Tash AwWe, the Survivors

Abstract

of focus.” Using repetitious phrasing, these fragmented chapters build in intensity. Moreover , they reveal how Stoberock plays with perspective. Pigs explores themes of distance, sight, and blindness to address the myriad viewpoints toward our world’s excessive consumption and the personal responsibility individuals bear for the often-unwitnessed effects of our subsequent waste: “It was official policy never to look back. It was official policy to believe the world stopped once it could no longer be seen.” Pigs manages to offer a varied reading experience, at times incredibly moving, disheartening , disturbing, violent, and playful. Inthefaceofoverwhelmingtrash,pigsdance. The garbage—which consists of everything from old toasters and the First Amendment to a grandmother who mistakenly cooked lasagna for her son’s gluten-free family—will never disappear. The pigs might. Stoberock forces us to consider whether or not solving the overwhelming consequences of our mass consumerism is possible. Pigs seems to suggest that the only possibility is one of fantasy. Kayla Ciardi University of Oklahoma Tash Aw We, the Survivors New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 336 pages. The narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, We, the Survivors, is an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian man called Lee Hock Lye— known to his friends as Ah Hock—who is recounting the story to a journalist of how he was involved in a random gangster crime, which resulted in his imprisonment for three years. The journalist Tan Su-min is a left-leaning Chinese Malay who travels from New York to conduct the interview for her doctoral dissertation in sociology. Ah Hock is the prototypical “survivor” in an unjust world. From childhood, he is brought up by his mother alone. Due to their alien identity, mother and son are forced to shuttle back and forth in various communities, from the provinces to the capital city. However, for undereducated migrants, “failure was a far greater possibility [than] success.” One day his mother collapses on the street in Kuala Selangor, making it easy for Ah Hock to leave forever. Ah Hock works in a construction plant andissoonpromotedtomanager.Ascholera era poet as an allegory for the silenced history of Palestine—a tribute to the victims who went to their deaths in silence. When Dannoun gives up on this novel, it is because he is determined to emerge from silence and to write his own story: the story of the Lydda Ghetto, the small Palestinian enclave that was fenced off after the majority of Lydda’s residents were massacred or driven to exile in 1948, and the story of his effaced identity as an Israeli Palestinian. The found-notebooks conceit is often frustrating, making us witness a masterly writer like Khoury meticulously undoing his skill. These notes for a novel mostly contain the things that novelists leave out—the minutely modified repetitions in search of the right emphasis, the writer’s descriptions of what he is and is not trying to do—and Davies’s translation faithfully delivers the clunkiness of the original, conveying Dannoun ’s reluctances. These are the scaffolds of a novel, which should fall away when the finished structure is standing. For Khoury, however, these scaffolds are the story itself. The text takes the reader through the arduous process of emergence from a natural state of silence into narration and narrative. This is not (only) a narrative of Palestine but an exploration of the inability and unwillingness to speak, of the social, political, and psychological conditions that have so often made the story of the Nakba impossible. Regarding his own writing, Dannoun is incessantly conflicted: on one hand, he recognizes how literature can tell the stories that are left out of the officially sanctioned archives and that their abstractions capture a different kind of truth. On the other, he hates how stories force chaotic events into forms, stripping away singularity. Literature makes everything exactly what it is as well as a symbol of something else. This emerges most painfully in the entanglements of the modern Jewish and Palestinian narratives , not only historically but also in recurring figures and tropes. The Lydda Ghetto, after all, was so nicknamed by the Israeli soldiers, who came from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. And the story...