In her sweeping and bold novel Beyond Babylon, Igiaba Scego explores the legacy of political and sexual violence on the lives of contemporary women. Scego’s narrative is centered on the family histories of two single mothers who separately immigrated to Rome in the 1970s: Miranda, who fled Buenos Aires in the midst of Argentina’s Dirty War and then became pregnant with daughter Mar not long after arriving in Rome; and Maryam who with husband Elias and their infant girl Zuhra escaped political persecution in Somalia. (Scego was born in Rome in 1974 to a Somali family.) Drawing on the parallel lives of these disparate women — one a white Argentinian and the other a black Somalian — Scego’s book bears witness to the impossibility of remaining exiled from your own past.
The novel opens in Rome in the summer of 2006 days before Miranda and Mar set-off for Tunis to study Arabic. Zuhra is enrolled in the same language program, and it is in Tunis that the three women first meet. Readers will soon discover something that the women do not: Mar and Zuhra share the same biological father, Elias. Neither girl knows anything about her father, as Elias abandoned first Maryam and later Miranda before his daughters were old enough to form any memory of him, and both mothers have always been steadfast in their refusal to talk about the past. The mothers’ silence reigns over not only questions about Elias but also the circumstances from which they fled their respective homelands — the torture, rapes, and executions of family and friends.
Meanwhile the daughters, Mar and Zuhra, have experienced their own personal traumas: Mar is still reeling from the recent suicide of her lover, Pati, and Zuhra is in therapy, struggling to cope with the horror of being repeatedly raped by her school’s janitor from the time she was in fifth grade. But the young women feel incapable of talking about these awful experiences with their mothers, having learned all too well from their example that painful things cannot be discussed. However recent events — for Maryam the death of a family friend, and for Miranda, Pati’s suicide — have triggered long-repressed memories and the urge for each to finally share her story with her daughter. The four women must make the dark journey into their pain in order to reach a place “beyond Babylon” where they can find the language to communicate their suffering and move forward with their lives.
The novel’s language is sensuous and playful, and Scego’s lush descriptions create imagery that gives a supple richness to her characters’ memories.
Mom speaks to me in our mother tongue, a noble Somali whose every vowel makes sense. Our mother language. Frothy, blunt, intrepid. In Mom’s mouth, Somali becomes honey… I try all the same with her to speak the language that unites us. In Somali, I found the comfort of her womb. In Somali, I heard the only lullabies she sang to me. I dreamed my first dreams in Somali. But then, all the time, in every conversation, word, breath, the other mother peeks through. The one that breastfed Dante, Boccaccio, De André, and Alda Merini. The Italian that I grew up with and which, at times, I hated because it made me feel like an outsider. The vinegary Italian of neighborhood markets, the sweet Italian of radio broadcasters, the serious Italian of university lectures. The Italian that I write.
Embracing self-identity is a predominant theme of the novel, and how a character perceives color — be it skin color, bright clothing, or even the hue of a person’s aura — symbolizes her individual journey toward self-acceptance. For example, as Mar looks back on her troubled romance, we learn that what attracted her to Pati was the woman’s alabaster complexion. Pati’s skin was like her mother Miranda’s, the complexion that Mar always wished that she had rather than the “too black” skin that she inherited from her African father. And then there is Elias’ father Majid, the victim of a gang rape by European soldiers near his home in Somalia who, as a consequence, remained emasculated and emotionally paralyzed throughout Elias’ childhood. It is only after Majid dresses himself in the brilliantly colored African gowns that his son sends home from his travels that Majid finally becomes emotionally whole, unshackled from the crippling humiliation that consumed his adult life. Finally, there is Zuhra’s relationship to the color red. Throughout most of the novel, Zuhra is unable to see red, even when it comes to her own menstrual blood, which appears to her only as “a speck of gray.” Later in the book’s final pages Zuhra considers a stain on her underwear that she believes resembles a red star, surmising that this red star contains “… her woman’s story. And within her story, the story of others before her and others after,” a recognition that she has grown to embrace her womanhood and the generations of the women who came before her.
Scego is refreshingly unabashed in discussing the corporeal — what the female body does naturally — birth, menstruation, breastfeeding; and, what is done to and in violation of it — female circumcision, rape, coerced abortion. In this way she punctuates how a woman’s agency over her body is fundamental to her self-identity. While Zuhra disassociates from womanhood due to the abasement of being raped, Elias’ adopted mother, Bushra, embraces her womanhood, agreeing to breastfeed Elias and marry Majid after Elias’ mother dies in childbirth. Bushra is empowered by the fact that she avoided her village’s practice of female circumcision. She is feared by most in her village and rumored to be a witch, possessed of special powers of seduction because she still has “meat” between her legs. Bushra does little to discourage the superstitions about her powers. She uses her status as the village’s witchy woman to instill fear in those who would harm her or her family.
The voices of generations of women laminate Beyond Babylon – women who, though subjugated and psychologically damaged, are survivors. Their experiences are Mar’s and Zuhra’s inheritances, the variegated clay with which each young woman can mold a self-identity, fortified with the legacy of her resilient female forebears. In portraying the inner lives of refugee women and their first-generation, immigrant daughters, Scego has created a work of great empathy that is a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.
[Published on May 14, 2019 by Two Lines Press, 464 pages, $22.95 paperback]