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Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.94
From the Greek, apeiron: to be boundless, to be endless. Alongside the Indo-European root of per: to try, to risk.93
As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible. At the same time, the entirety of the shape is complicit.
Sometimes it feels like forces outside of myself conspire to put the right book into my hand at the right time: Recently returned from a trip to Israel – where my long-held empathy towards the Jewish people and belief in the absolute necessity for them to have been granted a homeland in the wake of the Holocaust were reaffirmed – and I found myself in possession of an ARC of Colum McCann's latest, Apeirogon, and what a surprise it was to me to see that it is based on the real-life friendship of an Israeli and a Palestinian man. Thinking that I already knew something of the conflict between their peoples, I nonetheless find myself having been changed by the reading of this book. Eye-opening, powerful, literary, heartbreaking: I challenge anyone to not be moved; to be fundamentally changed. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
One Thousand and One Nights: a ruse for life in the face of death.To begin with this book's format: I don't know if you can really call this a “novel”; I'd say literary nonfiction. The narrative concerns the aforementioned friends – Bassam and Rami – and slowly reveals their stories, interspersed with facts and plenty of seemingly unrelated information (there is much on migratory birds, which is further spooled out to include everything from François Mitterand eating ortolan [songbirds drowned in brandy] as his last meal, to the latest craze for diamond-encrusted falcon hoods among Arabian Princes). The book is divided into 1001 parts (chapters count up from 1-499, the middle – between a pair of blacked-out pages – contains the transcribed speeches that Bassam and Rami deliver around the world, each numbered as 500, and then the chapters count down again to 1). So too is One Thousand and One Nights referenced more than once (from Sir Richard Burton originally translating it into English as he impersonated an Arab in the Middle East, to the story of Wael Zuaiter – a poet who was assassinated by Mossad in retribution for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and whose copy of One Thousand and One Nights trapped one of the thirteen bullets fired at his body), and much like the apeirogon itself, these countless facets serve to demonstrate both unrecognised interconnectedness and the complexity that overwhelms the human mind. However, while I was interested in everything that McCann included, and while I appreciated his efforts to bring his keen writing skills to such a worthy story, I think that the story itself is too important to risk turning away the widest readership possible with highfalutin' literary flourishes (but I hope to be wrong about that; I do hope this book finds its audience).
If you divide death by life you will find a circle.And so to their stories: Rami Elhanan, like all Israelis, had served his obligatory military term as a youth – he served during a time of war and killed impassionately, reflexively – and then wanted to just live a normal life; working at graphic design, enjoying his quiet home with his wife and four children. But in 1997, Rami's 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber as she walked down a Jerusalem street with her friends, and Rami's first response was one of hatred and a thirst for revenge. This ate at him for a year, until a rabbi invited Rami to the Parent's Circle – a support group for both Israeli and Palestinian parents who had lost children – and while Rami only went reluctantly, when he first saw a Palestinian woman clutching a photograph of her own dead daughter, he realised that it was the first time in his life he had thought of an individual Palestinian person as a fellow human being. His hatred and vengeance disappeared and he eventually sought out another organization, Combatants for Peace, where he would meet Bassam Aramin; a Palestinian man who would teach Rami what life is like in Occupied Palestine. An excerpt from the speech that Rami now travels the world to deliver to wide-ranging audiences:
We must end the Occupation and then sit down to figure it out. One state, two states, it doesn't matter at this stage – just end the Occupation, and then begin the process of rebuilding the possibility of dignity for all of us. It's as clear to me as the noonday sun. There are times, sure, when I would like to be wrong. It would be so much easier. If I found another path I would have taken it – I don't know, revenge, cynicism, hatred, murder. But I am a Jew. I have great love for my culture and my people and I know that ruling and oppressing and occupying is not Jewish. Being Jewish means that you respect justice and fairness. No people can rule another people and obtain security and peace for themselves. The Occupation is neither just nor sustainable. And being against the Occupation is, in no way, a form of anti-Semitism.Bassam grew up in an area of the West Bank controlled by Israeli security forces – subject to house raids, humiliating checkpoints, and patrolling armed soldiers. Bassam and his friends liked to hoist the (outlawed) Palestinian flag at their school, and when soldiers would come to take it down, throw rocks and run away. As a teenager, Bassam and his friends found some grenades, and when then threw those (defective) explosives at a convoy, the seventeen-year-old found himself labelled a terrorist and sentenced to prison for seven years. In prison, Bassam became at first more radical, but while watching a documentary on the Holocaust (which he had been taught had never happened), Bassam found himself thinking of the Jewish people as fellow human beings for the first time in his life. Upon release he cofounded Combatants for Peace, and two years after meeting Rami for the first time, Bassam also became a member of an organisation no one wants to join – the Parents Circle – when his own ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot in the back of the skull with a rubber bullet, fired by a jumpy eighteen-year-old Israeli soldier from the back of an armoured jeep, as Abir bought candy bracelets for herself and her sister. Joined forever in grief, the two fathers now meet several times a week and the following is an excerpt from the speech Bassam delivers alongside “his brother” Rami:
We started Combatants for Peace. There, at the Everest Hotel, up the road, near the settlement, by the Wall, two minutes away. Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I'll meet you there. We were right and we were wrong and we met in the field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy. We sat in the Everest Hotel and talked about ending the Occupation. Even that word occupation makes most Israelis tremble. Of course, each one had a different point of view – they are the occupiers and we are the ones under occupation, so it looks different to them. But in the end we were all dying, we were killing each other, over and over. We needed to know each other instead. This is the center of gravity, this is where it all comes down. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. As I have always said, it's a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can't be.In a very useful device, McCann narrates – intermittently, over the course of the entire book – the experiences of Rami and Bassam driving back to their respective homes after one of their meetings in the West Bank. Rami, as an Israeli, isn't really supposed to be here, but he is able to race his motorbike along the highway towards Jerusalem without issue, knowing there isn't much at stake if he does get caught. On the other hand, Bassam is required to pass through at least one checkpoint on his way home, and he knows that he is subject to questioning, detention, or arrest every time he leaves or returns to Jericho. There are stories about the IDF blowing up the cave (a very comfortable and suitable home) where his family resided outside Hebron when he was a child, Bassam's wife and terrified children being subjected to a humiliating strip search in front of each other, people being forced to stand under the desert sun for hours while the Israeli border guard lounges on a beach chair and cracks open soda for himself from a nearby cooler. From Bassam's speech:
The Occupation exists in every aspect of your life, an exhaustion and a bitterness that nobody outside it really understands. It deprives you of tomorrow. It stops you from going to the market, to the hospital, to the beach, to the sea. You can't walk, you can't drive, you can't pick an olive from your own tree which is on the other side of the barbed wire. You can't even look up in the sky. They have their planes up there. They own the air above and the ground below. You need a permit to sow your land. Your door is kicked in, your house is taken over, they put their feet on your chairs. Your seven-year-old is picked up and interrogated. You can't imagine it. Seven years old. Be a father for a minute and think of your seven-year-old being picked up in front of your eyes. Blind-folded. Zip ties put on his wrists. Taken to Military Court in Ofer. Most Israelis don't even know this happens. They're not allowed to see. Their newspapers, their televisions, they don't tell them these things. They can't travel in the West Bank. They have no idea how we are living. But it happens every day. Every single day.Naturally, if Israelis don't know it's like this, I certainly didn't know; I didn't see this, I wasn't told about it. Rami and Bassam's stories are so heart-breaking: of course it's the abuse of power by Israeli soldiers, just like Rami had been, that led a Palestinian suicide-bomber to make the ultimate protest; and of course, it's because of youth like Bassam had once been – throwing rocks and then grenades at Israeli soldiers – that made an eighteen-year-old jumpy enough to fire towards schoolchildren. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, but one that Rami and Bassam both think can be stopped: just end the Occupation (such a loaded word) and work out the details later; one-state, two-state, right-of-return, settlements, nothing matters until after children stop being killed. Hard to argue with that.
Again, I don't know if this adds up to a novel, but Colm McCann has crafted something really special and essential here. I do hope it's widely read; that things change for Israel and Palestine.
The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.
