Unholyland, a
Novel in Verse: a Review
Every now and then, a reader finds an author who consciously
strives to write A Novel of Great Significance. When a writer makes that
powerful and audacious claim, a deep and powerful matrix of setting, time,
mood, and human verity must be found within the pages. It doesn’t hurt to
unearth a nearly unused literary structure, one which was born (and perhaps
died) in the arms of Pushkin. Nor does it hurt the author to have functioned at
the top level of his art for over two decades. . Unholyland, by Aidan
Andrew Dun, is an epic poem made up of approximately 250 sonnets of a form
unused since Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Speaking with a level of lyricism
that bears comparison to Onegin, Unholyland depicts forbidden love and a millennium-old
legacy against the backdrop of one of the most intractable scenarios in human
history, the Israel-Palestine conundrum.
For those who have encountered Onegin
mainly through Tchaikovsky’s eponymous opera, a brief review of plot might
serve. Set in Tsarist Russia, the archetypal novel in verse follows the
dissolute title character, a wealthy twentysomething heritor of the Russian
equivalent of a grand Southern plantation, where slaves are replaced with
serfs. Onegin befriends a poet, Lensky, not yet twenty, who links Onegin to two
sisters, one of whom falls desperately in love with Onegin, but whose passions
are rebuffed coldly. Onegin and Lensky stumble over each other’s intentions at
a country ball that parodies the social schedules of the idle Russian rich.
Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel. Through further mishap, the duel comes off,
and Onegin slays Lensky.
Onegin drifts around the world, never
able to overcome his guilt. He winds up in Moscow, where he encounters the
younger sister. She is now married to an elderly prince.Onegin tries to undo
what he had done by spurning her years ago. The girl, now a woman even more beautiful
than she had been as a youth, now spurns Onegin to remain true to her husband,
while blaming him for the loss of their one opportunity.
Mr. Dun assures me that the saga of Unholyland
continues, so that full plot comparisons are premature. To understand what Dun
is attempting, it is important to see why Onegin towers over much of
nineteenth-century literature, and why the setting of Unholyland provides
an epochal parallel.
The character of Onegin represents the
beginning of the end of the idle rich. The historical fact of the French
Revolution and the upheavals in Europe that paused bloodily in 1848 certainly
impacted all the nineteenth century novelists, especially the Russians (think
Chekhov and his play The Cherry Orchard). Onegin’s desolation at the end
of the novel represents the inherent purposelessness of wealth qua
wealth, and Lensky’s martyrdom strikes me as the temporary subjugation of the
will of the people that Karl Marx was already writing about. The girl, who we
see later as a fully developed woman Tatyana, represents the truth and fidelity
of the common man – a prototype for Marxian thought that would define the
twentieth century.
Dun’s leading character, Moshe Rambam
is the greightieth-great-grandson of the leading rabbi Rav Moshe Ben Maimon,
known to history as Maimonides. There is no more famous figure in Jewish
history than Maimonides, so the reader is warned against projecting any
preconceived notions on his descendant. Moshe (usually called Moss in the
novel) is a dreadlocked, pot-smoking, slingshot-rapping youth, about to be
forced into his obligatory two years of military service. He crosses
effortlessly into Palestinian youth culture, where oppression and poverty are
the métier. This creates a paradox that seems more befitting of Lensky in the
Russian novel-in-verse than of Onegin, but Dun’s vision of Israel reveals
itself not as an old, crumbling estate that will fall of its own weight, but
rather, an oppressor that will be just as liberated as the oppressed when the
state of oppression ends. Rambam’s
slightly older Palestinian best friend Rayyan never turns against Rambam, but
the tension from Rayyan’s people’s occupation by the Rambam’s people grips this
reader as a second skin while reading – a shadow of foreboding. Still, the image
of a scion of power reaching out and trying to blend with the powerless is
almost a trope, having featured prominently since Victor Hugo’s fluid use of
power and poverty in Les Misèrables.
The critical three-day period occurs on
the first days of the Hebrew month of Nisan, on the Passover festival, in which
Jews commemorate the Exodus from slavery to freedom. Dun leaves the Biblical
reference more or less unexploited; he’s an artist, not a demagogue, but the
irony is not lost on the reader. Moss, as Moshe is known colloquially
throughout the book (except when he faces certain death at a Palestinian
nightclub, where his fluency in Arabic and his Mediterranean features allow him
to pass as Musa), is nearly killed as he crosses over to Palestine, and is rescued
by Rayyan’s sister. In any other setting, and in less inspired hands, what
follows would not be exceptional. Girl saves boy. Girl heals boy. Girl falls in
love with other boy. First boy is set up to meet second girl. They fall in
love. Will they live happily ever after?
But nothing is certain, not even love, under the shadow of occupation. I
will make two further literary references, and in these two references, the
detectives among you will find a spoiler. Therefore, I will not annotate these:
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (cited by Moss Rambam in the text) and
John Singleton’s 1991 drama Boyz in the Hood.
The structure of the sonnets that
comprise this novel and Pushkin’s work is three quatrains with contrasting
rhyme schemes ABAB, CCDD, EFFE, and a concluding rhymed couplet. Unlike
Pushkin, who stuck strictly to iambic pentameter in Russian, Dun allows for
excellent bleedthrough of the “slingshot hip-hop” resistance culture of the
West Bank. Liberating the stanzas of the strict rhythmic leg-irons allows the
poetry to dance when this is called for, such as in the following description
of Jalila, the sixteen-year-old leader of the Slingshot Hip-Hop movement:
When I first heard her in Shatila
I realized she was a healer,
a poet and a peacemaker,
a woman and an earthshaker.
She’s what the Arab world’s waiting for…
I feel a shift from the first couplet
(itself a pivot from the more classical verse that preceeds it) to the second
couplet, which calls forth Jimi Hendrix to this reader. The actual raps are Dun’s
imagination of the English translation over the Palestinian background music.
This flexibility might have been unacceptable in Pushkin’s time, but it is
mandatory in ours.
Dun ranges from the rough graphics of
the above quatrain to verses that sound more like the Song of Songs, like this
description of the heroine Jalila:
To some she brings velvet fruition,
to some, disastrous attrition,
the wearing down of all their dreams.
Or how about this couplet, and its
simile across three thousand years:
Nazareth: Mobile phones, like ears of barley,
buzz with life in her underbelly.
I was captured by Dun’s lyricism from
the first page, but never more so than at the first idyll between Moss and
Jalilah. I quote the sonnet in its entirety, and an analog from the Song of
Songs:
The atmospheric garden pleases;
it’s like being on another planet.
Here’s a waterfall that freezes;
here’s a fruiting pomegranate
where – through the dark – a nightingale
sang last night its lyric tale.
Ah! Here they are, sharing a joke
it seems, by a Palestinian oak.
Jalilah wears her black-fringed headshawl,
Moss has let his dreads hang loose.
Dove-calls seem to plead and seduce.
Now they wander by the waterfall
talking where a rainbow – over ferns –
makes a promise, while cool silver churns.
And Song of Songs Chapter 4: 10-17 (tr.
Chabad.org):
10: My beloved raised his voice and said to
me, “Arise, my beloved, my fair one, and come away;
11: For behold, the winter has assed, the
rain is over and gone.
12. The blossoms have appeared in the land,
the time of singing has arrived, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in
our land.
13. The fig tree has put forth its green
figs, and the vines with their tiny grapes have given forth their fragrance;
arise, my beloved, my fair one, and come away.
14. My dove, in the clefts of the rock, in
the coverture of the steps, show me your appearance, let me hear your voice,
for your voice is pleasant and your appearance is comely.
15. Seize for us the foxes, the little foxes,
who destroy the vineyards, for our vineyards are with tiny grapes.”
16. My beloved is mine, and I am his, who
grazes among the roses.
17. Until the sun spreads, and the shadows
flee, go around; liken yourself, my beloved, to a gazelle or to a fawn of the
hinds, on distant mountains.
I found that the more intense the plot became, the less
tight the poetry. By Chapter 7 (out of eight), I found myself given a green
light to speed through, and this disappointed me. Dun’s poetic forces surge
back in time to create a dramatic climax, right when it is needed. Even on the very last page, Dun gives us a
plot twist in verse. I would imagine that, as the author of a novel in verse
that was premiered at Royal Albert Hall, Dun is well in control of the
theatrical elements in his writing.
Unholyland is not for the passive reader. This is
not simple art. It’s not even an uncluttered story of young love. It’s not a
one-sided political screed; not any apologetic for either side. Dun calls out
the British, the Turks, and the Zionists, and (do NOT read a comparison or edit
out this parenthetical note!!!) the Nazis without equating anyone to anyone
else This is dangerous, challenging reading; don’t look here for a right or a
wrong. There is an ample, excellently
documented preface and good enough endnotes to establish Dun’s own point of
view. In the end, the art will have to stand on its own. This reviewer believes
that it will do just that, long after the inevitable firestorm disappears like
sand in a flash flood.
