A colleague recently asked why I read some novels more than once. I had never really considered why some and not others. Some books feel like they become a part of me in a way that is comforting to revisit. Some books are haunting in a way that demands reconsideration. There are also books that I assign for a class and I, of course, read and reread those each year. I love how such novels often have a different resonance for me and the students each year.
I am currently rereading Golnaz Bonde’s 2017 novel, What We Owe. It is one of several novels I assign in a course about theories of justice. For me, cultivating a lifelong commitment to justice requires humility, integrity, commitment, and courage. Justice requires an understanding of for whom and for what we have individual and/or collective responsibility. It is about understanding what we owe each other.
Bonde’s novel is the story of a fraught relationship between a mother (Nahid) and a daughter (Aram). It is about the all-consuming bitterness that can follow the death of youthful idealism. It is about how regret can swallow you and your entire family with it. It is about intergenerational trauma. The mother is an Iranian refugee living in Sweden, where she fled as a young revolutionary following the disappearance of her younger sister, Noora, at a protest. The responsibility and overwhelming guilt she feels for the disappearance of her beloved sister torments her endlessly and makes her incapable of reconciling herself to a life in exile.
This narrative is not the stereotypical tale of finding safety and renewal in exile. Exile not only offers Nahid little comfort, it exacerbates her guilt. Indeed, it is excruciating for Nahid to have the opportunity of a new life when others have not. The story picks up when Nahid is decades older and a nurse dying of cancer. She understands her rage is literally ravaging her body. Nahid is the antithesis of the model, grateful refugee.
In contrast, Aram is Swedish by birth and about to be a mother herself. She has found the happiness and sense of belonging that has always eluded Nahid. Her dreams are small and circumspect but no less important to her. Aram has found a lovely and supportive partner—the antithesis of Nahid’s violent and abusive ex-husband. Aram’s contentment enrages Nahid and she lashes out irrationally, cruelly. For her part, Aram is embarrassed by her mother, resentful of her inability to be happy, exhausted by her cruelty, without sympathy for the brutality of her life experience. Neither Nahid nor Aram are particularly likeable. They both cling desperately to their grievances. The birth of Aram’s daughter reminds the reader that great love is often the source of great sadness. It offers a flicker of hope.
At the center of this sorrowful relationship are critical questions about responsibility: responsibility to country, to justice, to family, and to oneself. Bonde resolutely eschews easy answers. Her prose is lyrical in its crispness. But the narrative is also stark in a heartbreaking way that will gnaw at you for a long while. What We Owe is in many places hard to read. But it productively uncomfortable in the way only truly remarkable novels can be.