THE SUMMERS: A Novel
by Ronya Othmann
Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 201 pages, $17.95
RONYA OTHMANN’S debut novel, The Summers, begins with a reversal. At the end of the prefatory chapter, the main character, Leyla Hassan, seems to be speaking for the author as she muses: “You always tell a story from its end. … Even if you start with the beginning.” In this way, Othmann announces a departure from traditional chronology in storytelling, a turn toward a more dreamlike structure. As the writer traces Leyla’s development from childhood to adulthood, the elusive nature of memory emerges as an abiding theme, suggesting temporal indeterminacy as a key feature of the novel.
Leyla shuttles between summers with her father’s Yazidi family in a small village in Syria and winters in Munich in her mother’s native Germany. Leyla’s father explains that the culture of the Yazidis, the Kurdish-speaking religious group to which his family belongs, is marked by its geographical indefinability. He explains that the official name of Syria overlaps with the unofficial territory of Kurdistan, a land that has no formal boundaries, and he warns Leyla that the name Kurdistan is unmentionable outside the family. The need for secrecy thus becomes an important early imperative for Leyla.
Instead of strict timelines and geographical demarcations, Othmann offers stories from Yazidi myths and legends, literature and music, along with accounts of the exploits of a vast array of family members. The first half of the novel focuses on the summers of the title, when Leyla’s grandmother teaches her Yazidi customs and religion and her father regales her with tales of his Yazidi family’s past, sometimes even when they are back in Germany. So immersed does Leyla become in the Yazidi way of life that she begins to experience identity questions, especially when Yazidi traditions concerning marriage to a boy from the village begin to conflict with her sense of herself.
Some of the stories recall the long history of violence to which the Yazidis have been subjected. On an early visit, Leyla learns the distinction between misfortune (illness, accident, poor harvests) and ferman (exemplified by their being forced to flee from massacres overnight and the religiously motivated murder of her grandmother’s father). As the first part of the novel closes, Leyla’s secular Communist father recounts in detail his imprisonment and torture, which culminate in his unexpected release and flight to Germany, where much of the second part of the novel takes place.
The switch to Germany as the primary setting allows Othmann to develop themes that have only been suggested earlier. She explores the struggles of immigrants in a Western country that continues to despise Kurds, as revealed by Leyla’s early experiences in her Munich school. Leyla’s lesbian life in Munich and during her college days in Leipzig is also explored. Part 2 begins with news of the Arab spring, signaling the urgency of current events for Leyla and her family, a subject that begins to occupy center stage in Leyla’s consciousness. For example, after a passionate weekend with a new lover, Sascha, Leyla returns to her apartment to learn of the random execution of a cousin in Syria, and immediately feels guilt that even as she had been dancing in a club, her cousin was being shot on a bus. Similarly, Leyla’s trip to Sascha’s childhood summer home on the icy Baltic sharply contrasts with her steamy childhood summers in Syria and establishes a distance between the two women. This gap widens when Sascha reveals that she has told her mother about Leyla and asks if Leyla has come out to her family, an act that Leyla can’t even imagine.
As conditions in Syria dramatically worsen for Leyla’s father’s family and Leyla becomes increasingly absorbed by them, she moves from one apartment to another in Leipzig, packing only her backpack and gym bag. This dislocation parallels the constant movement of the Yazidis from place to place. The backpack and gym bag may function as a contemporary version of the lightly packed suitcase, a Yazidi household requirement in case the family had to flee on short notice, and a central symbol of the novel.
Early in The Summers, when Leyla wishes to take notes on the details of the Yazidi faith that she’s learning about, her grandmother admonishes: “No, write it down? For what? … Better in the head, she said. There it is safe from everything.” In violating her character’s injunction, Ronya Othmann’s elusive and compelling novel has performed a great service to readers in the Western world. Its documentation of Yazidi customs and history can deepen our understanding of events that we may have only heard about on the news, if that. The novel contains a useful glossary of terms, though it might also have been helpful to include a calendar of key events in Yazidi history, since they continue to play a role in current events and the historical connections are not always clear. Still, Othmann is to be commended (along with her adept translator Gary Schmidt) for shining a light on an often overlooked culture.
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Anne Charles cohosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ.
