“As the war destroyed the world we were born into, we built an alternative in our bodies.” This quote, from Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers, is the tamest possible way to sum up the novel’s premise. It is both a postcolonial tale dealing with assimilation, asylum, grief, and identity, and a novel about taboo sex dealing with a wide variety of kinks. In a recent Guardian interview, Addonia noted two inspirations for his book — Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), a postcolonial inversion of Heart of Darkness, and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928), a classic of highbrow French pornography. I was taken by Addonia’s interview and I liked his pitch: “I’m taking writing back to the rock’n’roll era!” Unfortunately, The Seers is a disappointment. Not because it doesn’t blend postcolonial lit and European ultra-porn — it does — but because it doesn’t rock. He’s playing chords and he’s certainly belting out the lyrics, but the record’s filled with duds — if you put it on at a party people would go home.
On a park bench in London, Hannah narrates the story of her exile to a male refugee, Bina-B, for the entirety of the novel’s sole, uninterrupted 120-page paragraph, while penetrating him with a strap-on dildo. During the course of this X-rated Forrest Gump, we learn the story of Hannah’s initial flight from Eritrea. With her parents both dead, an aunt scrapes together money from relatives for the months-long journey to the U.K., the ultimate goal being for Hannah to become an engineer, or at least find safety and an education. In the London airport, Hannah tears up the fake Egyptian passport she used to pass customs in Cairo and flushes it down the toilet. Then, as instructed, she tells the agent at the entry gate, “Me English No Speak,” giving him a card explaining her country of origin and wish for asylum. With this begins a series of interviews and applications that end, as most bureaucracy does, in a mutually undesirable stalemate — Hannah is granted “Exceptional Leave to Remain.” She is found, as she puts it, “Potentially-British.” Addonia, who lived in refugee camps from the ages of 2 to 26, is an expert on the experience — the early sections detailing Hannah’s initial flight are the book’s best. It’s a clear story, and one readers of, for example, Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel about refugees in Berlin, Go, Went, Gone, will find familiar. The sex plot is more surprising; it is, as Hannah says, “A story uncensored and more truthful than my asylum application,” and “I’ve been called weird, shameless, and denounced for my decadence for having this urge to fuck a man’s ass in the way they wanted to fuck me.”
Relatives back home and other refugees in London don’t get it. What makes Hannah so kinky? Why do we find her “ogling the moist cracks of Bina-B’s cheeks” instead of studying engineering like her aunt wanted? Is it because she got into some soapy shower-play with her cousin back in Eritrea? (“The mutual pleasure when we inserted our fingers inside the other was like a current that streamed between us.”) Or because the treasured diary her illiterate father had preserved, the last relic Hannah has of her dead mother, turned out to be wall-to-wall smut? “I spat into his mouth.” “I slapped him.” “I sat on his face.” “I stood over him and showered him with the rain of my womb.” This is the kind of rock ’n’ roll that made headphones a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry.
Addonia seems to know his prose is precious and sentimental. He makes preemptive excuses for it in the text.
But it’s more than naughtiness running in the family. Addonia’s entire world is full of kink — pegging, cuckolding, fisting, piss-play, costumes. Virtually every person Hannah meets indulges. In the Guardian interview, Addonia complained about editors asking him to remove a scene in his last novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue, where a girl, immediately upon arrival at a refugee camp, starts to masturbate. He fought back, arguing, “The thing is, in a camp, people do have sex!” This is unquestionably true, and I agree: Novels about refugees should feature refugee sex. But the sex in The Seers doesn’t reveal a deeper layer of the characters, nor does it titillate the reader. It’s not sexy or thoughtful, or even provocative, just comically unrealistic. Plenty of refugees will flush fake passports down the toilet. Very few will open their mother’s diary and find the passage: “He loves the taste of our land on my soles, and he reveres the freedom I hid from the colonisers between my toes.”
Addonia’s prose style, more than Hannah’s sex olympiad story hour, is the most baffling choice in the book. The Seers features some of the most painful lines I’ve ever read: “I heaved as I swallowed sorrows with the memory of squirts.” “I found her scent in a pair of underwear that, like a cradle, held her stains.” “I craved to be the forest for the black panther that roamed inside her.” “My father had long hair … it was the blanket for my dreams.” “It was as if music had turned Diana’s eyes into a dance floor for her memories.” “She was warm, as if her chest was an oven that burnt with the logs of racism.” In Season of Migration to the North, Salih engaged with Joseph Conrad; in Story of the Eye, Bataille engaged with the Marquis de Sade; in The Seers, Addonia appears to be engaging with a more modern source: sappy Instagram poetry. The Seers reads more like Rupi Kaur than Bataille or Salih. “It is a blessing / to be the color of earth / do you know how often / flowers confuse me for home,” writes Kaur in a characteristic poem from The Sun and Her Flowers. I can picture those lines on just about any page of The Seers.
Addonia seems to know that his prose is precious and sentimental; he makes preemptive excuses for it in the text. Hannah says things like “I know I’ve used this metaphor before, but I make no apology”; “I exist to fight against originality”; and “To be refined and subtle kills the mystery of living.” I’m not buying it. I can understand the literary reasons for creating an unreliable narrator, but what is the possible point of giving them an unreliable prose style?
The novel’s ideas fight against originality, too. “Sometimes love becomes a war, and war yields love,” says Hannah. So true, I thought while reading. I almost wanted to reach through the pages and ask if, perhaps, she had noticed that cops and criminals are two sides of the same coin, or that the hunter has a tendency to become the hunted. Addonia’s unification of the parallel themes of asylum-seeking and pegging is at least his own concept — he compares Hannah’s “Exceptional Leave to Remain” to a double-sided dildo. I guess because everyone feels they’re getting screwed? I’m not sure even Addonia really knows. In the Guardian interview, Addonia said he’d heard that Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler in two weeks — though authoritative sources put it at around 26 days, or a bit less than a month. However long the great Russian novelist took to crank out his novel to pay off his debts, Addonia claims to have written The Seers in three weeks.
I believe him. ❖
Gideon Leek is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.