The sexually incontinent, socially dissident, morally flawed, affectively obdurate Hannah has a passion for people, words, and – as the novel all too often reminds us – men’s asses.
“The histories of the senses, intimacy and passion were as relevant as those of nations,” or so claims Hannah, the protagonist of The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia’s unabashedly lurid and deeply introspective third novel. Hannah is introduced to the reader as an asylum-seeker who escapes a war-torn Eritrea that is resisting Ethiopian colonial rule as well as the historical hold of Italian and British imperialisms. As Hannah is forced to cross borders illegally and arrive in Britain, she attempts to find a sense of home in London while reckoning with the complexities of her cultural and familial heritage. She draws this connection between passions and nations as she reads her late mother’s diary, the sole artifact left of the family from whom she has been violently exiled. But instead of finding an origin story that she can valiantly reclaim, Hannah finds in the diary secrets she has never known, including her mother’s sexual experiences and the unexpected story of her birth. Rather than return her to palliative myths of a pure cultural ancestry, one that often undergirds the story of families and nations, the diary offers a genealogy fraught with dissident sexualities and desires. Addonia insists that the trajectory of these desires is as crucial as the life of nations, or indeed that the latter is impossible without the former, and thereby throws into relief the unpredictable connections between bodies and borders, sex and exile, desires and migrations that muddy unadulterated constructions of cultural and national lineages.
In fact, Addonia’s body of work consistently illuminates the psychic and affective inner worlds of refugees, navigating belonging in alien terrains and amidst grave horrors. His debut novel, The Consequences of Love (2008), follows an Eritrean migrant worker in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as he is drawn into a forbidden romance with a burqa-clad woman whom he can only recognize by her shoes. His second book, Silence Is My Mother Tongue (2018), traces the story of two siblings whose identities and gender-expressions blur intimately within the confines of an East-African refugee camp built for Eritreans. This enduring focus on the Eritrean refugee’s trajectories is rooted in Addonia’s own past: he spent his childhood in an Eritrean refugee camp in Sudan before eventually settling in London. Reflecting on his early days as a college student in Kilburn, Addonia notes how the experience of migration in his life sparked an enduring desire for belonging: “I was always leaving, always learning, always catching up, always seeking to belong somewhere, begging one country after another to accept me, languages other than my own to adopt me.”
In The Seers, Addonia continues this examination of the refugee’s longing for belonging. But what sets this novel apart from the rest of his oeuvre is not only the setting, but fusing the experience of exile with the supposedly irrelevant – and certainly irreverent – eccentricities of sexuality. Heart-wrenching accounts of Hannah’s history as a refugee—of war, colonialism, and migration—dovetail with enticing, though sometimes (perhaps, appropriately) blunt, portrayals of her sex life. Addonia’s tendency to simultaneously talk of heritage and heresies, history and perversion is established from the novel’s very first lines:
My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square. It was as if a lantern was attached to the top of my strap-on so that as I entered him, I saw my reflection in a world inside him that was familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, disruptive and reaffirming.
The narrative itself makes a striking move from the familiar to the unfamiliar by setting up a sexual scene and then undermining any normative reading of it. If the first sentence might allow the reader to rely on familiar imaginations of a heterosexual sex—where the narrator may be assumed to be a male protagonist topping a character assumed to be woman—the second sentence compels the reader to discard such commonplace gendered conventions. Here, Hannah wears a strap-on to top a man, unbundling archetypal alignments between gender identity and sexual position. This rejection of sexual conventions is coupled with the refusal of narratological conventions about immigrant arrivals, especially clichés of virtuous refugees attempting (and struggling) to settle in an unremitting metropole. Hannah’s experiences find no analogy in the alienated Windrush migrants of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners who are persevering to make a mark in London, nor are they akin to the tragicomic life of closeted expatriates as explored in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman. Hannah is a less-than-perfect character who embodies values that do not abide by the traditional cast of loneliness, parochiality, piety, or resilience that often gets associated with immigrants (or that immigrants are expected to exemplify). The sexually incontinent, socially dissident, morally flawed, affectively obdurate Hannah has a passion for people, words, and – as the novel all too often reminds us – men’s asses. This sexual desire is not subsidiary to her experience as a migrant. In fact, sex becomes the primary conduit through which she (in her words) “rebirths” herself. Through sex, Hannah attempts to reincarnate herself in London and move on from her past life in Keren.
At the same time, sex refuses and troubles such a teleological story. In a notable moment, where Hannah reflects on the way her sexual desire may be linked to her history, she admits how she “had likened all [her] lovers to land, to places, as if my search for home had eroded the boundaries between my body and a country, so that the two had merged to make sense only when my desires were fully intact and in action.” But if sex is expected to be a refuge from the loss of family, community, and home, it also ironically returns Hannah to her traumatic past. That is, sex does not lead to a narrative of fulfillment but is rather presented as the murky terrain in which what is unbearable about one’s past continues to haunt the present. The narrative intersperses the opening sex scene with memories of witnessing Ethiopia’s attacks on Eritrea, as Hannah exclaims:
O Bina-B. O. B. B. I could see the light at the end of your O, irradiating your tunnel. The crowd around the lamp grew so enormous that a scuffle broke out. In the ensuing chaos, pickpocketing proliferated, companions lost each other, and the words between lovers in this heated ambience lost their intended meaning. Murmurs, screams, gaps, laughter, cries, moaning and mourning echoed between mouths.
Addonia’s textual play moves between registers of the factual and the euphemistic, the literal and the figurative, the past and the present. The moans of the sexual act echo the screams of chaos. The metaphor of the lamp, alluded to in the opening, seamlessly blurs into the memory of another lamp illuminating the bloodbath of war. The moment of togetherness in the here-and-now becomes a testimony of past partitions. England merges into Eritrea. Intimacy becomes a scuffle. Union reminds one of separation. In fact, the structure of The Seers typifies this back-and-forth: for most of the narrative, Hannah continuously recalls and remembers her past as she describes having sex with Bina-Balozi, and the reader learns of her story only proleptically. Rather than end with a sense of fulfillment or closure that sex is often expected to provide, in The Seers sexuality opens the narrative up to a mangled retelling of history. Sex here is a far cry from doe-eyed ideals of connection or togetherness. On the contrary, Addonia shows how even consensual, loving, beautiful sex can become the stage on which memories of violence can play out their horrors. Here, sex does not culminate to an endpoint but expresses itself through these movements of vignettes, bodies, and narratives.
The sense of (re)encountering an uncontainable past in an intimate moment is also evidenced in the stylistic innovativeness of the novel. Instead of presenting a chronological unfolding from the past to present, or a linear trajectory of passing through different fragments/chapters, the entire novel is structured within a single paragraph. Offering no relief or disturbance by even a line-break, the novel seems to congeal its entire story in one breath; yet this breath blows the reader into a panorama of experiences that traverses spatial and temporal boundaries. It is this stylistic novelty that makes Addonia’s novel particularly hard to categorize: The Seers mixes the rhythms of poetry with the brevity of a short-story and blends the memoir-like quality of its account within a plot-driven, novelistic frame. In its investment in crossing borders—of genre, gender, and genealogy—the novel seeks to offer a narrative of desire that disobeys their constraints. But the text is perhaps most irreverent in its dismissal of nationalist constraints. The Seers undermines the fantasy of cultural origins and patriotic belonging—one that is kosher for the narratives of ethno-nationalisms that are raging in the world today—and shows the ferocity of imperialist and nationalist juggernauts that structure the regime of racialized nationalisms.
Hannah confesses to an immediate antipathy to logics of racial belonging on entering London. She reflects on the unacknowledged violence that the Ethiopian government perpetrated over Eritrea which remains shrouded under the myth of African unanimity. She thus notes: “When I arrived in Europe, as well as my family’s and our country’s fury against the British, my heart was also filled with rage at the men from my continent.” The novel rejects simplistic ideals of pan-African solidarity, exploring entangled and intertwined histories of domination and submission that transcend racial boundaries. It does so by foregrounding the protagonist’s sexual and gendered subjectivity—and difference from the “men” of her continent—as well as by uncovering an anticolonial rage against Ethiopia. Hannah’s primary intimacies do not lie with the men from her continent; instead, they lie with other immigrants and refugees, workers and pedestrians, writers and ghosts, tenuous relations that do not align with logics of kinship based on bloodline or familiarity.
When she speaks of her intimacy with Bina-Balozi, Hannah notes: “We lived in the shadow of exile, in the shadow of empty promises, in homes made of cardboard tents, in nations drawn on sand.” If the nation is only a demarcation on sand, it can all too easily be washed away, and that is the threat on which The Seers bases itself. This threat finds expression through the indeterminacies that sex engenders in the novel. Sex mediates the experience of exile and destabilizes the present by evoking a history that refuses forgetting. The identitarian impulse to make a place, a city, a nation, a person, a people one’s own scuppers in the face of this uncontainable migrancy of sex in this novel: neither fully returning to a past in Eritrea, nor completely staying in the moment in London. Addonia tracks these dark alleyways of desire at the fringes of the nation and pushes his readers to find unfamiliar forms of belonging by engaging in a narrative experience of estrangement, shock, and thrill. The novel rejects garden-variety tropes of immigration and moves against the comforts of the familiar, dabbling with an aesthetics and politics of the unexpected. Both in form and content, The Seers repeatedly rejects these dulling entrapments of belonging and settlement: just as soon as we start getting comfortable with our readings, the novel usurps that comfort, jolting us with surprise, and taking us from behind yet again.
Ketan Jain is an English PhD student at Tufts University working on queer theory, postcolonial theory, and British Indian literatures. One of his pet peeves is writing quirky bios.
Thumbnail photo by Nemanja Peric on Unsplash