Book Club - Yumna Kassab’s Politica

Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. Her novels include Australiana and The Lovers. Yumna’s writing has been listed for prizes including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and The Stella Prize.  Yumna Kassab is also Parramatta’s first laureate in literature In Politica the reader is transported to conflict engulfing a country. Through glimpses of ordinary life and revolutionary struggle we are shown the cost of war on a people and the tenacity, the fierceness of will required to carry on. I’d like to begin this review with the tremendous narrative style that guides this storytelling. Kassab weaves voices together to reveal a story that is both grounded in these people’s everyday lives and allowed to float through the passions, concerns and petty jealousies that guide us all, whether we acknowledge them or not. This style was also in evidence in Kassab’s early novel Australiana. In that work the reader found the voices of an Australian town laid bare and the perspectives of the townsfolk, often at odds, found a cohesion in their shared geographic and historical journey. Politica weaves together these voices to chronicle the history of the conflict from its early days, through the height of the violence and into a strange liminal zone where people question whether they ever knew another way of life. The power of these competing and complementary voices is to keep the reader constantly shifting between space, time and perspective and so while we may not ever have the first hand knowledge of Politica’s contested ground, we are forced to look at it from every angle. In a way we both feel alienated from the action but also cannot fail but to resonate with some of those we hear from. The narrative is divided across five sections. In each we discover aspects of life through the conflict; a father and son’s relationship, a dynasty of resistance fighters, or a woman’s struggle to eke out a space for herself.    Politica is not a linear narrative and in this we find another impact and power of Kassab’s style. As we work through the novel we may be rocketed backwards or forwards through events or memories. The conflict is both fresh and seemingly endless and in this we discover something of the horror that is carried by all who are touched by the violence. Life in the conflict may seem to age prematurely whilst also leaving individuals in stasis. After years the people may wonder if they have really lived at all outside of the conflict.  Be careful though. I want to avoid trying to draw too easy a conclusion from Politica; about its purpose, or inspiration, or the message it may have for our world right now. What seems apparent to me is that the novel offers a chance to explore something of the violence that I have never had in my life, but that I know exists in the world. This violence is a real part of people’s lives and their shared histories. It’s not that a novel like Politica can necessarily bridge that gap in my understanding (if anything can), rather it is another nod to the power of narrative to reach out across one groups ignorance and misunderstanding and offer stories that might help us be better.