The Hair of the Pigeon (Mohammed Massoud Morsi, UWA Publishing)
Egyptian-Danish-Australian writer Mohammed Massoud Morsi’s The Hair of the Pigeon is a continent-spanning saga of survival, devotion and destiny. Yarmouk refugee camp forms the novel’s nexus; a place of struggle-scarred pasts and children rushed into maturity. Morsi crafts a 3-dimensional community that is as detailed in its day-to-day kindnesses as it is honest towards misdeeds and negative behaviours. Memories of the camp haunt The Hair of the Pigeon’s deep cast of characters long after Syria’s crackdowns and human-made calamities send them careening over borders and into doubtful, uncertain futures, where cycles of grief and closely held secrets wait to unearth themselves on foreign soil. Overcoming a slight tendency toward over-sentimentality through one punchy, event-filled chapter after another, stories accumulate via the protagonist-narrator’s limited perspective to create an intuitive sense of time’s passage. Morsi’s style is delightfully sparing in literary ornament, instead employing hard-working symbolic figures, crisp imagery and endearing dialogue. With journalistic diligence, broader historical arcs and region-wide socio-political movements are encoded in the spaces between anecdotes, often manifesting in the characters’ daily gripes. As settler-colonial displacement and state-backed mass violence persist, readers worldwide hold the power to prevent the humanity of the Palestinian people from becoming a casualty of conflict. Echoing the portraits of resilience found in Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry collection Forest of Noise, Morsi’s well-executed novel safeguards Arab asylum seekers’ experiences in the unassailable realm of literature.
Books+Publishing reviewer: Adam Novaldy Anderson is an Australian and Indonesian editor, writer and cultural arts educator in Western Sydney. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.
Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews
