The Singularity

The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) tells the story of two women who lose a child. In one case the child is an adult, in the other an unborn baby, but grief unites them, as does the fact that both are refugees. There, however, their paths differ as one arrived in a European country as a child (not unlike the author, a Kurdish refugee who came to Sweden when she was seven) and is now a woman expecting her own child, whereas the other is living in an alley with her mother and children, leaving each day to hunt for the ‘Missing One’, a daughter who has disappeared. They coincide in one moment, a moment which opens the novel as a prologue as the pregnant woman watches the other throw herself from the clifftop road in despair:

“When the woman lets go and slams against the rocks once then twice, it is neither quiet nor more solemn than usual – this at least you remember and this you tell the people who later wonder why you’re always circling back to the woman and the corniche.”

It is not accidental that the pregnant woman is ‘you’ placing the reader in the position of observer, though we shall later discover she has more in common with the dead mother than at first appears. She initially links herself to the mother of the missing girl by taking the bag that she leaves behind, filled with flyers and a stump of soap the missing girl used.

The novel then returns to the days before, as the mother searches for her missing daughter who worked in a restaurant on the corniche:

“She has aged, it shows – in her emaciated body nothing is held high anymore and under the headscarf her hair is ever sparser and whiter…”

Yet, this section is more than the pain of the mother; it is filled, too, with the thoughts of the grandmother and the children. It is their memories of the missing girl that bring her to life. Her brothers and sisters remember swimming in the sea with her after selling washcloths in the market; her grandmother remembers, “you couldn’t even sit still as a child.” This section, titled ‘The Missing One’, takes up around half the novel, and would be a powerful and affecting novella in its own right, but we then continue with the story of the pregnant woman before the narrative does something extraordinary.  In a few pages we learn that the baby, as yet unborn, has died; time freezes for the woman:

“For years you wander along the windowless corridor, it’s like a canal lock between the reception and the maternity ward…”

As we soon discover, however, this section is titled ‘The Singularity’ for a reason, as the two narratives impact on one another:

“…finally you ask if something is the matter / it happened that night on the corniche / I’m going to get the doctor, she says, I’ll be right back, and then walks out into the brightness of the corridor / when you catch sight of the woman she has already climbed out onto the cliffs, is leaning forward…”

The singularity is not simply the coincidence of the two women meeting in the minutes before the mother’s death; as this section progresses the story of the pregnant woman’s childhood interlinks with the time before she gives up her dead baby.  Here we also see the refugee experience and it is heavily implied that the fate of the missing daughter could well have been her fate. Not only do both stories humanise refugees, but they highlight the luck involved in survival and success.

It is also suggested throughout the novel that the loss of a child is only part of a wider loss felt by those who have to leave their homeland. At one point the woman on the corniche thinks to herself:

“If the loss without end is present – and it is, she can feel it like she can feel her fingertips on her eyelids and the dust that sometimes sweeps along the street and disappears – it has been inside her as far back as she can remember.”

When the pregnant woman goes to a counsellor, the first thing she says is, “I come from a tradition of loss.” This loss is made concrete in her child, but also in her childhood friend, Roza, who is left behind. The final section of the novel, made up of short chapters of less than a page, is titled ‘The Losses.’

There are now many novels recounting the refugee experience, the majority of them written by refugees, which tend, unsurprisingly, to be largely autobiographical, but The Singularity uses a structure which could be seen as artificial to produce an account which is not only moving but feels truer.