Amelia Zhou at The Sydney Review of Books:
How many ways can you say the word ‘love’? In Arabic, Abbas El-Zein tells us in his memoir Bullet Paper Rock (2024), there are at least twenty-five, perhaps up to one hundred, words that express love in all its shades. The word jawa, for instance, refers to ‘alternating states of hope and despondency that a lover endures’. More than a word with a double meaning, it points to another kind of dynamic: the emotional tides typical of a lover’s conundrums about their beloved. Hope and despondency may initially strike us as incompatible, even oppositional, in meaning, yet they are less so than they appear. For El-Zein, expressions of love also contain ‘the possibility of [love’s] deficit, of a certain fragility inherent to the utterance’. In jawa, this four-letter container, we see mirrored back the tenuous fulfilment of love El-Zein describes. Just as love can be reciprocated and fulfilled, it can also be undercut and anguished by the prospect of its own defeat.
In Bullet Paper Rock, El-Zein further maps the amatory pivoting between hope and its inversions (disappointment, failure, and defeat) onto the affective condition of the migrant. Negated forms of hope, El-Zein suggests throughout the memoir, become emblematic of his experiences of dislocation, from leaving his home country of Lebanon for Europe, before finally emigrating to Australia.
more here.
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