Traces of humanity in war-torn Chechnya

Katerina Schina | Sunday Edition of Kathimerini | Sunday 10 November 2013 What drives a young American writer to turn his literary interest towards Chechnya and its wars? The unfamiliarity of this brutal conflict, made all the more unfamiliar by its remoteness? The cultural dimension of such a war? The fate of the people trapped in such a bloody conflict, a fate that is utterly terrifying and vulnerable, since no one in the world cares about them? But every war is unfamiliar and yet deeply familiar, for, whilst its starting point may differ, its outcome is always the same – pain, pain and more pain – and this knowledge is inscribed in the collective memory of every people.Anthony Mara could have set his novel anywhere; perhaps, however, he chose the most fitting place and the most appropriate time to demonstrate how indestructible barbarity remains in the modern world, how merciless war is, and how brutally it breaks down moral resistance. In a novel in which a much-told story of survival, loss and downfall becomes a springboard for reflection on the use or abuse of history, the setting of Chechnya—destroyed morally, culturally, economically and spiritually— gives the narrative revelatory dimensions.The masterfully written debut novel by the young Anthony Mara, which launches the intriguing series of foreign fiction from ‘Ikaros’ publishers, gains even greater evocative power through Achilleas Kyriakidis’s translation. The narrative centres on the efforts of Ahmed, a failed provincial doctor, to smuggle out and save eight-year-old Hawa when Russian military forces seize her father. He entrusts her to the bombed-out hospital in the nearest town, which operates with just one doctor, Sonia, and an elderly nurse, without a trace of equipment. Revolving around these three central figures are Sonia’s sister, Natasha, trapped and lost in the maelstrom of international prostitution, Ahmed’s friend, the elderly Hassan, who will burn his life’s work—3,330 pages on the history of Chechnya—and his son, who will become an informant, unable to endure the torture. The city streets, the surrounding forests, the countryside, are the theatre of unimaginable atrocities; as for the hospital, there everything is falling apart: a wound is stitched up with dental floss; a limb is amputated with a common saw; patients are brought here only to die; they simply ‘take too long’. Yet amidst this savagery, despair and deprivation, traces of humanity survive. Anthony Mara sets out to stitch together the shattered fragments of this ravaged world, to compose a raw version of beauty and forgiveness.War, torture, betrayal, the sex trade, on the one hand; the printed page, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (frequently referenced in the book), memories, a tender gesture, an ancient yet warm coat, the intimate union of two bodies, on the other: oscillating between warmth and brutality, solace and horror, Mara’s novel is not, in fact, bleak; despite the persistence with which it depicts barbarity, a breeze of optimism blows through its pages, a promise of redemption. The book’s enigmatic title itself is an affirmation of life. The constellation of vital phenomena is precisely what defines it: organisation, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation. And it is precisely this entry that the exhausted Sonia will read from the Medical Dictionary shortly before collapsing and sinking into a sleep she had until then stubbornly refused, as a reminder that as long as even the slightest spark of it remains, life will claim us from death and oblivion.