Fadi Zaghmout’s Heaven on Earth, translated by Sawad Hussain, is ideologically fascinating, but in a way that I’m not sure Zaghmout intended. the novel takes as its premise the development of a drug that allows the aging process to be perfectly and controlledly reversed, taking the subject back to whatever age they choose. our protagonist, the journalist Janna Abdallah, is physically in perhaps her thirties (though she is in fact almost a hundred years old); other characters return to adolescence or childhood or even, in one case, infancy. the novel follows Janna through the tumultuous period leading up to and following the death of her brother Jamal, who developed the “cure” for aging but refuses to take it himself.
as might be expected, much of the novel’s energy is focused on the experience of living a world where aging and death of old age are optional: a parliamentary debate about a bill that would legally obligate everyone to take the anti-aging drugs (on the premise that refusing them is tantamount ot suicide); a reality TV show where the contestants regress to infancy over the course of the season, at the end of which one of them will be adopted by the celebrity singer Sabah; changes to the legal management of reproduction — children may now only be born when a member of a family dies; and a number of related developments like the existence of cloning technology that would enable Janna to, for example, give birth to a clone of her own mother, who died prematurely of Alzheimer’s (now also curable, thanks to Jamal).
structurally, the novel is a bit unfocused. we follow Janna’s first-person perspective, but the narrative jumps back and forth between several threads, sometimes backtracking, occasionally a bit jarringly, to pick up where one left off:
central to what I found both fascinating and frustrating is Janna’s relationship with death. Zaghmout is quite explicitly (per his preface to the novel) enamored of the idea of a “cure” for aging, and to some extent this is reflected in the trajectory of the novel, as Janna ultimately comes down on the side of supporting the “anti-suicide” law. at the same time, while the novel — through Janna’s perspective — attempts to vindicate this position, it nonetheless recognizes that this is, in the end, a selfish betrayal of her own political principles. Janna may have convinced herself — and possibly Zaghmout — that this is “good” (or “for the best”) and an expression of love, but there is a gap here that the novel acknowledges between “my political principles” and “what I really wanted”.
that said, it also frames Janna’s principles as something she must “overcome”; it is also skeptical of Jihan’s assertions of political principle: while Jihan adopts (we are told) Marxist or at least left-wing positions on certain issues, Janna insists that these are not reflective of real principles but rather a self-serving and essentially ignorant attempt to make herself seem important. that Janna is from a comfortably middle-class family while Jihan is from a working-class background makes Janna’s dismissal ring hollow. I was left unsure whether or not we’re meant to regard Janna’s assessments as accurate or whether we are meant to approach her skeptically — a reading I think is rewarding. I found Janna a deeply engaging and increasingly unlikable or unsympathetic narrator, which, everything else aside, was a fun dynamic.
as is apparently the case in his earlier novel The Bride of Amman, Zaghmout deals extensively with Jordanian gender politics here, both directly and in little nods — like the current Jordanian prime minister being a woman. perhaps most striking in this regard is the novel’s frank treatment of Janna’s sexuality: her sexual frustration in her relationship with her husband, her deep discomfort as he regresses to a horny teenager who still wants to have sex with the woman who is legally his wife, her sexual fantasies about Kameel (she does masturbate in this book!). less striking is the characterization of Jihan. in addition to presenting her as politically disingenuous, the novel also often treats her as being in reality what Janna’s perspective calls her — “Hell-lady”.
nonetheless, there is a tantalizing glimpse of another angle in the final chapter, which functions as a kind of epilogue, set about twenty years after the bulk of the novel. here we learn that Jihan has sued for joint custody of Janna’s daughter (the clone of her mother), Amal, and that Amal calls Jihan “Mama” and defends her from Janna’s criticism, forcing Janna to admit that perhaps Jihan might not be an unmitigated villain — that she might have some positive and valuable characteristics, as well. I’m fascinated by the coparenting arrangement implications — it reminds of the throuple conclusion of Norma NicLeòid’s Dìleas Donn, and I wish we’d gotten to see more of it. unfortunately, the climax and epilogue are very abrupt (and kind of weird — there’s a “terrorist” bombing in Amman, Janna gives birth, and then we jump immediately to the epilogue), so we don’t get the fuller picture of this that I would have been curious to see.
with all of that said, what I meant when I said the novel is ideologically fascinating but in a way that I’m not sure was intended is that the framing of the narrative strongly seems to confirm Janna’s perspective and perceptions as accurate, but I think that attending to the inaccuracies and often willful gaps in Janna’s perspective produces a much more interesting book — I’m not just not sure if that’s what Zaghmout wanted us to do.
the writing is...a bit rough around the edges, to be honest. there are some strange word choices throughout (“consanguineous”?), and a bunch of things that probably just come down to not quite enough editorial attention (including a few sentences with an extraneous word that made them incoherent).
I would recommend this overall, then, but not as strongly as I was hoping to.
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