With much expectation and excitement, MENAWA gathered in its second reading seminar for this academic year to discuss Ranna Haddad’s debut novel The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor (2018). In one and a half hours, we found ourselves immersed in reflecting on a variety of topics ranging from the philosophies of love and desire to the politics of masculine facial hair.
We opened our discussion by reflecting on the distinctive style which Haddad has chosen for her novel. The fairy-tale like plot, its melodramatic and poetic note, the deliberate philosophical choice of the characters’ names, and the prevailing humorous tone all combine to grant the novel an outstanding character. It is simultaneously a memory of a city (Lattakia), a satirical commentary on the socio-political scene of fin de siècle Syria, a philosophical reflection, and a queer narrative.
The combination of the reality-inspired setting and the philosophical preoccupations of the novel endows it with a distinguishable character. Although its plot is framed within a particular political context, we agreed that Haddad’s The Unexpected Love Objects deviates from the majority of the contemporary, politically-fraught and violence-imbued literary productions on Syria. Through the protagonist, Dunya Noor, an aspiring photographer with rebellious curly hair and a glorious spirit, the reader is granted an insight into Syria away from crude national agendas. Although the novel is grounded within the 1980s and 1990s Syrian socio-political scene under the reign of Hafiz al-Assad, we found that the story transcends the political to more artistic and aesthetic preoccupations, mainly photography, music, science, and story-telling. As such, the novel crafts a renewed vision of Syria away from what the media currently propagates; a country which bursts with artistic appreciation, beauty, love, and desire.
One of the topics that stirred much discussion during our seminar was the way the novel approaches gender issues. Clearly, the novel offers a protagonist that not only challenges political norms with her open opposition to the authoritarian Baath party at the age of 13, but equally confronts familial, social, and sexual norms. Through her camera lens, Dunya Noor dares to reverse the gaze and be the one who looks instead of being looked at. Against all social expectations, she grows up to be a woman of passion who is unmindful of the social expectations of an upper-class woman. Growing up in London, where she is sent after her scandalous comment on the ruling party, Dunya Noor dares to subvert the etiquettes of class and sexual divisions. She not only falls in love with a socially unsuitable guy, an astronomer and the son of a tailor from Aleppo named Hilal, but also falls for his twin sister Suha. Dunya’s transgressive bisexuality, a key theme in the text, is presented by Haddad as a philosophical pursuit: “if 1 + 1 = True Love, what is 1+ 2 equal to?” (p155).
Gender roles in fin de siècle Syria are particularly approached through an element that MENAWA spent much time enthusiastically discussing: moustaches. The politics of facial hair and its relationship to masculinity and power is wittily approached in the novel. While it is sarcastically associated with the fearful “moustachioed band of Baathist young man”, signifying their tyrannical power, moustaches are also a distinguishable form of gender performance. Being associated with authority, accessibility to the public sphere, and relative freedom, Suha, for instance, chooses to disguise herself as a male singer with a ‘florid moustache’ in order to escape the social constraints placed on female artists. This act of performativity gestures towards the phallic symbolism of facial hair in Arab countries, which led us to ponder upon other cultural equivalences.
We ended our discussion by talking about Sufi love and desire while indulging on glitter-glazed doughnuts. While the love objects of Dunya Noor are people (Hilal and Suha), objects (cameras and light), and concepts (love and art), some of the MENAWA attendees agreed that their new love object is Haddad’s novel.
By Huyem Cheurfa
menawapoco.wordpress.com 