Maya Lea Portner, Reem Bassous: “Negotiating Dystopia”
Two months ago, our mother was admitted to the Noor Hospital for People Who Need Organs and New Teeth. My sister and I had just finished donating blood and were in the parking lot of the hospital, both of us sitting in our car with the doors open, taking great gulping breaths of fresh air to restore our energy. Around us, paramedics leaped out of screaming ambulances and tried stretching soldiers back to life. A young man in a blue kameez and a red sash leaned over a stretcher, his cheeks like small hard tumors in his face. He gently admonished the soldier, This is selfish, guy, pull yourself together, while his friend stood next to him taking quick, worried puffs from a joint.
The state of the world is such that I can’t tell what parts of this are based on grim realism and what parts are horrifically dystopic allegory. The second time through, I realized it wasn’t out of line to wonder if the mother was admitted to the hospital, not because she needed organs or teeth, but because she had them.
It’s an uncomfortable read, always walking a very thin line. The tone is tense and clipped, adding to the horror that a run-of-the-mill day holds for the sisters. I barely get a sense of anyone as an individual. The events are reported simply, the most grisly details matter-of-fact:
I should not have to string these scenes up in front of you like this to help you understand that the word loss has a weight that cannot be borne.
Even when I get some sense of why the sisters have been brought to this training camp, I don’t feel much, as if I’ve taken on the objectivity of the narrator, the detachment of the voice. This is the danger of seeing constant chaos and human degradation: we get used to it, see it as normal. Whether it’s well-heeled school kids being mowed down by their disaffected peers, or children drowning in the Mediterranean on a 50/50 chance of escaping hell alive, or unrestrained genocide (what the hell, murderous Buddhists?), our minds normalize it, because if it were wrong, surely someone in authority would be doing something about it, wouldn’t they?
A Just Recompense 