At the start of 2017, Donald Trump enacted a series of Executive Orders and Presidential Proclamations prohibiting travel from a number of countries that eventually became known as ‘the Muslim Travel Ban’. There were three Executive Orders and three Presidential Proclamations during his Presidency, the last Presidential Proclamation coming in January 2020, focused mainly on seven majority-Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen but also Venezuela, North Korea, and Chad. All travel restrictions enacted by President Trump were ended by President Biden on January 20, 2021.
In the middle of his legislative campaign on 11 January 2018 President Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African states – which ones is unclear – as ‘shithole countries’. This choice epithet was reported by a Democratic aide who attended a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House in which President Trump was again engaged with the issue of immigration to the United States. It was later verified by two separate sources who had also been at the meeting. Trump later issued a denial on Twitter: ‘The language used by me at the … meeting was tough, but this was not the language used’. For those who don’t speak fluent ‘tough’ no translation of ‘shithole’ was provided.
My Life As An Alien, Seraj Assi, Tartarus Press, Coverdale, 2023
Palestinian author and scholar Seraj Assi’s first person narrator never mentions President Trump, the United States, or the ‘Muslim Travel Ban’ once in the 214 pages of his debut novel. An academic who took his PhD at Georgetown University, Assi is an ‘alien’ who made it: he’s now an Adjunct Professor of Arabic at George Mason University and also a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at Georgetown.
His novel is a kind of Othering Heights, set in a place of transition – it mostly takes place on board a United Airlines flight – where ‘the alien’ has an opportunity to reflect on Aliens and Humans, the Old Country, the New World, of flying to ‘Humanland’. Here is the current bogey figure of political rhetoric, the migrant, the asylum seeker, the refugee, claiming their humanity in the only way they feel is left to them: by boarding some means of transport and leaving their ‘shithole’ country for another where humanity isn’t so contingent, so provisional. As such this a timely and compelling novel, where those voices seldom heard by politicians and headline writers is finally given a chance to speak.
In choosing to describe himself as an ‘alien’ and in not giving himself a name or saying definitively where he’s from, Assi’s narrator gives voice to the kind of traveller the legend emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty was meant to welcome:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
One gets the impression, however, that President Trump, with his stated preference for Norwegian immigrants to the United States, would not want the likes of Seraj Assi’s narrator anywhere near ‘the Land of the Free’. Of course, Humanland is viewed with a certain cynicism by Assi’s alien:
I see myself in a freer land, a dreamland, a Neverland, a promised land, a borderless land, a land where aliens roam free under the azure Western sky.
This riffing on ‘land’ – we get six variations on this evocative noun – is indicative of Assi’s prose throughout the novel. For this is a performed text, for all of its nods here and there to canonical Western authors (‘They say no man is an island; I say hell is other people’ is perhaps the most representative of Assi’s aphorisms). Assi’s prose is closer to a monologue than a novel, a one-man show of a book that buttonholes the reader on a long flight and doesn’t let up until ‘the alien’s’ plane has landed and he is at the airport. Even then – a good 200 pages later – he is still nervously and excitedly gabbling away.
One of the most consistent riffs in the novel is on the word ‘alien’ itself. Take these passages for example:
Nothing unites humans like the prospect of invading aliens. Nothing alienates the alien like finding himself adrift in a sea of mistrustful humans, for only when I gaze at them do I start to fathom the depth of my own loneliness.
When good aliens die, we quip, they go to Humanland.
There are two kinds of aliens; those who flee their homeland in horror and disgust with nowhere to go but Hell, and those who leave in pursuit of some paradisial fantasy. I’m huddled in the middle, in limbo, see-sawing, teeter-tottering, dangling midway between Earth and Heaven.
The dichotomy that pervades the novel – between humans and aliens, between those who are free and those who seek freedom, between the Masters of the Universe and the Wretched of the Earth – works also at a structural level, centred on the ‘alien’s’ backstory and his nowstory. For ‘the alien’, stuck on his flight, not knowing if he’ll be deported when he lands, has plenty of time to reflect on where he’s come from, and fills in his backstory in a series of reveries:
The shadow of gloom cast by my hasty departure refuses to leave me. My parents bid me goodbye. My father gave me his rather detached blessing: I could sense a mix of joy and sadness in his voice…‘Write, son. Tell us about the Empire State, and the state of the empire.’ To my father, the journey from wasteland to Westland is more than just a good pun. In a village where the mere mention of the West makes people shudder, his proclamation seemed rather biblical…
My mother showered me with prayers, as if I were already dead.
Here is the ‘quayside wake’ re-enacted in the age of transatlantic flight, the final farewell given to a migrant son or daughter their parents knew they would never see again. These reveries punctuate the novel, and give an insight into the anonymous ‘alien’ en route to ‘Westland’.
This switching between the ‘alien’s’ backstory and their nowstory further emphasises the duality of his identity. At once they are an ‘alien’, but in leaving for Humanland with their sponsor’s letter in their pocket they may just elevate themselves beyond the life, the identity, they’ve been ascribed. The ‘alien’ overnight – it may of course take a little longer than this – can finally become a ‘human’.
And so we get very little of the traditional approaches to the novel in Assi’s tale of the ‘alien’, none of the overstuffed parlours of Austen and Dickens, the pursuit of love, inheritances and ‘great expectations’, the virtuous rewarded, justice meted out to the venal, the palpable realist nineteenth century novel. Nor do we get more recent expansions of this formula, what James Wood called ‘hysterical realism’ in his essay ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’ back at the turn of this century. Wood accused novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith of writing novels that are ‘excessively centripetal’:
… different stories all intertwine, and double and triple on themselves. Characters are forever seeing connections and links and plots, and paranoid parallels…
These novelists proceed like street-planners of old in South London: they can never name a street Ruskin Street without linking a whole block, and filling it with Carlyle Street, and Turner Street, and Morris Street, and so on.
Woods goes on to say: ‘The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked.’ He blames a dizzying exponential proliferation of detail in these novelists’ work on the obliteration of credible characters in their pages. Novelist and critic, Tom LeClair, has described the fiction of these writers as ‘system novels’, which deal with, as Christian Lorentzen in a recent essay on Bookforum:
1) too much information; (2) the inescapability of science; (3) the incomprehensible scale of things; (4) the limits of any man’s perceptions; (5) the need to see things whole; (6) the impossibility of mastery even when it’s the artist’s duty.
Assi decides to abandon all of these approaches to writing a novel. Rather like a poet, he excludes most of the world to include only the lyric ‘I’, junking all the stuff we find in most novels – living rooms, houses, cars, cafés, pubs, plots, systems – to render not the human predicament, but the predicament of the alien, who must choose between the bombs and the bullets of the home they were brought up in, or trying to get away from this warzone to ‘freedom’ in a place where they may at least find safety. This simplification of the terms Assi decides to work within focus very clearly not on Le Clair’s theses but on his own thesis, that anyone who is trying to escape from a ‘shithole’ will always be ‘Other’. Aliens don’t emigrate – they invade, and in seeking to humanise his alien, Assi forges a very different aesthetic from those Western novelists who have so dominated contemporary fiction.
If the mid-century American novel was the preserve of hyphenated Americans – Irish-Americans like John O’Hara, Italian-Americans like Mario Puzo, Jewish-Americans like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, African-Americans like Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Native-Americans like N. Scott Momaday, Asian-Americans like Maxine Hong Kingston – then here perhaps is the ultimate hyphenated American, the Alien-American, which is almost of course a contradiction in terms.
But perhaps my scrutiny of this novel by a Palestinian writer is distorted by Western goggles when I should be trying to look at his work through Eastern eyes. So here is Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in an interview with Adam Shatz for The New York Times in 2001: ‘Exile is more than a geographical concept… You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.’ Substitute ‘alien’ for ‘exile’ and the very same sentiments can be found in My Life As An Alien.
Assi’s novel is published by a small independent press based in Yorkshire, Tartarus Press, which was founded over thirty years ago. The press’s USP up to Assi’s novel has been the publication of ‘the literary supernatural/strange/horror fiction’ by writers such as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Robert Aickman. This is their first venture into the ‘literary novel’, and one can only wonder how a Palestinian scholar based in America found his way to Yorkshire. They are to be congratulated for taking a risk on Assi, for publishing his novel in such a handsome hardback edition, with cream jacket and embossed clouds on the boards, and a yellow ribbon to mark your place.
Assi’s voyage from the Old World to the New – and the fictional representation of it in My Life As An Alien – is the dream of many a voyager in our contemporary world. It seems we live in times of great displacement. Here is a novel, an excellent comic, sardonic novel, in which the voices shouted down and shouted over, refused, excluded, abandoned, deported, finally get a chance to speak.