Foremost among the questions that arise while exploring this novel by best-selling Algerian author Ahlem Mostaghanemi is the one about the true identity of the lovers occupying centre stage. For so replete is this tale with bedazzling “word tricks” and a clever interplay of fact and fantasy that after a point, we start echoing the narrator’s thoughts: “Where is this story taking me?”
After 70-odd pages, however, some of the answers start surfacing. They offer fascinating insights into Algeria, a country both unique and oddly familiar; for it has, like our own, a history of liberation from colonial enslavement and pressing issues that have ensued as a result.
Coming back to the novel’s main protagonists: there’s 30-year-old Hayat, a woman of many parts — a writer who has a borrowed quote for every situation; an individual who prides herself on her “differentness”, implying her superiority to women of her class who have surrendered to life’s predictable banalities as prescribed by an Islamic society; a lady of privilege, not unlike those she disdains, bowing to convention as the beautiful, bored second wife of a high-ranking military-intelligence officer with whom she shares a loveless marriage. Perhaps unintentionally, she comes across as self-important, hypocritical and patronising, especially when she professes to being “so unpretentious that all the…nobodies around me thought I was one of them”.
It takes a while before we discover that she’s more than a lady of leisure seeking excitement. We learn that she is the daughter of a national martyr who fought for Algeria’s independence from its French colonial masters, a man she hasn’t finished mourning decades after his death; she is the sister of Nasser, a political dissident under surveillance by the very authorities her husband represents; and she is, above all, an anguished patriot who helplessly watches her country descend into civil war and chaos. Torn between the claims of her disparate worlds and the urges of her different personas is a conflicted Hayat whom we can eventually begin relating to.
About her lover we have more reservations than she does and just as many questions: is he really a fictional character from her manuscript in progress, whom she sets out to find in real life? Or the man who sits next to her in a darkened movie theatre, inflaming her desire with his scent and silence? Is he the man in white in a café or the one in black? Is he the artist Hayat takes him for or the journalist whose profession, representing freedom of expression, inevitably invites “troubles, tragedies and death” in a country that is bent on keeping its citizens muzzled? The pieces of the puzzle eventually fall into place, but not before tragedy strikes, killing Hayat’s creativity. Bereaved and freed from “the slavery of writing”, she resigns herself to life’s mundane routine.
More engrossing than her story, however, is its backdrop — a conflict-torn Algeria in the early 1990s. Through Mosteghanemi’s portrait of her beloved homeland, we discover — sometimes, with a sense of déjà vu — a country whose unemployed youth hang around public places, harassing women with impunity; whose young lovers are forced to seek privacy in the solitude of cemeteries; and whose women accept their husband’s infidelities with equanimity, dividing their time between the religious (pilgrimages to Mecca) and the secular (same-sex social gatherings where slander is disguised as conversation).
What finally remains, though, is the tragic image of a nation that had witnessed the sacrifice of thousands in the cause of its independence eventually surrendering to far more dangerous foes — greed and corruption. It is a place where freedom of thought and expression is under threat from successive regimes; where authoritarianism has unwittingly sown the seeds of a greater repression in the shape of an Islamist insurgency; where the common man is forever caught in the crossfire. Captured in its many moods, Mosteghanemi’s Algeria offers us a poignant lesson on how terrifyingly easy it is to fall from a position of strength into darkness. That, alone, makes Chaos of the Senses , the second novel in an award-winning trilogy, worth a look.
