Black Foam by Haji Jabir, translated by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey, is a novel about an Eritrean man who has spent a lifetime making up stories to survive, and who just wants to be able to settle into a monotonous life of easy survival—to take a path that is paved instead of muddy and difficult to walk.
He's had many different names. He's been Adal, Dawoud, David, and Dawit. He's told many people what they've wanted to hear in order to get onto the next bus, or into the next refugee camp, that could mean surviving. Now, he's on his way to Israel as part of a community of Ethiopian Jews seeking refuge in Jerusalem. He knows his life has been a lie, but he no longer knows what else he can do. His stories follow him, stalk him.
He resents how he's been forced as a refugee to relive his traumas, or to craft stories, to justify his survival—that he's been forced to either fabricate new selves, or give away his own deepest stories, to prove that he deserves a safe place to settle. Jabir writes this brilliantly—as we're ushered back through the stories of Dawit's life, we too aren't sure what's real and what Dawit has embellished, and increasingly, neither does Dawit.
The experience of being a person born into war and then a refugee has stripped him, name by name, of knowing who he is. Of being able to own who he is—because it's the officials, the people deciding where he goes, who own his story. Who decide who he's allowed to be, and under what conditions. From the person who tells him "all the stories have been taken" by refugees before him to the researcher who digs into his story for her project, his life story, real or fabricated, is always something to be extracted by someone else.
Black Foam was an excellent read. I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. It's out from Amazon Crossing on February 7.
Content warnings for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, violence.
