grief disguised as the rage you cannot
name for it is the love you never knew
—Mira Mattar
“I have a name but it is not mine” British-Palestinian poet Mira Mattar writes near the opening of her novel Yes, I Am a Destroyer, first published in England by Ma Bibliothèque in 2020 and recently republished in the United States by Litmus Press. All the descriptive categories I’ve just used—novel, British, Palestinian—are ones I hesitate to deploy in relation to this text (for want of any better term: Lisa Robertson in her blurb dubs it a “glorious tract,” Mirene Arsanios a “prose novel slash fictional poem”). I’m not sure that Mattar would accept any of these identifying labels, lacerating as the work is of any identification, caustic as it is about the good subject nestled in identity, and dedicated as it is to the rampages and rages of the bad subject.
This is not a “Palestinian novel” like Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost or Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin, fine as those works may be. Their adherence to realism, to narrative sequence attuned to historical events and character development, Mattar entirely dismisses, or, rather, dismantles. “My dearest fear is destiny—that everything is written, that the path is forged, word follows word, sentence follows sentence. I hear over and over that it is the nature of things to end—but all I see is bludgeoning continuity.” Likewise, she refuses the desire for ethnographic characterizations that reassure by emplacing and humanizing: “I won’t give up the names of my mothers or italicize the food we eat. I won’t write the story that keeps us in our places, peered at sensitively from the radio and awarded. I won’t find home in the end.” If anything, Yes, I Am a Destroyer is closer to Adania Shibli’s novellas in its out-of-kilter relation to the world and painstaking attention to the grotesqueness that attends any enumeration of the minutiae of mundane existence. But it is still quite unlike those also. In keeping with her long and vigorously paratactic poems Affiliation (Sad Press, 2021) and And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves . . . (Veer2, 2023), this is a novel that works as a poetic structure rather than a novel: defiantly non-linear, it has to be read like a constellation in the interrelation and configuration of its parts, back and forth.
Nonetheless, I would not hesitate to say that this is a resolutely Palestinian work, not least in its adamant refusal to situate or emplace itself as such. Throughout, there are momentary allusions to a never directly named Palestinian history and memory that an attentive reader will likely recognize as such: “Around my neck was hung a key to a house that does not exist in a place that does not exist but is teeming with people. It thudded against our chest exposing its lost hollow”; “What can I recall without memory? Only a melancholy tone—pat and shallow, not much but a fragrant impression. You eat oranges like your grandmother unknown. . . . This is not my key to nothing but I try to bear it lovingly.” Such passages as these, selected from either end of the text, find echoes everywhere in it, as if the absent presence of Palestine constantly punctuates what is otherwise a rather grungy metropolitan scenario. But such citations of a presumptively Palestinian fate are so rigorously held in suspension, in virtual anonymity, that they merge and articulate with other categories or locutions of identity only in order to share in their mutual disturbance.
Displacement and dislocation, loss of state-sanctioned identifications and legally recognized belonging are so regularly inflicted on the minoritized populations of colonial and racial regimes that the reaction of asserting a distinct counter-identity may seem the historically typical form for resistance to take. But what liberal obtuseness has dubbed and dismissed as “identity politics” goes by its true name as differential insurgency. It is predicated on the loss of the self-evidence of belonging, not on some atavistic cleaving to a minor version of universalism’s own identity politics, that ghoulish and insubstantial category the Human, or the “neutral, universal, unique self” to which at one point the narrator claims to aspire. “It was,” the narrator proclaims at the outset, “their universals I loved the most,” only to discover later that, in comparison with her gracious employer, epitome of ruling-class perfection who is “making a charity with her artist friends to help poor Arab children,” her own humanity is deficient: “her humanity glowing as mine is tapped and drained, naked lymph.” The liberal pretense that claims the commonality of the human—“that because we have something in common, we have something in common”—reveals itself as another means to possession: “She tells me she is so glad she’s found me, that all her friends want one just like me.”
For the “thingified” (as Aimé Césaire put it), for the dispossessed, there is no belonging in this “world of good taste, built upon what it excludes,” no “identity” recognized as sovereign subjecthood, and nothing which belongs of right to them. The dispossessed offer the overlooked substructure of a radical state of disidentification rather than an identity to be recovered or affirmed. The identities imposed on or aspired to by them have no more substance than does gender or the treacherous rituals of this dedicated and eager consumer (“What would a me-like girl wear?”) or of the dutiful employee who masquerades in the master’s home like one of Genet’s maids. Alienation has a historical basis, but it is also registered at the subjective level. Disidentification suffuses this whole non-narrative of radical unbelonging in a world the narrator perforce regards with the defamiliarizing gaze of the outsider.
Mattar’s narrator dramatizes this state of radical alienation by setting herself the task of becoming a self, a “good female subject,” a task at which, inevitably, she fails again and again, ever better, as Beckett might say. To this task, “Routine is crucial,” and fulfillment of the requirements of this “forced insatiable I” results from “performing, with a minimum of effort, a series of repetitive tasks.” Ardently she faces the challenge of assuming a “nice personality: me,” undertaking with painstaking thoroughness the assigned rituals of female living:
They told me I was a girl, and I believed them. It taught me who I may and may not love, how to arrive at femininity and what I may and may not invoice for.
Peered at and skirted I understood my love would always have a pleading tone, that a shirt would never fall predictably against my chest, and that the lineage of smiling was only a hook in the cheek.
There are the strangely erotic routines of domesticity, where “Cleaning returns me to I,” the scouring of the floors giving way to the scouring of the body, the grooming, the brushing, the depilation, the flossing, the deodorization a kind of “murderous cleanliness.” Then the rituals of dressing and making up, “approximating their outfits,” and the rituals of shopping and consumption that include a magnificent farce of purchasing “a bedspread at seventy-five percent off” and being “high for hours after” that flips into a dream of the “one thousand chapped and blistered fingertips,” the “one thousand drops of blood” of the workers who made this cheap commodity into which the narrator disappears.
Then, inevitably, the performative rituals of loving, dressed in a quite savage parody of the language of the self-help or couple’s therapy manual and the metonyms of desire:
Be careful with your words—when to say I, when to say we. Be not overly concerned with the detachment of some limbs and organs: heads in laps, hands in hands, hearts in hands. Try to like each other’s friends. Find activities you both enjoy. Try new cuisines. It is not enough to have a heart in common. Allow sexual acts to be playful, but never insincere. Suspect perversion. Suspect those who love solitude. . . . Enjoy inseparability’s spacious trap. It is love’s true trick, like pain’s, to arouse a feeling of uniqueness: no one has ever felt this way before.
Love’s rituals of course require a handbook: nothing here is natural, everything is learnt, inculcated, dinned into the skull of the alienated subject by dint of repetition and imitation. Identity is, as we have long been taught, iteration:
Having observed over time others attempt to communicate, I started moving my hands as I had seen them move theirs. They did not do so on inconsequential words—prepositions, conjunctions—but on crucial ones—pronouns, possessives. “You”—an open palm gestures in your direction, a finger points out the perpetrator. (Everything is war here.) “We”—rarely used and if so only to bind and exclude; or with abandon, imprecisely, implicating and including with force, leaving the shy, the sick, the dead to roam the edges eternally.
The work of the pronoun is violent and exclusionary, marking the boundary between friend and enemy, the good subject and the ejected other, and even gesture describes the essential identity of the good subject that is the possessive individual.
In her ardent pursuit of belonging, the narrator is obsessed with possessions, her own, those of others, and those she would possess in orgies of pointless shopping or purloining, from sachets of sugar or mayonnaise to her employer’s clothing. Everything turns around possessions for “this woman stretched with objects”: “In my room I have just enough space to arrange my possessions around my possessions, and maneuver myself around them, possessed.” Possession is the mantra that anchors her pursuit of being itself with an almost Cartesian certitude: “I belong. I own and am. My husband is possessive, so I know he loves me.” Even the carefully performed personality is a property, or a container for the subject’s properties, though it is always in question whether that makes it a secured possession or merely a stage property, a mask such as that which is the etymology of persona: “the self—that constant stranger . . . gets a personality and puts things in it.”
To assume the language is to assume its brutality: “Though it is not mine, I clean and cut the language diligently but still it is marked with blood. I employ its normal cruelty with dry eyes.” But never will the narrator assimilate the language as her employer does, taught as the latter has been by the “finest institutions . . . to use the idioms with total confidence, knowing their bloody roots and loving them.” On the contrary, “My education taught me that everything is on the outside. I was never human! It turned me away from myself.” There, on the outside, like every Caliban, the narrator’s profit from learning to fulfill the language of gestures and idioms of belonging is to curse. Much of Yes, I Am a Destroyer is a furious litany of imprecation and disgust, full of savage and often self-mutilating rage and fantasies of vengeance, “a string of weak sabotages” such as strangling the employer’s goldfish and inserting their rotting carcasses into the hems of curtains. The cruelty is in fact rarely agential but consists in lacerating bodily descriptions or depictions of decay in long lists that sling together the abject and decaying, the violent and the beautiful with a vertiginous indistinction. Many of the lists consist of items in supermarkets or department stores or of accumulated possessions, piled upon one another without differentiation. Others are lists of what is perceptible from the narrow vista of a London flat’s window or on the street, from sputum to fox turds, body parts to medications, flowering lilac to condoms, a debased epic technique refunctioned from the naming games played by kids on buses or trains. This anhierarchical accumulation betrays no horror of the body, however, Swiftian as its energies sometimes seem, but ultimately represents a refusal of the overarching logic of value itself, an inversion of the reduction of everything to indifferent exchangeability of the commodity form.
This refusal is, to riff on a phrase of Fred Moten’s, “the refusal of what has been refused.” In the years since Yes, I Am a Destroyer’s initial publication, the Israeli genocide and, moreover, its unflinching acceptance by the powers that be globally, has taught anyone not already aware of this fact that the Palestinian occupies a zone of ontological nonbeing. This is the novel’s deep engagement with a never-named Palestine which has, no more than the narrator, no name that is its own, no name that obliges recognition or acknowledgment in itself, persisting “without a home, not even a home in writing.” For those “born on our knees—into guilt, work, emergency,” whose “birth certificate is also obituary”; for those who inhabit “geographies whose function is to make the I am of the one into the am I of another, to manufacture cruel difference”; whose I am becomes I am illegible; who cannot belong to what is not theirs, “every speech act is the single suitcase for fleeing in an emergency.” The powerful “rely on [their] amnesia” so that theirs is “the arduous ardor of remembering not to forget, or: learning. Form.”
This is the form that reflects the fragmentation of Palestinian life, from the broken body to the segmented homeland to the dispersed and forcibly disconnected populations. “All their stories are garbled away from sense and further yet from poetry. A broken story is not a poem. A story that cannot exist but wants to is not a story.” As Edward Said once lamented, the Palestinian lacks even the permission to narrate. And yet Yes, I Am a Destroyer refuses that logic and finds its form precisely in the broken, the fragmented, the abandoned, the unfinished. Its episodic and fragmentary story, to echo Gramsci’s characterization of subaltern narratives, befits the dispossessed’s insurgent speech:
songs written nowhere mobile costing nothing
making a new language for a new world or a new world
from a new language
Maybe this “new language” issues from the desire “to dream more than a murderer’s dream, live more than a murderer’s life,” but certainly what it utters is a steady burden of negation of a world saturated by the forms of what Jeffrey Sacks calls “settler life.” In such a world, negation is the proper path to affirmation: “Every no a yes to not-this.”
It’s a while since I’ve read anything as compelling and genuinely poetic as this text’s entirely unreconciled but deeply moving conclusion, its lyricism entirely warranted by the fierce and unrelenting skepticism of all that has gone before—the effect is one I can only compare to moments in Beckett’s prose or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. Yes, I Am a Destroyer is stippled by stone throughout, in ways that cannot help calling to mind the grounding of Palestinian resistance and sumud, not just on the land but on the firm bed of stone beneath it that Palestinian masons have long worked and that every child early learns to hurl in symbolic acts of resistance against the occupation. It is fitting then that its final lines should find the free rhythm of their breathing in stone and in a song “to all that knows refusal is a kind of devotion”:
From the tiny scent, young apple, tar, soot, tooth, paper, kiss, sleep, blood, saliva, small animal stretching, bullet chorus, to each pulsing universe glimpsed at the feeling limit of skin, of all that is shared which is all there is. Every thing’s and no thing’s. Audaciously. In love. Always and only. To lean is to stand against. A stone, a stone is pulled from the mouth. Knowing and mottled, studied, dirt brushed off, held. Lump of remembrance, brutal compass, a mirror reflecting an impossible sky—tangible, all at once. A stone, a stone is pulled from the mouth, pulled from the mouth and thrown. Jaws open, hands open—breathing, breathing, here.
_____
Yes, I Am a Destroyer. By Mira Mattar. New York: Litmus Press, 2025. 141 pp. $20.00, paper.
