Maznoona (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016)

The title varies the Arabic word meaning “madwoman.” Her narrative wrenches the protagonist, Yalayl, out of one stable, restrictive situation after another. She grows up in a fortified river village at desert’s edge. Free people of color, her community must pay annual tribute to a predatory nomad tribe, and she herself, as she enters puberty, learns what obligations a woman must obey within such a community. Chance teaches her the story of Layla and Majnoon, a pre-Islamic Bedouin tale of mad love, and Yalayl makes it a means of escape from the fate that awaits her in her village. She loves, first, a feral boy raised by a pack of wild desert dogs.

When dogs and boy head out into the desert after migrating game, Yalayl, pregnant and unmarried, passes through a crisis and is sent to bear her child and be cured of her madness in the city, where no one will know; but she is seen and recognized. She must travel farther, into the mountains, to the hamlet where her son is born, and where she loves a man who cannot use language but who can communicate with birds. She again is pregnant. In that hamlet, up against the same social strictures as at home, Yalayl makes her mark as a master weaver and as a drummer. She is accepted into a sisterhood of drumming women. Performing at a saint’s feast, her drumming and singing free the villagers’ spirits from the binding forms of mere ritual and send them into communal ecstasy. Having shown her power, she attracts resentment, and when friends work to marry her to her lover, whose father is paramount chief of a tribal confederation, she is exiled back to the city.

There, where Yalayl sells her weavings and raises her children, the chief arranges for her to be arrested and tortured by the police. From there her story enters a dark spiral, as she goes to work for the police as a typist and an informer. She joins with other women in a sisterhood of artistically gifted prostitutes. At this stage in her life she thinks she’s possessed by znoon, the malevolent demons of that culture. She wonders which is the madness: the love that drew her to animal-linked men or the shameful state of mind set up by social norms. One way or the other, she wishes to free herself and travels into the desert, to an oasis where healers specialize in exorcisms; perhaps also, to search for her first lover, the boy who runs with the dogs. In the end she finds a different, more drastic form of escape.