Is literature ever diplomatic? Can it ever claim to be “balanced”? Should that so-called virtue even be an aspiration? The function of a novel is a contested question that never tires, most of all because a singular answer is impossible. But perhaps the one thing that’s not up for discussion is this limit: you can not tell a story from all perspectives. No matter how hard you try, you’ll miss something. You’re better off when you don’t attempt this futility that is centrism in a novel. Animal Farm would have looked different if it had sought to present a balanced view of Soviet communism. All the great memoirs in the world would have faltered under such constraints. Even holy books understand the power of a singular narrative, which is why they have been listened to and even obeyed by so many.
Exile as consequence
The holy book referenced throughout the novel Do Not Ask the River Her Name is The Bible, specifically the Old Testament, in which exile takes up a lot of room. Exile often appears as a consequence of disobedience – a test of faith that ricochets through periods of reflection, repentance, and restoration. In this novel by Sheela Tomy, translated by Ministhy S, exile is a consequence, but not of the person’s doing. What is the exile the consequence of? Answering that much-contested inquiry in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict would disrupt the precarious balance the novel attempts to commit to.
Through the close third-person points of view of Jewish Israeli Asher, Christian Malayali Ruth, and Palestinian Muslim Sahel, this novel follows Asher’s search for his missing friend Sahel, Ruth’s struggle for survival in Dubai’s underbelly, and Sahel’s dangerous attempt to escape across the border. Through these multiple perspectives, the novel insists that no one is bad and that people are the way they are because of what happened to them, which is not only an apparent character arc, but also a tell-all of moral ambiguity.
In Do Not Ask the River Her Name, Ruth works as a nurse and a caregiver at the Maneham household, where she takes care of Asher’s father David, who hails from a Jewish Iraqi family. David, a retired professor from the Hebrew University, was always an outsider. Even though he was a Jew, he was also an Arab, and his family’s exodus from Baghdad made him a foreigner too close to the “other” in his adopted home Haifa. His isolation plunged him into the history of Israel and Palestine and the anti-Arab sentiment that looped around his life. His wife, “Eema” as the book acknowledges her, which is the Hebrew word for “mother”, is his antithesis. “For the unfortunate woman who lost her mother due to the Hamas attack on Tel Aviv, there was no tally of missiles or stones in consideration. There was only truth,” says the novel from Eema’s perspective. It adds: “…the truth called Israel.” Eema hates the Palestinians, and in her eyes, “the Jews alone were the chosen people.” According to her, “[all] the heathens who lived in Israel since ages should leave the land.”
This is the naivety of the novel, where it implicitly critiques the extremes of both Zionism and Palestinian militancy, endeavouring to show how entrenched ideologies and violence eternalise ferity. But it fails because this moderation is unconvincing. Its manifestation in the novel – the marriage between David and Eema – is dubious. The narrative rushes through how their relationship began. Given David and Eema’s juxtaposing ideas, it’s hard to imagine a plausible scenario for their courtship.
While studying Arabic literature and psychology at the University of Haifa, David Menahem met a girl. In the words of Solomon, ‘a rose of Sharon’. ‘Beautiful as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners’… Esther, born in an Ashkenazi family. She awakened David’s love.
David could have been anyone; even greater than Solomon himself. But he was a mere Iraqi in the eyes of Esther’s family. Though ‘His eyes were like doves beside springs of water’, and ‘His posture was stately, like the noble cedars of Lebanon’, the youth was just an Arab. How could those, swelling with pride at their Ashkenazi lineage, send off their precious daughter with such a man? Impossible! For David, Esther fought a battle which was more formidable than the Six-Day War. She emerged from ‘the lion’s dens, the mountains of the leopards’ … ‘to see if the vines had budded, and their blossoms had opened’ in David’s vineyard. To see, ‘if the pomegranates have blossomed…’
Strained by its own ambition
Should a novel even hinge resolution on the possibility of coexistence? While Tomy has done extensive and commendable research – talking about Gaza, while being away from Gaza – the novel’s insistence on a multi-perspective narrative makes it limp. Tomy explores the human cost of the conflict, the emotional and psychological impact on individuals, but this exploration is taut with a moral permissibility that ultimately straitjackets any critique, particularly of characters like Eema (“[Soldiers] are helpless too. Obeying orders is part of their job.”). This emphasis on the traumatic backstories of many, particularly those spewing vitriol, is a penchant of the novel that doesn’t let you breathe, bombarding the reader with multiple plot lines that jump away before you even grasp them. Add to this the fact that Tomy is a writer who cannot keep a secret, unwilling to resist the temptation of exercising the “little did [insert character name] know,” trick, assuring the reader that more is coming.
And a lot kept coming the reader’s way. There’s no moment of respite for the characters, nor for the reader. Peacetime, in both this novel and in Israel, is a misnomer. Ruth’s perspective opens with her life in Israel, but then abruptly shifts to her experience of being nearly trafficked through flashbacks. These flashbacks, where Tomy pushes the reader down the tunnel of fake promises made to poor women about a life abroad, are fragmented and interspersed with Ruth’s present-day life in Nazareth. You’re disoriented, trying to keep up with the story before you’re tumbling into Sahel’s memoirs, Ruth’s vlog (“Nazareth”), the “Warrior of Light” Facebook Page – an online platform depicting the violence faced by Palestinians – to offer more perspective, more clarity, insisting on temperance. There’s no room for the reader to make up their mind.
The repeated appearances of Mariam of Bethany, an apparition Ruth seeks without realising, made a book that’s only 300 pages long exhaustive. For Tomy, Bethany is “a conjoining factor of the story, who connects two epochs, without the differentiation of ancient and modern.” To me, she embodies the Malayali writer’s obsession with magical realism, a tick they’re unwilling to let go.
Do Not Ask the River Her Name is an ambitious novel in which Tomy ushers in a mammoth amount of research material, planting the reader in the perilous nooks of the Middle East where exile and exodus are part of the daily vocabulary, the bread and butter of its inhabitants. But perhaps it’s ambition that strays it away, making it a congested narrative that does too much and tries too much to find footing in a situation that was never just to begin with, as the novel itself admits. Diplomacy in writing comes too close to a total abandonment of radicality. Literature thrives in its extremism, in its absolute disavowal for diplomacy. How else does a reader change their mind?
Do Not Ask the River Her Name, Sheela Tomy, translated from the Malayalam by Ministhy S, HarperCollins India.
