Other Lives by Iman Humaydan (review)

“When will you be back home?” (p. 1). The opening line of Iman Humaydan’s Other Lives sets the stage for this intimate novel of diasporic longing. Miriyam, an exiled Lebanese Druze, returns to Beirut fifteen years after her family’s departure during the civil war, seeking some kind of resolution to a war that broke up her family and destroyed any sense of permanence. Her political uncle is exiled by the deadly nationalist struggle, her father is driven to madness, her mother is driven into silence. These losses, she finds, have produced in her a longing that is “not for a specific place . . . [but] for what’s inside myself that I’m losing everyday” (p. 1).

In anticipation of return, Miriyam reflects on her own series of exiles—in Melbourne, Nairobi, Mombasa, and Cape Town—with a surreal sense of detachment and a deepening awareness that what is lost is, for the most part, irretrievable. Miriyam’s narrative is a shattering lament against her mother’s restrictive silence and the collective silences surrounding the unresolved horrors of Lebanon’s war. It is a quest for human connectedness with “other lives,” including her own multiple lives in diaspora, marked by a proliferating number of suitcases that stand in for home.

Humaydan’s intricately woven narrative highlights the tensions between the individual, interior story and the collective, public history marked by the violences of war, imprisonment, and exile that shape individual destinies. Miriyam comments on the erasure of the individual story within her own family, “unless the beginning of her or his life can be associated with an important date in history” (p. 4). This may allude to a broader tendency within the Arab literary tradition, where women’s voices are often marginalized. In contrast, Other Lives takes us inside Miriyam’s head, into those liminal spaces of her “suspended life” (p. 13). The nonlinear, spiraling narrative of the novel is structured like the “circular memories” that are described as “a peculiarity of women” (p. 13). For Miriyam, these memories are also embodied, linked both to the pleasure of sexual desire and to pain “as a condition of existence for certain bodies” (p. 93). The constant state of diasporic longing is somatized in her mother’s silenced body, in Miriyam’s own body wracked with migraine headaches, and in her friend Olga’s cancerous body, which is one of the reasons Miriyam is drawn back to Lebanon and back to her family home.

Other Lives is transnational and expansive, traversing those less explored sites of Lebanese diaspora—not Europe and America—but Australia and Kenya, by way of the Dubai airport through which all transnational migrants pass: Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans, Europeans, and Americans. In Australia, Miriyam’s traumatized family settles into a suburb dubbed “Paradise,” as she probes emigration as not only the quest for that idealized garden of belonging and salvation but also a dream deferred, where questions of identity and assimilation are suffused in a process of memory and forgetting (p. 5). In Kenya, we get a brief glimpse of the Arab exploitation of Africans, and foreigners’ interests not in the inhabitants but in expanding their business markets (p. 41). Here, Miriyam fills her head with news, novels, and poetry from Lebanon and listens incessantly to Asmahan, as she seeks to escape her passionless marriage. In the Dubai airport, in transit to Beirut, she encounters Nour, an American journalist searching for his Lebanese/Palestinian roots. Although she finds him attractive, he seems driven by a longing that is fanciful, fabricated, and distant, “as though his memories have no pain attached to them” (p. 18).

The title Other Lives refers not only to Miriyam’s many lives in her transitory state but also to her central dilemma of whether “to connect or not to connect” with others (p. 16). Miriyam attempts to connect to her mother’s silence, but strives not to emulate her mother’s detachment from her own desires (p. 26...