Book Review: Boualem Sansal's Harraga
Lovers of Enid
Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood trilogy
who have often wondered what it would be like to tuck into a few google buns,
shock toffees and pop biscuits have only to pick up Boualem Sansal’s
wonderfully evocative Harraga, which
means ‘path burner’ in Arabic. This hauntingly beautiful tale about two
diametrically opposing personalities, Lamia and Cherifa will make your taste – buds sing with hits of sugar as
well as spice and your eyes sting with its acid bite.
The protagonist, Lamia, is a wounded
animal, having lost her parents and elder brother in quick succession. Her
younger brother, Sofiane is a Harraga,
who has run away from home, hoping to leave the country and find a better life
or die in the process. Resigned to spending a life, licking her wounds having
stockpiled more than a fair share of sorrow, she retreats to the colonial
mansion she calls home. Barricaded within its crumbling confines she has only
the company of the ghosts that roam free from the shackles of life if not
death. By day, she is a paediatrician and it helps stave away penury, despair
and encroaching madness, but barely. It is then that a pregnant waif, sent by
Sofiane blows into her life like a runaway tornado. Cherifa is just as destructive and departs as quickly leaving
Lamia reeling from her encounter with a prodigious force of nature.
The chronicle is propelled forward
more on the strength of its central character, ably aided by the beauty of the
prose, rather than a suspenseful succession of endless revelations. Lamia is a
self – proclaimed “hateful bitch” whose prickly exterior, which could easily
rival a porcupine at its most bristly, belies a tender core, spilling over with
repressed passion and a mother’s endless compassion. Her scathing indictment of
Algiers, which according to her is a “trollop who gives of herself the better
to take”, the corrupt government that has allowed their country to go to seed
and Islamists, who “dream of the glorious crimes against humanity yet to be
committed” will have the reader lapping up her observations and asking for
more.
In direct contrast, Cherifa is the blithe spirit, who breezes through
life, helping herself to all she needs without so much as a thank you,
unmindful of the fact, that in their world, an unwed, knocked – up mother, who
dresses skimpily and has no trouble picking up men even in the advanced stages
of her pregnancy may well be looking at the death penalty. Like Lamia, the
reader will have trouble warming to the child – woman but will eventually
become fond of her for refusing to kowtow to the draconian laws of a spiteful
civilization.
Cherifa
is not meant to be tied down and she flees the bonds of Lamia’s affection,
leaving the latter devastated and unable to come to terms with the loneliness
she had foolishly believed to be her shield. Gravitating towards the other
victims, who had been affected by the tornado, one of whom is named Scheherazade, Lamia struggles in
vain to recapture the moonbeam that had slipped through her fingers or at the
very least figure out what had become of it, on the road leading to the
enormously moving climax.
In addition to exploring the perils
of being a single, woman in a patriarchal society, extreme solitude and
disillusionment with an unpalatable reality, Sansal seeks to answer his own
question, “How far can your life take you when there is nothing to hold you
back?” and the revelation will leave you with a lump in the throat, a smile on
the lips and a fervent desire to become an honest to goodness, Harraga.
This review was written for The New Indian Express and you can check it out here.
