Yumna Kassab – Parramatta’s first laureate in literature – tells stories in fragments. It’s now her recognisable style: mosaic segments that coalesce into a constellation view. The author skilfully employed it in her debut story collection, The House of Youssef, where some of the tales were only a page or two long, as well as her first novel, Australiana, and in her follow-up The Lovers, which was shortlisted for last year’s Miles Franklin. But it is in her latest novel, Politica, that this approach feels most resonant, with nonlinear narrative and atomised storytelling speaking to the novel’s subject of war – its incomprehensible disorder and irreparable fissures – and a community grappling with the fallout.
Amid an unnamed conflict and location somewhere in the Middle East, Politica centres a few key characters. Abdullah is the figurehead of a resistance movement and husband to the pragmatic Khadija, who ideologically spars with him and strives to protect their family; their daughter, Yasmeen, despite her mother’s dissent, becomes her father’s successor. We’re introduced to Salma, a woman reflecting on the irreparable alteration of her life by a war decades prior. Interleafing with these narratives are vignettes of ephemeral scenes and characters: villagers who visit a town well to remember the dead; a woman losing her faith after a loved one’s death; an invasion forever upending a teenager’s education.
