1 Introduction: Re-imagining the World through the Prism of Milk
The aim of this chapter is not to learn about specifically ‘Arab’, ‘Druze’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ notions of food. Rather, the chapter aspires to be an exercise in a different form of knowledge production by looking at food in literature as an attempt to explore more-than-human1 relations. The background is political: in times of climate crisis, the understanding of our relations to and in the world will have to undergo a major re-orientation, and literature, as well as literary criticism, have always been a means of re-imagining the world.
Indeed, food would appear as an ideal starting point for exploring humans’ connection to the world that surrounds them. There is arguably no more intimate relation between humans and the world: when we eat and drink, we incorporate the world, we transform it physically and appropriate certain elements. In the process, we transform ourselves, our metabolism transforms the food into something which becomes the body through which we interact with the world. Boundaries are porous: as recent research in multi-species anthropology shows,2 the notion of the human as a discrete entity surrounded by the world of animals, objects and plants from which it can be clearly distinguished and disentangled is increasingly difficult to square with scientific knowledge. To name just one example, the importance of the microbiome for the human organism – and the fact that human life is inconceivable without it – throws into question the division between humans and the rest of the world. Human exceptionalism thus joins the opposition of nature and culture. Largely abandoned by mainstream anthropology, these foundational dichotomies of a Western, post-enlightenment science nonetheless remain powerful conceptual tools of knowledge production. Literature, as an alternative mode of knowing, can offer a different perspective, and help to question some of the preconceptions on which scientific knowledge is based.3
I turn to the theme of milk in Fadi Azzam’s novel Sarmada with the aim of considering the interrelatedness among humans, animals, plants, objects and artifacts.4 Milk as food is a particularly interesting case, as it is the only type of food the human body is capable of producing without technology in the widest sense of the term. Thinking within the categories of Western scientific knowledge, it occupies a place at the interface of human and animal, nature and culture: humans and cows are so much alike that they are grouped together as mammals. In the West in the 19th century there was even a widespread move to substitute breast milk for cow’s milk,5 despite the fact that cow’s milk often carried pathogenic bacteria which resulted in the death of numerous infants.6 On the other hand, the production of milk and dairy products is reliant on relatively complex technologies of fermentation and storage that precede consumption, and therefore reflects human emancipation from nature. In fact, the modern appetite for cows’ milk – the market for dairy products in the Arab world is still growing continuously – is very closely linked to the industrialization of food production, and the development of pasteurization and marketing strategies in the late 19th century.7 And yet again, as Valenze tells us, drinking milk has long been seen as a sign of the lack of civilization of pastoralist tribes – from the Gilgamesh epic to the ancient Greeks.8 For many non-milk-drinking cultures – which, globally, used to be the norm rather than the exception – milk is an unclean animal fluid on a par with urine.9 The ambiguous character of milk also comes to the fore in debates taking place in Europe and the US about the respective benefits and risks of raw milk as compared with pasteurized milk,10 which also influence the development of the dairy sector in the Middle East. Possibly, it is its position between the human, the animal, and human-as-animal that makes raw, unprocessed milk an ambiguous substance. Forms of interrelatedness of humans and more-than-human entities, as well as the fluidity of boundaries between them, are hardly as novel a subject in literary works, or in knowledge production outside the Western scientific knowledge system, as they are within it. In this chapter, I propose to trace the connections that the substance of milk establishes between various characters and entities in the novel and show how these connections throw into question some foundational aspects of scientific knowledge based on the premise of human exceptionalism.
Fadi Azzam, the author of the novel Sarmada, was born in Suweida in Syria in 1973. He belongs to a younger generation of Syrian authors whose work attracted attention outside the Arab world in the wake of the Syrian revolution. Sarmada is his first novel. The book first appeared in 2011 in English translation with Swallow Editions. The original Arabic version was published in the same year with Dār al-thaqāfa li-l-našr wa-l tawzīʿ (Beirut). Owing to the date of publication, the novel was mostly read in relation to the Arab Spring and the revolution and war in Syria. One review in the New Yorker even goes so far as to proclaim it “The Essential Novel of the Syrian Spring”.11 A second strand of reviews focused on the book’s graphic sex scenes and related questions of gender politics. Yet the theme of interconnectedness of humans, animals, plants and the land is pervasive in the novel. This appears in the notion that the place could be described as the true hero of the novel, which has been advanced in a number of reviews without being pursued very far. In an interview, Azzam pointed out this dimension of his work:
it seems that the place is the essential hero, is personified and exchanges roles with the life moving around on its crust. But sometimes in Sarmada there seems to be an essential unity between people and trees, rocks, the gorge, the dust and occasionally a separation. (International Prize for Arabic Fiction, 2012)
This chapter’s focus on milk in the novel takes up this lead. But before venturing further in this direction, I will give a brief summary of the plot. Given the great number of interweaving stories, what appears as a side-track in one reading of the novel may appear as an important part of the narrative in another. The following is a rather conservative – and selective – reading, largely concerned with reconstructing the chronological order to provide some measure of orientation.
2 The Plot
Sarmada begins in Paris in 2010. The narrator Rafi,12 a documentary filmmaker, meets the professor of quantum mechanics Azza Tawfiq. Having heard that Rafi comes from the village of Sarmada, mainly inhabited by members of the Druze community, she approaches him and tells him that the soul of Hela Mansour, a young woman killed in Sarmada in the late 1960s, has been reincarnated in her body. The transmigration of souls, Rafi is doubtful about, is a central part of Druze religious beliefs. He decides to return to Sarmada to investigate the claims of Azza Tawfiq. What ensues is a fragmented story line centring on three female characters who lend their names to the book’s three chapters. The first chapter, Azza, essentially relates the murder of Hela Mansour. Hela, the most beautiful girl in the village runs off with an Algerian man. In the traditional Druze setting, where marriage between Druze women and men from different communities is forbidden, it is clear to Hela that her return to the village will mean her death at the hands of her brothers. Nonetheless, she returns and is stabbed to death and beheaded by her brothers in front of the whole village.
The second chapter, Farida, narrates the life of a young woman who comes to Sarmada in order to get married to Salman, a chauffeur and gambler with a good reputation, shortly after Hela Mansour’s death. Tragically, Salman is killed by a stray bullet in the course of the wedding celebrations. This is just the first in a row of tragic deaths befalling the Salman family. Salman’s mother is overwhelmed with grief and her breasts begin to swell. When the local doctor and the medical staff in the capital Damascus fail to relieve Umm Salman from her ailment, Farida cuts open her breast with a razorblade. Blue-tinged milk pours out of the breasts, which Farida collects and stores away. Umm Salman quickly recovers. As a token of gratitude, Farida is allowed to continue living in the family’s old cow stables. Shortly after Umm Salman has recovered, Farida organizes a feast to which the whole village is invited. Being eyed with suspicion by many villagers, she hopes to be able to improve her relations with them. In the days following the feast, a mysterious affliction descends on the village: all villagers feel an irresistible urge to cry, followed by stomach cramps and vomiting. The whole population is sick for several days before they recover. After this incident, and the death of her new fiancé a year later, Farida, unwilling to submit to the traditional role of a widow, takes to the sexual initiation of the village’s young men. Shafee Mansour, Hela Mansour’s younger brother, is the last in a long line of adolescents Farida seduces. Discovering shortly after that she is pregnant, she gets involved with Hamud, a geography teacher who has lost his mind after the six-day-war, and eventually marries him. She gives birth to her son Bulkhayr, who becomes a favorite of the village population.
The third and final chapter is dedicated to Buthayna, Farida’s sister-in- law. The chapter begins by relating Buthayna’s relationship to a young man who has emigrated to Venezuela, and her realization that he will probably never come back. She rejects all other men, but when Farida’s son Bulkhayr starts school, she sexually abuses the boy for a year when he comes to her home for help with his homework. Eventually, ashamed of herself, she ends the abuse, gets married and leaves for the Emirates with her husband. Ten years later, when it turns out her husband is unable to have children, she returns to Sarmada. In due course, she is drawn into a sexual relationship with the now sixteen-year-old Bulkhayr, who breaks up with her at the end of the novel.
The novel ends with a short section on Farida. After Hamud also has died, she lives in a platonic relationship with a religious shaykh, but eventually retreats from the world. Toward the end of her life, as with Umm Salman, her breasts begin to swell and produce a green liquid. After she has poured the milk into bottles, she completely retreats from the world until the day of her death – the day when the narrator Rafi arrives in Sarmada.
3 The Milk Network
The stage for the appearance of milk as a central element of the story is set in the first chapter, in which the death of Amira, the village’s favorite cow is recounted:13
كانت البقرة الأشهر في المنطقة. لا أحد يعرف كيف فرضت جملة من العادات على الجميع، ولا كيف استقبلها أهل سرمدا متندرين بها، ولكن صرامتها جعلتهم يقرون بميزتها، فاطلقوا عليها إسماً استمدوه من خيلاء مشيتها كاسرين إمتيازا لا تتمتع به سوى الخيول العربية الأصلية. […] أما حليبها فهو الأغزر والأشهى في كل المنطقة.14
Princess was the most famous cow in the whole area. No one could quite understand how she [had imposed all her habits on everyone, nor how she was received mockingly by the people of Sarmada. But]15 she maintained her poise until they finally realized that she was something special. They ended up giving her a name that matched her imperious bearing, breaking the long-standing tradition that only thoroughbred Arabian horses merited such names. […] Her milk was the best though, the most abundant and delicious in the whole region.16
One day, the gets stranded on a cliff and the villagers, unable to save her, gather at the bottom of the cliff to wait for her inevitable fall to cut up the carcass. The slaughtering of the cow only just precedes the description of how Hela Mansour is murdered by her brothers after returning to the village. The connections established between the fate of these two are manifold – from the fact that both die as a result of their taking the liberty to leave the paths prescribed by tradition, their characterization as ‘something special’ to the details of the killing itself: both bodies are stabbed and finally beheaded. On one level, the moral condemnation of slaughtering a young woman like a cow is expressed in the juxtaposition of the two scenes, thereby reinforcing the absolute difference between a human being and an animal. On another level, however, it shows the porosity and fluidity of the boundaries between human and animal. When Amira becomes somewhat human through the attributes ascribed to her, and the great importance accorded to her death by the village community, Hela’s body foregoes some of its humanity in the description of it being butchered by her brothers, which closely resembles the scenes where a cow’s carcass is cut up.
Milk as a substance takes center stage in the novel’s second chapter in the form of Umm Salman’s mysterious ‘grief milk’ (ḥalīb ʾasā). Having lost both her sons, her sister, her niece and her nephew in close temporal succession, Umm Salman, Farida’s mother-in-law, is overwhelmed by grief. When she is no longer capable of producing tears, her breasts begin to swell:
رويدا بدأت دموع أم سلمان بالنضوب من الذرف المتواصل، وحين عجزت عن البكاء، بدأ ثدياها بالتضخم، وصارا بعد كل فجيعة يزدادان تورما حتى أصبحت تحتاج إلى رجلين ليساعداها على حملهما كلما ارادت قضاء الحاجة !؟ ولم تعد تستطيع الخروج من الباب من حجمهما الهائل، فجلب لها “سعيد الحداد” عربة بكرجات، كي تستطيع التحرك بها، فشلت كل وصفات العشابين بتوقيف نموهما غير المعقول، وذعر ممرض البلدة الذي يدعوه الجميع بالدكتور سالم من هول ما رأى، وطالبهم بادخالها المستشفى في دمشق. فهنا حالة لم يعدها الطب الحديث ولا القديم، ولم يسمع عنها أحد.17
Eventually, Umm Salman ran out of tears: she’d cried so much and for so long without any interruption. As her tears dried up, her breasts began to swell with every new calamity until she needed two men to help her carry them when she went to the toilet. They grew so large she couldn’t get through the door anymore and Saeed the blacksmith brought her a wheelbarrow to help her move around. The various remedies that the herbalists prescribed failed to halt their inexplicable growth and the village’s resident nurse, whom everyone called Doctor Salem, [was alarmed by what he saw and]18 told them to take her to the hospital in Damascus. It was a condition that neither modern nor ancient medicine had ever encountered before.19
Eventually, Farida is able to help her:
شل الرعب أم سلمان وهي ترى فريدة تمسك الحلمة الضخمة لأحد الثديين وتشطبها شطبين على شكل إشارة زائد. بدأت فضيلة المبتلاة بتورم الثديين، تطلق صرخات مجنونة، لم تعبأ لها يدا فريدة القاسيتان. إنتظرت قليلا وحين لم يخرج شيء، وضعت فمها على حملة الثدي، ورضعت بكل قوتها. شعرت بطعم الحليب الممزوج بالحسرة ينفر على وجها وفمها. ذاقت حلاوة غربية أصابت جسدها بالقشعريرة.. واعادت الكرة على الثدي الأخر..20
Umm Salman was paralyzed with fright as she watched Farida take a nipple in her hands and make two perpendicular cuts with the razor like a plus sign. Poor swollen-breasted Umm Salman started to scream as if she were possessed, but Farida’s cruel hands paid her no attention. She waited and when nothing came out, she bent down and began to suck on the nipple as hard as she could. She could taste the milky grief as it spurted into her mouth and on her face. The peculiar sweetness gave her a shiver. Then she did the same thing to the other breast.21
As the people of the village gather to witness the miracle, Farida collects the ‘grief milk’ in bottles and a bucket.
There is, to use one of the terms coined in multi-species anthropology, something ‘more-than-human’ about Umm Salman’s body. It transcends ‘human-ness’ in two important ways. For one, the narrative, as well as the imagery used by the narrator approach her body to a cow’s body. Following closely after the story of Amira, the association of Umm Salman’s swollen breasts with a cow’s udder does not appear particularly far-fetched. Practices usually framing human-animal relations are performed in an inter-human relationship: Farida is milking Umm Salman, she collects the milk in a bucket and bottles as she would collect cow’s milk and stows it away for further processing. Second, Umm Salman’s body becomes the site for a collective moment of catharsis which alleviates the suffering of the whole population of Sarmada:
شعر الجميع أن الثقل الغامض الذي جثا فوق فضيلة الخطار وبيتها، […] ومصائب عديدة لأهل سرمدة بدت لا تذكر أمام هول الموت الغامض. شعروا أن هذا الثقل قد بدأ يخف. وتأكدوا في الصباح أن أياما جديدة أقل نحسا وألما، بإنتظار سرمدة.22
Everyone had the feeling that the mysterious burden that had struck Umm Salman [al-Khattar] and her family, […] and the many misfortunes of the people of Sarmada seemed negligible in the face of the horror of the mysterious death.23 But now, it seemed, the curse had begun to lift. The villagers greeted the next morning with the knowledge that better days – happier, less painful days – were in store for them.24
Here, it is not the boundaries with other species that become fluid, but those between individual bodies of the same species.
After the grief milk has been separated from Umm Salman’s body, Farida’s appropriation and handling of the substance, and uses she puts it to, further extend the networks of more-than-human connections fostered by milk. Farida’s house, which provides the setting for this part of the story, is in itself a continuation of the theme of porous boundaries between humans and animals. After Farida has managed to cure Umm Salman, the latter allows the young widow to live in one of the family’s disused houses, previously used as a cow shed, whose last resident had been Amira the cow.25 It is here that Farida first stores the bottles of milk before she makes a cheese conserved in brine from one half of it and proceeds to ‘distill’ the other half “as you do with wine”.26 Again, these are practices of food production usually performed by humans on animal milk or other food stuffs.
Only at this point do the properties of the ‘grief milk’ become a matter of reflection for Farida: she is undecided whether this milk is blessed (mubārak) or impure / polluted (najis).27 Filling bottles with the milk is Farida’s first step in appropriating – and taking control over – this ambivalent liquid. The next step only follows almost a year later. During those months, Farida renovates the cow shed and dresses the courtyard with plants. We get a first indication of the mysterious powers of the grief milk in a short episode where Farida checks on the bottles of distilled milk and accidentally drops one of them in the courtyard. The next morning, she is surprised by the growth and the vigor of the plants growing close to the spill.
في يوم التاسع من اذار مارس عام 1969 يمكن القول: إنه كاد يغمى عليها في ذلك الصباح الربيعي من هول الصدمة، لما وجدت نبتاتها التي تشربت السائل المسكوب، وقد اكتست بخضرة لم ترها من قبل. وعقبت بروائح تثير الحنين مخلوطة بالشفقة الرقيقة، وحين هبت نسمة ربيعية وتحركت الأغصان المحملة بالثمار والبراعم والأزهار المريبة الشكل ودهشت من الهسيس الخفيف مثل موسيقى غامضة تعزف في الحاكورة، لها الصوت يشبه أصوات الندابات الحزينات التي تهيج القلوب وتعيد أسماء الموتى والغائبين إلى الوجود، وتفوح منها روائح عطرية فذة لم يعهدها المكان.28
On the spring morning of 9 March 1969, you could say that she nearly fainted when she saw that the plants that had soaked up the spilled milk were green, unlike any she’d seen before. Their wafting scent was like a longing mingled with delicate pity and as the fruit, bud and flower-laden branches swung in the spring breeze, Farida was bewitched by the soft, whispering rustle they made; it was like the song of wailing mourners. It stirred hearts and [brought back to life] the names of deceased and absent friends as the unique and unfamiliar perfume filled the air.29
In this short paragraph, Umm Salman’s milk, through processes of distillation and fermentation, the work of humans (Farida) and microbial cultures, comes to connect plants and humans. Although it is a liquid initially for human consumption, it nourishes the plants; further boundaries are dissolved. The plants become like mourners who help humans to come to terms with the loss of friends and family.
After close to a year of tending plants and animals, and tiring of the sexual advances of Sarmada’s men, Farida gets engaged again. When her fiancé Abbud dies of a heart attack shortly before the wedding, she finds herself isolated in the village community. After a failed suicide attempt she begins to “experiment” with the distilled grief milk, beginning a process of controlling the substance and containing its potentially harmful effects:
اخرجت إحدى قناني الحليب الأزرق المخزونة تحت في المستودع الجواني، وبدأت تجري عليها تجاربها التي تعلمت الكثير منها في طفولتها كابنة احد العشابين المولعين بالنباتات، وقدرتها على مد الصحة للأجساد السقيمة.
شمت رائحته، وجدتها تفوح حلاوة مشوبة بزنخة خفيفة. سكبت بعضا من الحليب في “كاسرولا” نحاسية، غلته جيداً واضافت إليه “حبوب البركة” وبعض من العسل الجبلي، وحين بدأ بالفوران، رشت عليه قبصات من طحين القمح الممزوج بالسمن البلدي وصنعت منه كباكب صغيرة بحجم عقلة الأصبع. لفتها بورق شفاف اللون على شكل حبات “كبب” صغيرة.
عبأت نصف كوب من اللبن الرائب صنعته من مقتنياتها الحليبية، تناولته مع إحدى قطع الحلوى! مسحت الخط الأبيض المتخثر عن جانب شفتها، وصارت تراقب تقلصات معدتها.. تشنج جسدها، عضت على أسنانها، نضحت عرقا، وانهمكت في موجة بكاء حاد لم تعهدها في حياتها ارادت الإستغاثة فلم يخرج صوتها، فقبعت تتلوى وتتشنج حتى غابت عن الوعي. مساء استفاقت. سارعت إلى المرآة رأت وجهها يعكس بياضا فذا مصقولا ويشع بالنضارة والأغرب، إن مزاجها عال، وروحها تضحك، وتضج بسعادة وافرة، لحظتها شعرت انها منذورة لتيقظ الفرح وسط هذا المكان المحاط بالوجوم والرجوم والصخور البازلتية الزرقاء الداكنة30.
She took some bottles of the blue-gray grief milk she’d stored and began to run some experiments, many of which she’d learned as a child; she was the daughter of a herbalist who’d been fascinated by plants and their power to heal the sick.
She sniffed the grief milk and found it smelled ever so faintly rancid with an underlying sweetness. She poured some into a copper saucepan and brought it to a boil, stirring in a handful of nigella seeds and some honey from the mountains. As soon as it started boiling, she sprinkled in a roux of flour and ghee. She rolled the resulting mixture into small knuckle-sized balls and wrapped them in cellophane like bonbons. She poured herself half a glass of homemade buttermilk and drank it down with one of her little bonbons. She licked up the clotted trail at the side of her mouth and instantly her stomach began to cramp. Her body went into spasms, she clenched her teeth, poured with sweat, and dissolved into a fit of violent sobbing unlike any she’d ever known. She wanted to call out for help, but no sound came. She curled up on the floor, writhing and twitching, until she finally lost consciousness.
She came to that evening. She hurried over to the mirror and saw that her face was uncommonly white, smooth and refreshed. Stranger still, her spirits soared and her heart seemed full of laughter; she felt wonderfully happy. She realized at that moment that it was her duty to reawaken joy in the village, which was surrounded by sorrow, stones and dark blue basalt.31
At this point in the story, the grief milk goes through another transformation. When previously Farida’s handling of the milk drew from techniques of everyday cooking and food preservation (fermenting milk, preserving it in the form of cheese, distillation), the frequent references to her herbalist father and the “experiments” shift the practices in which the substance is involved closer to medicine or healing. The ambivalence of the milk, and the food into which it is processed remains central in its description: it is sweet, but also rancid, it is a bonbon (ḥalwā in the original, the same root as sweet) which causes violent pains in the body, but it also has a cathartic effect. In the hope that the people of the village might likewise profit from this effect, Farida decides to invite the whole village to a feast where she serves food secretly mixed with grief milk.
سلق الأرز في “خلقينات” ضخمة، وتقدمت فريدة وأخذت القنينة الملفوفة بكيس الجنفيص، وبدأت تسكب منها فوق تنكات الحليب وتخلطه جيدا، فهي أضحت متأكدة الآن من قدرات هذه المادة المنتوحة من ثديي أم سلمان، إنها ستعالج عالم سرمدة. افرغت القنينة كاملة في تنكات الحليب وشرعت بغليه وسكبته فوق الأرز الفائر بالطراوة. واضافت عليه ال“ماء زهر” ومنكهات تفتح الشهية على الأكل والحياة معا.32
As the rice boiled away in several large cauldrons, Farida took the hessian-wrapped bottle and poured it into the cans of milk. She stirred them up well, ever certain that the substance drawn from Umm Salman’s breasts would soon cure all of Sarmada of its pain. She poured out the whole bottle and then she boiled the milk, before adding it to the fluffy and bubbling rice. This she flavored with orange-blossom water and spices that spurred an appetite for life as well as for food.33
The grief milk is no longer treated like food – it has turned into a substance with therapeutic qualities. Rather than being added to modify the taste of the rice or the milk, it is intended to develop its effect on the level of affect and emotions.
The people of the village gather in the courtyard of Farida’s house and consume – incorporate – the product of Umm Salman’s grief, which was also the community’s grief over their role in the killing of Hela Mansour. The result of the feast is another moment of collective catharsis:
اصابها الهلع وهي ترى البشر ممن لم يصل إلى بيته يستيقظ متعفرا بقيئه، ملقوحين على جنبات الدروب غارقين في تشنجات العويل الصاخب. بدت البلدة وكأن وباء ضربها. وجوه الناس شاحنة، وأجسادهم متهالكة34.[...]
The sight of the guests who’d not even made it home the night before filled her [Buthayna] with panic as she watched them waking up, covered in vomit, laid out along the side of the road, howling in spasms. It was as if a plague had overrun the village. People were exhausted; their faces were ashen.35
A few days later all villagers have recovered. It never becomes quite clear to what extent the pains and vomiting can be attributed to the grief milk, as Buthayna, Farida’s sister-in-law, has secretly poured a magic potion intended to harm Farida into one of the bottles of grief milk used for the cooking.
After this feast and the moment of collective catharsis, Farida puts the grief milk sweets to yet another use. Having decided to take into her hands the sexual initiation of the village’s male teenagers, the sweets became part of her ritualized grooming.
فقررت أن تكون جسرا للعبور فوق ضفتي الجسد. تمنحهم عبورا حالما فيه الكثير من الرضى. سارت أيامها بجلاء نحو المسالك الوعرة لمفازات الغلمة وانوارها القصديرية، وصارت تُـعرف بغريزة بكر، درب سلالة المنبوذين من المراهقين ومن لم يعرفوا جسد إمرأة من قبل، وزودتها الحلوى المخثرة بالغموض، والمتبلة بحليب الأسى36.
She decided to make her body the bridge to the other side, for the crossing they were so looking forward to. She gave herself over to navigating the rugged tracks of silvery-white sexual desire, and as if by instinct, she tracked down those outcast teenagers, who’d never known a woman’s body, sustained by her mysterious sweets, spiced with grief milk.37
The effect of the grief milk in this context is not clear either. It remains an ambiguous liquid, carrying, at least for Farida, a sense of impurity: when Farida sleeps with Shafee, Hela Mansour’s youngest brother, who at that point she has identified as the young man she had always been waiting for, she decides not to feed him any of the grief milk products as she wants him “as he is”.38 Interestingly, in this context another form of milk appears, which links it more closely to the male body: Shafee’s semen is referred to as ‘his milk’39 in the passage describing his sexual intercourse with Farida. The fact that Farida swallows Shafee’s ‘milk’ establishes a clear parallel to the consumption of Umm Salman’s grief milk.
In the third and final chapter, milk only makes two short appearances: one is embedded in the story of Rahma, the caring sister of Buthayna’s husband Salum, who looks after the family’s animals. The second, taking up the previous extension of the milk network to male bodies, is a sex scene involving Buthayna and Farida’s son Bulkhayr, where the verb istaḥlaba, to squeeze or milk, is used to describe Buthayna’s squeezing of Bulkhayr’s penis.40 Again, the semen is being swallowed, thereby strengthening the connection to the grief milk, as a human bodily substance re-incorporated by human bodies. With regard to the ambiguous nature of milk, it is interesting to note that in this case, as well as in the case of Shafee and Farida, these references appear in scenes describing the sexual encounter immediately preceding the lovers’ permanent separation, from which both women suffer.
After this chapter, (grief-) milk disappears from the pages of the novel, until, at the very end, it is reincarnated in Farida’s body. Her “repressed desires”41 – after Shafee has left her, she has entered a marriage with a religious shaykh in which sex is prohibited – make her breasts swell as they fill up with grief milk. She cuts her breast open as she cut open Umm Salman’s before, and transfers the liquid – green rather than blue this time – into bottles which she stores away. At the time of her death, these bottles are found in the shed.
4 Transgressive Connections
A number of pages have now been devoted to summarizing the appearances of milk in this novel. But what does milk actually do? An obvious answer, and the one central to this chapter, is that milk establishes a network of connections between people, animals, plants and places.
Two basic principles of association can be discerned. One principle of association on a lexical level draws together a number of different instantiations of ḥalīb (milk): the milk of the cow Amira; the anonymous milk that the Mansour brothers buy in a shop; the milk of the cow that Rahma tends to; the grief milk (ḥalīb ʾasā) of Umm Salman and the various food stuffs and therapeutic products made from it by Farida (cheese, fermented milk, sweets, rice pudding); the grief milk that emerges from Farida’s breasts; Farida’s ‘normal’ breast milk when her son is born; finally, though less prominently, ḥalīb is used to refer to Rafee’s semen, while the verb istaḥlaba (to milk, to squeeze), is used to describe the stimulation of Bulkhayr’s penis.
The second principle of association lies in the trajectories of the “milks” and their transmutations, which, as we have seen, connect a great number of varied entities: a cow, a shed, Umm Salman, Farida, cheeses, sweets and fermented milk, plants, Farida’s and Buthayna’s lovers, a whole village population, honey, nigella seeds. These entities are all embedded in a number of practices. Food production and consumption, healing practices, sex, and reproduction are possibly the most important ones.
The main interest of these connections and the practices through which they are produced lies in the fact that they transgress established boundaries and invite the reader to reconceptualize foundational notions of a (Western) scientific knowledge system. Indeed, the novel’s narrator and Azza Tawfiq find themselves in this position. Azza, being engaged in that quintessentially rational scientific endeavor that quantum mechanics represents has to come to terms with the experience that Hela Mansour has been reincarnated in her body. Rafi, the documentary film maker – another profession dealing with supposedly objective reality – sets out to Sarmada in a mode of investigation. In the course of the novel he abandons his fact-finding mission, deciding to let the stories speak for themselves.
Many of the connections established in the milk network developed in the novel sit uneasily with the dichotomous notions of human and animal and nature and culture. The focus on the substance of (breast) milk recalls how thin the dividing line between humans and animals actually is. As lactating bodies, little distinguishes the human from the bovine body. An idea that is, at least tentatively, extended to the male bodies which are ‘milked’ and produce ‘milk’. The ingestion of human bodily fluids by other humans is remarkable precisely because of this transgression. Familiar foodstuffs such as cheese, or sweets prepared with breast milk appear as an aberration only because a categorical difference between human and animal milk is assumed by the reader.
Together with human exceptionalism, the connections established in the novel throw into question the idea of the individual, housed in a body with discrete boundaries to the “environment”. The bodies of the novel’s characters quite literally flow into and through each other. The bodily fluids are no less part of the body because they are constantly reproduced. Umm Salman’s body is thus distributed over the whole population of Sarmada during Farida’s feast – and even Farida’s plants get to ‘drink’ the grief milk and partake in embodying Umm Salman. At the same time, Umm Salman’s body becomes the site of production of the grief milk, in which the grief not only of Umm Salman but of the whole village population is incorporated.
This fluidity of the body’s boundaries is a theme that also appears in the novel beyond the associations surrounding the substance of milk: transmigration, which provides the narrative frame for the novel, and breaks up the unity of the human body and soul, is a case in point . The blurring of lines between humans and the land can be seen in such diverse instances as when Bulkhayr sees a landscape of black basalt stones in form of human bodies and the scene where the village young men try to penetrate with their penis an old tree to prove their manhood.
Despite all fluidity, and the blurring of the bodies’ boundaries, one boundary remains very much intact: that between bodies of female and male gender. As Irving has noted,42 the novel’s gender politics – and the view of the sexualized female body it reproduces – are conventional if not problematic. In fact, the narrative relies on the ambivalence of the female body in a patriarchal society. Perceived on the one hand as essential to the community’s survival through procreation, and, on the other hand, as a threat to the community that must be contained, the ambivalent female body is the source and carrier for an ambivalent liquid: the grief milk, a blessing and a curse, which is handed down through generations of women (from Umm Salman to Farida). In a sense, the fact that boundaries between humans and animals appear much less clearly drawn comes to emphasize the perceived paramount reality of the essentialist distinction between male and female bodies.
The interrelatedness of humans, objects, animals and plants is in no way limited to the links established by the substance of milk. Nonetheless, this attempt at re-imagining the human body, human-animal relations in the light of Fadi Azzam’s novel ends here. The questions of how such work of re-imagination will translate into action, and where we get by thinking of the human body as a networked entity or by allowing the categorical distinctions between humans and animals to blur, remain very much open.
References
International Prize for Arabic Fiction. 2012. “Q&A with Fadi Azzam”. Accessed April 16, 2014. http://www.arabicfiction.org/news.108.html.
Irving, Sarah. 2012. “Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada Reviewed”. In: sarahirving.wordpress.com (14.07.2012). Accessed September 16, 2014. URL: http://sarahirving.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/fadi-azzams-sarmada-reviewed/.
Valenze, Deborah. Milk: A Local and Global History. Yale University Press. 2011. https://www.perlego.com/book/1089807/milk-a-local-and-global-history-pdf.
The phrasing ‘more-than-human’ is widely used to refer to networks or associations binding together humans and other entities in order to avoid the deficiencies implicit in terms such as ‘non-human’, advanced by Actor-Network Theory, e.g. Latour, Bruno, “Mixing Humans”, 1988.
E.g. foundational texts such as Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet, 2008; Kirksey, Eben, and Helmreich, Stefan, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography”, 2010.
This should not be construed as an argument for a relativist view of science; rather it connects to the critical analysis of scientific knowledge production that has become the hallmark of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory.
As Holgate has shown, magical realism has been a way for postcolonial literatures to deal with this theme of interrelatedness, and the concurrent questioning of hegemonic ontologies and epistemologies connected to a scientific rationalism which constructs a divide between humans and the environment. Holgate, Ben, Climate and Crises, 2019, 3. Azzam’s Sarmada, with its many magical realist elements could well be seen as part of this tradition.
DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, 2002, 46–66.
DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, 5.
DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, 2002.
Valenze, Deborah, Milk, 24–25.
Valenze, Milk, 3.
Paxson, Heather, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures”, 2008.
Nader, Alexia, December 06, 2011.
I follow the English translation (Azzam, 2011) for the spelling of names and the translated quotes.
ʿAzzām, Sarmada, 2011, 38–42; Azzam, Sarmada, 2011, 29–34.
ʿAzzām, 39.
This part of the sentence has been mistranslated in the published English version. The translation given here is mine. Only mistranslations and omissions will be corrected in further quotes.
Azzam, 29.
ʿAzzām, 65–66.
Omitted in the published translation.
Azzam, 53.
ʿAzzām, 67–68.
Azzam, 55.
ʿAzzām, 68.
This sentence has been mistranslated in the published English version. The translation given here is mine.
Azzam, 55.
Azzam 56, ʿAzzām, 69.
Azzam, 62, ʿAzzām, 70.
ʿAzzām, 71.
ʿAzzām, 71.
Azzam, 58.
ʿAzzām, 76.
Azzam, 62.
ʿAzzām, 85–86.
Azzam, 70–71.
ʿAzzām, 93.
Azzam, 78.
ʿAzzām, 100.
Azzam, 82.
ʿAzzām, 108.
ʿAzzām, 111.
ʿAzzām, 108.
ʿAzzām 219.
Irvin, Sarah, “Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada”, 2012.