Lamia has been on her own since her parents died
and her youngest brother left Algiers as harraga, a
wanderer. She lives all alone, working days in the
hospital and spending nights in her crooked old family
house. When a seventeen-year-old pregnant Lolita girl,
Chérifa, shows up at her door with an invitation from the
estranged brother, Lamia takes her in out of a sense of
boredom and indignation at the world. Together the two
must balance what is with what they want to be. In a land
where an unwed mother can be killed to avenge honor,
delicacy is both required and found in short supply.
When Lamia makes the greatest mistake of her life,
Chérifa runs away. Now realizing that Chérifa was the
daughter she never had, Lamia has to fight her guilt in
order to rescue the flighty young woman she loves so
much.
HARRAGA is a novel which takes a cultural look at
Algiers and at Islam through the lens of a woman who
lives in one and fears the fanatical turns of the other.
Lamia is by far the best character I've seen on the page
in a novel of self-discovery. She is so self-aware of her
many and very real flaws. She is a self-described bitch,
who shouts and screams at Chérifa and creates mysteries
out of her neighbors for her own amusement. Chérifa in
turn is a mystery, making herself at home in Lamia's
house and routine one moment and vanishing the next. She
carries the baby like the most serious of mothers would
at first and then like it will not change her life one
bit. These two are both full of secrets and fire, the
kind that bonds women even in the most challenging of
circumstances.
The poetry written by Lamia in the contents of
the novel is both haunting and wonderful in its quality.
I think this poetry is what really captures the soul of
Lamia. Her struggles, her dreams, her actions are all
articulated and justified in these poems. If you read
this book for no other reason, read for the poetry.
HARRAGA lays bare the expectations of the reader
and sticks a knife right in the heart. It's a novel which
changes the perceptions of the reader. Lamia and Chérifa
share a lesson with us all that we need, whether or not
we know it yet. The dreams of one, the loss of the other,
and it's up to the reader to decide which is which. This
book really causes deep thought and is one which I have
no intention of forgetting.
Harraga. The term means "to burn," and it refers to those
Algerians in exile, who burn their identity papers to seek
asylum in Europe. But for Boualem Sansal, whose novels are
banned in his own country, there is a kind of internal
exile
even for those who stay; and for no one is it worse than
for
the country's women.
Lamia is thirty-five years old, a doctor. Having lost most
of her family, she is accustomed to living alone,
unmarried
and contentedly independent when a teenage girl, Chérifa,
arrives on her doorstep. Chérifa is pregnant by Lamia's
brother in exile—Lamia's first indication since he left
that
he is alive—and she'll surely be killed if she returns to
her parents. Lamia grudgingly offers her hospitality;
Chérifa ungratefully accepts it. But she is restless and
obstinate, and before long she runs away, out into the
hostile streets—leaving Lamia to track her, fearing for
the
life of the girl she has come, improbably, to love as
family.
Boualem Sansal creates, in Lamia, an incredible narrator:
cultured, caustic, and compassionate, with an ironic
contempt for the government, she is utterly convincing.
With
his deceptively simple story, Sansal delivers a brave
indictment of fundamentalism that is also warm and
wonderfully humane.
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