitations of reality, a profane representation and thus mimicking reality. Kras û fistan, showing a group of dancing women, isn’t, as we might think, the simulation of a wedding; the performance is a mimesis, a story, an interpretation; the work points beyond itself to something else. The fiction of representation is clearly recognisable.

SHAHIRA

According to Giovanni Macchia, Don Juan only exists in the theatre; likewise, Shahira can only exist in the neighbourhood she uses as a stage.

Younes was fourteen and at the market the last time he was seen with his mother in public. She ambled from one stall to the next, and Younes followed her, always staying one step behind his mother, who knew all the sellers by name. […] The confidence which Shahira radiated as she strolled around the market, set up just for her, fed the other women’s anger. They greeted each other, but not Shahira, and even turned away when she approached. The women were props for Shahira, there to make the market more lively.

Raffiq was not in that scene, he is talking about it: Younes was seen. The scene, the way Raffiq describes it, can’t have happened this way, certainly didn’t happen this way. In his narration of Shahira, he always speaks about her as others might have reacted to her. Raffiq acts as a choir meditating between characters and the audience.

Shahira is the pivotal character in both stories, a sun around which the story revolves. Now, while writing this essay, I realise: this character needed this rotating book, this physicality, because she too emphasises physicality; to rotate and turn a body is an act of eroticism which readers share with the character through the book’s format.

Shahira is also fascinating for Amal and Raffiq because she, in contrast to the other adults, represents an archetype. Raffiq refuses to become a copy of his father by not following him to Kurdistan. Only after interpreting the role of the father is he able to understand himself; by seeing how his father is seen, he looks into the future as into a mirror. A society that ensures its social survival only through imitation is not an option for Raffiq and Amal to create their own archetype: Shahira is the promise that this is possible. She does not imitate anyone, not even the idea of what a woman is; ‘she is herself’ as Amal puts it. The parents expect their kids to become copies of themselves, just like they became copies of their parents. Shahira, on the other hand, does not mark the break; she is the break.

In the reality of the novel, Shahira might be one of the ostracised members of society, but in the literary construction of this book she is the queen – not in the sense of a mighty aristocrat or as an empowered gesture, but as a literary omnipresence, as a space, as a narrator who does not speak to the readers, but structures the novel through her presence, like the character of the tower block in my first novel Beschreibung einer Krabbenwanderung. What are literary characters called who determine the structure of a novel? For example, the execution device in Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, the architecture in the film The Platform. Can their omnipresence be summarised with a figurative term? What do you call the invention of stylistic devices? Neofiguration? The character of Shahira navigates this unnamed reality. She does not speak, because she is not a literary character, but a rhetorical device. Amal understands this when she says:

She’s alone, she’s with herself, she’s for herself, she’s herself, she’s not Shahira Shafiq, the daughter of Anisa and Ramazan, she’s not a woman, she’s not a person, she’s much more and she’s nothing […]

Shahira is the matrix; the language of mathematics can perhaps better describe literature than phrases from literary theory. Through language I need to find another language; I send my language off to find another language, in search of a language replacing mine, extinguishing mine.