Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree, translated from Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman and published by the premier high-brow lit-in-translation outlet Archipelago Books, is majestic. I made a post about it on my instagram story, and my friend Elina Alter, who edits Circumference, a premier high-brow lit-in-translation magazine, asked me how it was. I said: “It’s like, comically intense, ghost story vibe, and Arabian nights vibe with some weaved in parable that also read like the Iliad a bit… it’s very serious.” I think that’s as good a way I can briefly summarize my take into a bite-size. But I’m not here to give a bite-sized reaction. Maybe two or three bites, a little snack if you will. This is a micro-review blog, not a “one sentence review” blog.
Our hero, our protagonist, is a guy named Muzafar-i-Subdham, who was part of the Kurdish resistance (a peshmerga fighter) against Saddam Hussein. (If you want to know more about the political context about the book / a more political reading of the book, I’d encourage you to check out John Domini’s piece in the Brooklyn Rail). Homie’s been in a prison in the desert for 21 years, and he’s gone full “zen-mode” to make the time pass. “They wouldn’t let me think; they wiped out any glimmer of hope in my tears. I killed all the things that had filled my tears with memories. If you are imprisoned in the sand, you can’t miss anything. Do you understand? You can’t. The sand won’t let you.”
He was imprisoned because he decided to distract enemy forces so that his commander, Yaqub, could escape. After he is released from prison, Yaqub puts him up in a beautiful, secluded mansion (partly as a reward, partly to protect him from the cruel outside), that he constructed as an escape (both spiritually and physically) from the world, on his “architect in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction making an indestructible cone-shaped house in the woods s**t.” He wants Muzafar to teach him the “whirling dervish, stoic mindset” that Muzafar cultivated in prison, which annoys the hell out of Muzafar, who wants to dip and try to find his son Saryas-i-Subdham. He’s dead though, or is he? Muzafar is certainly dead to Saryas as well, whether he is dead or alive. Or as Muzafar likes to quip, he is dead too, not of this world after those 21 years. An FBI Witness Protection Program of the soul.
The book alternates its chapters between his search for his son and this Arabian Nights campfire story style thing. A glass-hearted boy falls in love with a sister who can’t return the love because she and her sister made a pact that they wouldn’t get married, on some truly “unhinged but respectable” s**t. The Arabian Nights (narrated by Muzafar?) style story eventually merges with the main narrative to form a backdrop for Muzafar’s search introduces Saryas, who runs the merchant cart district and is generally a well-liked guy (the professor of the carts). The sisters end up playing a really important role in Saryas’ life and in Muzafar’s search.
I hope that this premise underscores the point that this book rules. A lot of contemporary American fiction is, like, stuck in this stupid debate / false dichotomy between “auto-fiction” and “social realism” and it was really nice to read Ali who just comes in like a graceful bull in a china shop, telling a heart-breaking, gut-wrenching story that also low-key spits some fire political critiques on Saddam’s regime, teaching us American readers a little bit of history while making us cry and ultimately feel inspired, that this guy who has had everything taken away from him has something to believe in even when the thing he believes in definitely does not exist anymore.