Praise the Mutilated World: A Review of Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (2020, Rescue Press)
A poem by Polish writer Adam Zagajewski ran on the last page of The New Yorker’s issue two weeks after 9/11. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” advanced a theology perhaps of use for those who had lived through parts of the murderous twentieth century and were embarking on the next 100 years: “You must praise the mutilated world […] You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere, / you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. / You should praise the mutilated world.” A similar imperative is at work in To Remain Nameless, Brad Fox’s hypnotic new novel about the smallness of the human vessel, what he calls “a windsock flapping at the edge of a carnival,” as it wanders the world at will or by force, buffeted either way by an enormity of feeling. The narrative begins its unraveling with melancholic Tess returning to the States to accompany her exuberant friend Laura in the birth of her first child. As the night hours in the hospital go by, Laura submits to the waves of her contractions while Tess privately churns through memories of their past lives lived abroad, in places that have undergone a transformation as violent as birth: the former Yugoslavia, Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus.
Tess and Laura, both American – Tess hails from a heroin-scarred family in Kansas City, while Laura remembers summer camp in Massachusetts – meet in 1999 as contract aid workers in Skopje, where fifteen minutes by car to the north the bombs of NATO airstrikes fall on Kosovo. Laura has arrived from Kinshasa, Tess from Sarajevo, where she’s spent the past three years, long enough for the former Yugoslavia to begin to feel like home. But Tess and Laura are itinerants, “always in a white 4x4, with instructions to do something that defied common sense and humanity.” Fox, who spent fifteen years working as a journalist, researcher, and relief contractor in the Balkans, Mexico, the Middle East, and Turkey, is familiar with the world of international humanitarian relief and its many contradictions: the benevolent intentions, the often corrupt and colonialist outcomes.
“No one loves you anymore,” a Serbian friend tells Tess shortly after the U.S. invades Iraq. “You” refers to all Americans, though Tess doesn’t need to be told. Neither she nor Laura harbor many illusions about their line of work or the lives they lead. They are people who may wallow in the world. They live in contrast to the populations of asylum seekers and refugees they are supposed to serve, who languish in UN-staffed camps, or are caught in the limbo of Ottoman law, under which, as Tess learns upon joining Laura in Istanbul, “the only people who can apply for asylum in Turkey are the ones fleeing persecution in Europe.” Tess and Laura can look at the Bosporus and contemplate “the dolphins on their way from the Sea of Azov to the Atlantic,” they can breathe in the particular freshness of Istanbul air. They know at any time they can leave and go elsewhere.
While much of To Remain Nameless is set in the early aughts, “those murderous years that seem quiet now because they came before all the uprisings,” violence is ever-present. Tess recalls her time on the Kosovo border, the shock of realizing that “half the people she’d thought were exhausted and resting were in fact dead. Nothing was real until that new lens fell into place.” Often, sites of violence are then met with the ongoing violence of an incompetent international response: to crises on the border, to asylum seekers in the city. And then there is the violence of everything to come, the heartbreak of many now-vanished worlds. In one quiet scene, Tess sits in a café behind the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and waits for her half-brother Max. The time is late 2010. Two young Syrian men approach her to try out their English. They long to go to America, they say. “How could she explain her half-brother, who had left the affluent suburbs of America to wander the arid peaks of Syria, and who was happy there? How stupid would they think him? She told them: I know it must be bad, but I have a feeling that eventually you’ll look back on this period with nostalgia.”
As surely as Zagajewski invoked a world covered in “the nettles that methodically overgrow / the abandoned homesteads of exiles,” Tess understands from her work in the camps of Macedonia and Gulu that refugees are “visions of the future.” She also sees what lies ahead for herself. In part from overexposure to the world’s brutality, Tess knows she will never give birth. She thinks of her uterus as “a bag with the drawstring pulled tight.” She will make of herself an “endpoint, a refusal to give anything to her mother and father and the grandparents she hardly knew. Let their windows fall shut and go dark.” She thinks all of this while Laura labors. Laura who wants “to feel everything,” who has always seemed to Tess stronger than any man, who at twenty-five followed a Macedonian minister into a press conference and in front of international news agencies demanded that (now North) Macedonia open its border to people dying in Kosovo.
And yet, from the broken world, glimpses of wholeness shimmer and beckon. Fox’s narrative warps gorgeously as Laura moves closer to delivery and Tess brings her memories closer to their present day. Laura bucks her body against Tess, “and there in that motion, in those fluids that rushed and gushed inside her…were not only the Istanbul nights at the end of days…but the manic drives through the Balkans they’d made the summer they first met…the planeloads of ammunition landing at Marsa Alam before it was turned into a resort, the solitary soldiers guarding Sufi tombs in the Western desert…all of that swelled and gushed inside her, was what her body was made of, as much as her father’s lemon-yellow suit and her mom’s sepia fruitstand.” To Remain Nameless is concerned with the lives all of us carry within, no matter how fragmented they seem, no matter the ruined landscapes through which we take them. It is a novel studded with intimate scenes of narrowly personal significance and then ecstatic moments of life cracked open – like the single body of protest in Tahrir Square before Mubarak orders it to be fractured brutally into painful, individual lives.
Laura stretches to breaking and brings Tess hurtling into the present: “For that moment Tess too was both herself and no one, a tissue of pure abstraction, inscrutable and bottomless, as inarticulate as the black of an eye. … a bucket of flesh, a flash of light, a code, an emergent spark mistaken for a woman.” To Remain Nameless presents a theology of humanity: pieces of flesh who flare-up in time and place, who wander the world, or stay home, or are forced to abandon home. Bodies that might go to a protest or get buried in a mass grave, who might give birth twelve stories above the streets of Manhattan, or in the mud of a refugee camp. None of it is just. Laura gives birth, and Tess is revived. She will continue her life, despite it all, and “without knowing why or where or anything.” And so will Laura, and so will her child. Praise the mutilated world.
Reviewed by Clare Needham