Insomnia - Aamer Hussein

Hussein's characters are both wounded and nourished by their cosmopolitanism

The seven stories of Hussein's plaintive 2007 collection are soft, drawn-out sighs in the face of time's passing. Like sighs, they are whisper-quiet, yet convey so much tenderness, vulnerability, longing and loneliness in their subtle breaths.

Perhaps the barest and most poetic of the collection is 'Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda'. In its short nine sections, it is a rather tilted, oblique account of a trip through Spain. It almost defies interpretation, creating its greatest effects through those nostalgic moments sparked often by smells, sounds or tastes: 'Eyes shut, I breathe in, lost colours found again: jasmine white, fig green, hibiscus red and something new, unnamed: purple, perhaps'; 'The fan hums overhead. I recall one night's mad crossing, and a morning salutation: parted lips brush mine four times'; 'The smell I remember from Sevilla fills the air, from a bush behind my left elbow.' Memory haunts every sensation, memories mostly of loss, of a previous love, and yet the events of yesterday, the memories being created more recently, as well as the immediate future, have 'no shadow and no smell.' The narrator seems distant from the current events of his life, caught in the net of his longing.

Yet after 'Postcards' the collection takes a different approach. The opening story, quiet, poetic and stuttering, is exchanged for longer continuous narratives that explore how Hussein's characters are both wounded and nourished by their cosmopolitanism, how their relationships can be both a drain and a vital component of life, and how longing deepens as they move through life.

Recurrently, the personal world is threatened and indeed shaped by socio-political unrest. In probably the most successful story of the collection, 'The Angelic Disposition', a female writer is buoyed in her fledgling literary career by a correspondence with her contemporary, Rafi Durrani, while the Second World War and the chaos of Partition rages in the background. Yet the historical context is only referred to as it relates to the relationship between the two characters and their writing compeers, and this prevents the story from sagging under the burden of the past. Hussein's greatest power is in his control of the material, his preference for looking closely at human relationships in the face of such widespread torment.

This might be the reason 'The Crane Girl' seems to make the deepest impression, despite the fact it isn't the best story in the collection. The young Murad, who shows up in later stories as an older man, and who appears to be an alter-ego of sorts for Hussein, becomes embroiled in a difficult relationship with Tsuru, a Japanese girl, who holds an intense power over him. Towards the end of the piece Murad's friend Shigeo tells a heartbreaking story of how she was unfaithful to him when they were dating. The story as a whole spills sexual and emotional anxiety from its pages and leaves one feeling unsated yet strangely fulfilled - the type of ending Hussein does so well.
 

Insomnia is a commendably polished collection. Its melancholy life portraits of itinerant writers and artists seem to drift as on the oceans so often evoked, the pathways to home. The language Hussein uses is utilitarian, poetic in its brevity, yet the worlds he creates are emotionally and psychologically complex. This is certainly a collection for the modern era, where travel nourishes its characters even as it separates their world into pieces; pieces that don't quite fit together again in the same way.

pp. 133.
Published: Telegram, 2007.

Stay posted for an interview with Aamer Hussein in which the short story writer talks about his work, his foray into novel writing, and his use of his mother tongue...