Reorienting Between Worlds:
The
Scrolls of Nef, by Gary Glickman, Hand to Hand Publishing
(492 words)
One
of the powerful, pleasurable effects
that The Scrolls of Nef had on
me was to feel between worlds, not only while I was reading, but afterwards as
well, expecting people to talk as they do in Nef,
perhaps, or walking through the scenes of my daily life with a sharper lookout
for beauty and magic. Really, Between
Worlds could have been the working title for this epic that is also an
intimate comedy of manners, a familiar landscape that is also fantastic, and
one more seemingly orientalist fantasy of
light-skinned Northerners sex-dreaming of the dark, effeminate south, that is
also a critique of orientalism.
It's
a split narrative: the story of two brothers, princes exiled and separated, and
their separate paths to their soul-knowledge. They seem to be the white guys,
from a castle sounding like somewhere in
Medieval Europe. One of them stays on the Northern continent—the
warrior with a lot to learn. The younger brother flees south with the
girls—mother and sister—to the mother's people, whose decadent city
and decadent ways (they smoke water pipes in Nef, and
have eunuchs, harems, and gondolas) seem at times close to a 19th century
European dream of Ottoman cities: one of Rossini's (delightful but) absurd
stage sets, or French erotic paintings of harems, slave markets, and other
sublimated S/M tableaux. Indeed, several images seem to come out of the same
19th century Euro-dream: a naked snake-charmer boy before the king; naked girls
sold off publically for brides;
languorous concubines flapping their veils, impatient for action.
And
yet, the novel jumps into the post-card imagery to create an unsentimental, (to
this reader) credible version of human interactions that might have transpired
in such a dream place. The reader
keeps getting sucked into the credible dilemmas of scene after scene, impatient
to find out how one decision in life affects the next and the next, until the
hero's journey becomes apparent. By then, the Orientalism
has been turned on its head, revealed to be just one more "reality"
that is shown to be sham: in this world, the heroes are the dark-skinned
refugees, whereas the decadent locals are pale-skinned and blonde. It's no mere
white-face switch, but the other side of the familiar Orientalism
archetype that has the white man in the observer-consumer role, and the nubile
dark-haired beauty as objectified slave.
What
a liberation it is at last, to feel liberated, in this story, of the rigid
binaries of male subject/ female object, and light-skin superiority/ dark-skin
doubtfulness. Because The Scrolls of Nef
continually undermines those common, tired binaries with its plot, its
characters, and its voice, the reader's imagination stays awake to the present
moment—the aim and effect of successful art. It is a good place for a novel to be centered, always in the
unfolding present moment, which is, by definition, between worlds; that which
has already passed away, and that which is about to be created.