The secret maker of the world
March 2014
Abbas El-Zein / UQP
There’s a reason I sometimes enjoy indulging in an afternoon of listening to a good dose of Dad Rock, albums like Exile on Main Street, Who’s Next and Led Zeppelin II. It’s because they’re more-or-less no bullshit rock’n’roll, of the kind that’s kinked with a storytelling style that’s sometimes swaggering, sometimes sharp-witted, but mostly just straight from the heart. There’s ventriloquism there, but it seems to come from a place that its makers think is true.
Reading Abbas El-Zein’s new collection of short stories, The Secret Maker of the World, is a little like tuning into one of these albums. The stories are straight-up, with little by way of conscious literary tricksy. Its characters come at us from places of extreme or unusual experience, from diverse historical periods and geographical spread, but also try to get across some of their mundanity: a sniper in war-torn Beirut; a boatman on the Yellow River who, for a fee, will collect the bodies he finds carried on the current; a deaf Iraqi woman’s diary romanticises her search for her lover who has fled to join the insurgency. Everyone wants to survive, to make a living, to live to see another day. Some make it, some don’t.
While the range of voices that El-Zein performs leans mostly on a static third person, some play a little further away from that place of narratorial reliability. There’s an affecting and deliberate shift, for example, in ‘Respect’ in which Mohammed, an Afghan construction worker who has been attached to projects around the world, addresses David, an apparently dismissive and arrogant Australian engineer. Mohammed’s soliloquy assumes a tone of defence, an accounting for himself that demands the respect he believes David hasn’t afforded him. The story of Mohammed’s departure from his boyhood village to take up his role as a bit player in the global economy carries a deeply wrought and finely-balanced sense of loss, excitement and fear. To understand someone’s story, to know what they have sacrificed to be where they are, to know what they know, is the very fabric of respect. But in its use of the second person and its confessional control over the telling of a story, ‘Respect’ also gives a hint to its true shape, in that it shares something with another, much older, classic that uses the same technique: Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’
‘Bird’s Eye,’ also stands out in its imagined account of the historically real thirteenth-century geographer Yaqut al Hamaoui as he prepares to flee the city of Merv, which is soon to be overrun by the Mongols. Its style recalls the novels of Orhan Pamuk, particularly in its close following of its central character’s deliberations, the sweeping back and forth between imagination, memory, dream and reality. Borges is there too, in the moment Yaqut loses himself while writing in a confusion, a sudden realisation that he might not be himself, but rather ‘the tool of some divine science; a poor go-between in the service of a bigger and better intelligence.’
Like every good album, there are a couple of singles here that have been polished a little more closely than the rest of the collection. It’s reassuring to find that these hits rest on a solid bedrock of storytelling.