Harraga
Author : Boualem Sansal
Publisher : Bloomsbury, Rs450
The word harraga means ‘to burn’, and it refers to those Algerians in exile, who burn their identity papers to seek asylum in Europe. Boualem Sansal — whose novels are banned in his own country — asks a crucial question in this novel: Does forging a path ahead by erasing our trail require consuming our own self in the fires of time, writes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
In a world of folly and woe, the search for meaning is often a quest for absolution, a totality which takes the form of an end in itself instead of simply being a means to an end. Perhaps it is this aspiration for a totality — for a system or an idea which will generate solutions for our multifarious anxieties — which forms the core of our formational delusions, the daily lies with which we endeavour to placate, sublimate and suppress our acute sense of loss and lack of self. Vitally, the sense of self necessitates a certain grounding, a rootedness, even if that rootedness is a lack of it. Hence, history, personal as well as communal, acts as an ally in this process, being both an obstacle and a companion in the lasting, enduring search for meaning.
Boualem Sansal’s 2005 novel Harraga seems centrally, even fetishistically, concerned with the fleetingness of stable meaning in our twisted, tortured world. Of course, harraga, derived from Arabic, is tragically familiar these days; as Europe introspects in the wake of its worst immigrant crisis in contemporary times, ‘one who burns one’s path’, or ‘path-burner’, immediately acquires a poignant, disturbing tone. Sansal’s narrative is presented through the confused, opinionated, mercurially fanciful voice of his protagonist, lamia. lamia is a bitterly independent paediatrician in a state-run hospital in Algiers, the capital of Algeria; it is the first decade of the 21st century, and a heady, toxic fusion of extremist Islamism and globalisation works to sap, quite literally, the blood and vitality out of that struggling, torn nation. The lack of economic opportunities and growing fundamentalism propel lamia’s younger brother Sofiane too to become a harraga, to run away from home to smuggle into Spain via Morocco, and in her solitude lamia endeavours to cope with the trauma of this loss by welding herself to her house, an edifice more than two centuries old with an intricate, layered past of its own.
To the discerning reader these are familiar tropes: The isolated individual in a house with a distinct personality losing a sense of time along the quest for moorings. As lamia extricates herself from the world around her and becomes more and more a part of her house, a house which has been owned by a Turk, a Frenchman, a Transylvanian, and a Jew, the reader cannot but help hear echoes of Marquez and Roy. In her melancholia, the house becomes a point of no return wherein a thousand fantasies compete with the weight of a perplexing history to obfuscate as well as heighten the sorrows and desperation of her loneliness.
This loneliness and lamia’s entrenched isolation are dealt a blow with the sudden, unexpected arrival from Oran — the city Sofiane has run away to in order to become a harraga — of Chérifa, a pregnant young girl of 16 carrying the illegitimate child of a powerful Government minister. Indeed, the novel, divided into four ‘acts’, starts precisely with this rupture in lamia’s forced solitude, with, as she calls it, Chérifa’s invasion of her house. Poles apart, lamia and Chérifa are still drawn together, each complementing the other in what she lacks, lamia giving Chérifa’s life order and method and Chérifa bringing a wind of restless hope and activity to lamia. Their involvement, however, is short-lived, because Chérifa walks out of the house following an argument in which lamia abuses her as a harraga: “you’re a harraga, that’s what you are, and you’ll die as one.”
After this mid-way point in the narrative, lamia embarks on a different quest into the dangers of Algiers in search of Chérifa. As she negotiates with and through various people and places, an impossibility of return begins to haunt the reader: One’s life, as lamia often iterates, is perhaps not even partly one’s own, and so we are all harragas, lost souls burning our own path to absolution in an indifferent world. In the end, Chérifa dies giving birth to a girl whom she christens louiza, in deference to lamia’s wish to name the child after her own childhood companion, and lamia resolves to turn from this world of intolerance, misogyny and brutality by taking louiza and becoming harragas.
Which, ultimately, is the totality which seems to emerge from the text: lamia’s pungent, bitter narrative consistently denounces the evils of religious and political extremism; its search for stability finds resolution in the exorcism of the ghosts of her personal and communal past for a future without memory. Forging a path ahead by erasing your trail requires consuming your own self in the fires of time, and if lamia and her daughter, and by extension our strife-ridden world, can do so is a question which, fittingly, remains unanswered.
The reviewer is an Assistant Professor with the Department of English, Bharati College, University of Delhi