The Teeth of the Comb by Osama Alomar (review)

In his collection of "very short" stories, Osama Alomar, a Syrian writer living in exile in the United States, provides us a world with repeating images whose often humorous senselessness are easy for us to accept because of their absurdity. We encounter gossipy flowers; bags that contain everything beautiful, everything ugly, or the entirety of homelessness; feet that talk to hands that also talk; and rebellious garden hoses.

With war, loss, and exile on his mind, Alomar humanizes political struggle by removing the human and humanizing objects—lending them or sparing them our most disgusting features. In "When the Sparrow Was Imprisoned," for example, a cage feels an immense joy at finally having found purpose in his life—at having, finally, a little sparrow to imprison. When the human is removed, it's easier for us to see that we are both the sparrow imprisoned and the cage happy to imprison it. Our happiness is also our cruelty.

But if Alomar uses the nonhuman to describe the cruelty of our lives, he also uses it to show our ignorance toward the consequences of our actions. In "Why Do They Hit Us One Against Another," Alomar describes an audience applauding bowing performers. One hand asks the other: "Why do they violently hit us against each other?" Disgusted at the scene where the performers bow before the gruesome spectacle, the other hand answers, "They respect violence!" Alomar understands that there is violence in even the simplest acts of appreciation and kindness. But he understands also that it is just clapping. Is it really so violent? Perhaps the violence and cruelty that we despair over being so senseless isn't really that senseless. Maybe the problem is perspective. Maybe there is a reason for it all. Maybe there is a reason we are being violently hit against each other in the senseless wars that people seem to respect. Maybe we just need to look harder.

It's important to consider this collection of short stories as a book rather than a convenient gathering of stories. Despite having parabolic qualities, the surety in individual stories quickly unravels in proximity to the rest, which are part of the same distinct world. Those same hands in "Why Do They Hit Us One Against Another" appear in "The Smells," where they are envied by feet whose "strong smells … [permeate] the room." The feet are ashamed of their odor and ask the hands why they don't also smell, to which they reply: "Because we are always open to others and absolutely refuse to be closed in on ourselves." These judgmental, arrogantly superior hands are the same ones that suffer the senseless violence of applause. Alomar asks us to defy easy appeals to hypocrisy and challenges us to accept that all suffering exists regardless of the moral purity of those who suffer.

In The Teeth of the Comb, Alomar is searching. It's a theme that is common to a majority of the stories in this book. To him, writing itself is searching. In "Love Letter," a story that appears near the beginning of the collection, Alomar outlines this idea. The story stands out as a moment he moves away from phantasmagoria and towards an earnest expression of longing. Addressed to Minerva, Alomar details a fairly typical courtship—meeting a bookish woman at a performance of Waiting for Godot, falling in love, facing disapproving parents, overcoming them. Eventually the narrator decides to emigrate to escape war, but the woman stays. They stay in touch via email and text, but after an inspiring revolution sours into an unforgiving civil war, he stops hearing from her. It seems that this is the most painful thing about love and about humanity. We know it's there, we are sure of it, but we can't seem to know where to find it. In the last line of this story, Alomar sincerely offers us the hopeful thesis of this book: "All I know is that I will continue writing my letters to you until I find...