Book Review

The title of Balsam Karam’s novel, The Singularity, is also a description of its formal logic. The book enacts in its plotting, its structure, and its language what happens inside of a black hole, playing out the metaphor across continents, families, and nations. Singularity, Karam explains, brings bodies together in a space of infinite density, eliding the boundaries between objects. As Karam develops this book-length metaphor, she brings readers into the gendered experiences of refugees, and raises questions about how we should witness the pain of those closest to, and most distant, from us. In Karam’s black hole of a novel, refugee women risk and sustain great losses when they bring children into the world, displaced as Karam’s characters are from history, from home, from all of the threads that add up to identity and kinship. By staging intimate conversations that haunt the margins of violence—a bombing that kills a friend, a suicide after a child’s disappearance, an impending stillbirth—Karam erases the distance that can protect the privileged from these scenes. At the same time, however, she explores how dangerous it can be to fully encounter others’ suffering, how the act of bearing witness, performed with enough empathy, can bring us into the very cycles of trauma that wreak havoc across the globe’s postcolonial and neocolonial spaces. Out of this impossible paradox, the novel calls us to invent a new orientation toward remote suffering, a project as charged as ever in this moment of war in Gaza.

In three parts, The Singularity unfurls two stories that intersect at a moment of extreme loss. In a developing city without a name, a woman jumps to her death from the corniche (a busy road carved out of a coastal cliffside). Her eldest daughter has disappeared without a trace, and that absence consumes her. Nearby, a pregnant woman visiting for business (we’ll call her the witness) watches as the first falls to the rocks below. Later, when the witness miscarries, she will trace back to this suicide the scene of her child’s death in utero.

This primal scene opens the novel and then recurs often throughout it, haunting us like a slide projected from a carousel. The connection Karam establishes between the two women—one, a mother who kills herself because she can’t find her child; the other, a mother-to-be who loses her own child when she observes this trauma—serves as the relationship around which all others fall into a kind of order. Both women, we learn, are refugees. The first, until she can no longer bear her grief, haunts the alleyways of a divided city, where tourists dine and laugh as an underclass of children and laborers hides and starves. The second comes to this place from somewhere equally anonymous in Europe, a city to which she and her family long ago fled from a war that destroyed her neighborhood and killed her best friend. Against the lessons of Western philosophy, which insist that our deaths must be our own, these women experience death together, a tragic version of Karam’s singularity.

The Singularity is not only the title of the book, but also of the tripartite narrative’s middle section. There, Karam explicitly defines the force that brings these two women together. The witness, returned to the West, looks back from the hospital where she is actively refusing to give birth to the death she carries. Stuck there by choice, the woman teaches the white therapist sent to help her let go of her child about the concept of singularity. “‘[I]nside a black hole is a place that is also a state—do you know about this?’ she asks Patrick or Henry, Eric or Martin.” (By refusing to settle on a name for the therapist, Karam turns back against the West’s erasure of refugees’ singularity, which Karam will go on to chronicle in the novel’s third part, a record of the microaggressions the witness’s family faces after their relocation.) When the therapist confesses that he doesn’t, she explains: “It’s called a singularity,” and inside of it, “the force of gravity is so strong it can’t be calculated.” This gravity “pushes bodies together and renders the distance between them nil” so that “eventually they occupy the same space.” She concludes, “and if there’s no distance between two bodies, it’s pointless to go on talking about distance, right?” This concept, whereby a force powerful enough to erase detachment brings bodies into total identity, has an explanatory power that illuminates from different angles, not only the woman’s identity with the dead child she carries in her belly, but also her relationship to the dead mother, whose suicide touched her so deeply that another child disappeared. When there is no distance between bodies, another’s grief is our grief, something that can hurt us.

At the same time as this vision of singularity helps us understand two of the novel’s central entanglements, it also runs through the many other relationships women in the novel bear and claim. As the witness explains the concept to her therapist, for instance, another conversation runs in tandem with their dialogue. The woman’s mother has come to walk with her at the hospital, and they are talking about Rozia, the woman’s childhood best friend, who died in a bombing shortly after the witness and her family fled for Europe. Only a slash separates these conversations from each other, the conceptual from the historical, the past retold from the present. Rozia and the witness, we learn, were like siblings, or better, like twins. They were born almost at the same time; Rozia’s mother once nursed both babies; one grandmother fed them both as children. When the witness left for Europe, her mother left one of her outfits for Rozia, who, they would learn much later, died in it, her body pulled from the rubble, unrecognizable, so that they could only “tell that it was Rozia by the dress.”

This story about Rozia enacts the logic of the singularity as it plays out in violence, rendering the woman and her dead friend identical, grieving the arbitrariness of tragedy. Either one of them could have died, and a part of the woman did die with Rozia, as she never stops obsessing over her friend, thinking about their likeness, closing in memory and mourning the distance between them.

Earlier, the witness traces back further and further the cause of her unborn child’s death. It was on the corniche, she speculates; or, it was when Rozia died; or, it was when her own grandmother lost her first two children. Time is also disrupted within the space of the singularity so that not only do bodies become identical, but everything also happens at once. The usual relays of cause and effect are suspended in an intimacy particular to women and their socially and physically reproductive labor. This revised logic doesn’t allow for an outside to the violence these women endure, and it precludes the possibility of safety or escape.

The final section of the novel adapts a form from Citizen, US writer Claudia Rankine’s iconic 2014 collection. The most celebrated parts of Rankine’s lyric assemblage put the reader in the position of a composite black subject experiencing microaggressions in a so-called “post-racial” US (although the Trump years that followed gave the lie to this national fantasy). Rankine conjures the second person to bring readers of all identities into the position of someone whose every interaction is weighted with, and deformed by, the historical violence of US racism. Karam, too, deploys the second person in a postcolonial context, welcoming us into the point of view of the witness. We are asked to inhabit the pressures of migration, loss of language, culture clashes, prejudice, and more in the European city to which her family flees. This narrative brings us up in the end to the moment of loss on the corniche. We are asked to become this woman, a tourist on a work trip, looking forward to dinner at an upscale restaurant. She inhabits at once the roles of refugee and of cosmopolitan elite, of mother and daughter, of lost and found. We know what we’re about to see, and we know we’re in for a devastating loss. How, the novel leaves us asking, should we act, what should we do, knowing, as we do now, that there is no distance between bodies?

The Singularity is a deft experiment, inventing a set of forms uniquely able to open the imaginaries out of which Karam’s characters speak. As does Rankine’s text, the novel also unites the daily rituals of prejudice with the violence the West sanctions against those it excludes from its privileged centers. If more could see, as Karam’s characters have no choice but to, that sometimes there is no distance between bodies, how what hurts one must hurt another, perhaps we could imagine a way out from under the rubble. And yet, the novel resists easy resolution. It leaves us where we started, about to witness tragedy, and it asks us what, if anything, we might do differently.