The Sea Cloak

The Sea Cloak / Nayrouz Qarmout
trans. from the Arabic by Perween Richards & Charis Bredin
Manchester: Comma Press, 2019.
106 p.

This collection of 11 short stories by Gazan journalist and women's rights campaigner Nayrouz Qarmout is beautifully written, while also hard-hitting.

The stories are all layered and poetic, with sensuous writing describing the realities of life in Gaza, prior to the current conflict. The collection focuses on women, sharing many perspectives of both young and old characters. It looks at patriarchy, colonialism, violence, religion, and women's rights, and how they all intersect.

Qarmout is able to build a life into just a few pages in these very short stories. The title story is one of the longest, and it is the gentlest one; in it a young girl wishes to wear the Sea Cloak, to simply sink into the sea away from her family and responsibilities. Others are more stylistically unusual; Black Grapes starts with the final moment and moves backwards to reveal the truth behind a political murder of a young man. The Anklet of Maioumas is another unusual story, shifting its setting between ancient Palestine and today, with a young woman dancing on a beach - it's hard to tell from moment to moment which girl and which year it is.

The brevity of the stories are their strength. Each gives a glimpse of a life, like snapshots, and many times they are told from multiple perspectives. In such tiny stories, it is striking that the structural decisions Qarmout makes support the story she's telling. I would say that this book will appeal to anyone who enjoys literary writing, and appreciates a poetic eye that can describe and evoke reverie, beauty, and violence at the same time. She writes with such compassion for the women in her stories, and can also point out how hypocrisy, patriarchal violence and war affects an entire region. It's writing that looks to the interior life of characters, but in a way that illuminates wider society and all its ills. Really powerful and evocative reading.