The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021
Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.
The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.
From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:
Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]
Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.
The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”
My father would never say such a thing.
My father doesn’t say much to me anymore.
Fatima’s distraught paternal relationship has been established since her birth, with the disappointing revelation of her gender; after having two girls, her father had wanted a boy, and thus, in an act of denouncing her girlhood, subconsciously involved her in numerous activities that would have otherwise been assigned to a son. As any child would, Fatima developed interest in both the “feminine” and the “masculine”, but as Fatima displayed further “boyish” lifestyle preferences and attitudes, her mother reinforced the gender norms of a female upon her, concerned about Fatima rejecting what has been “naturally” assigned to her at birth. Caught in the midst, Fatima struggled with the identity crisis that resulted from being forced into the polarities of the gender binary, with her romantic and sexual interest in women throwing her into further confusion.
In middle school, I have girlfriends, but I prefer hanging out with boys. […] I’m the only girl in the group, but I don’t know it yet.
I’m in gym class the first time I get my period.
I realize that I’m a girl.
I cry.
That night, I tell my mother I don’t want it.
She explains that it’s natural.
I hate nature.
The word “natural” has often been weaponised against queer people, coupled and manipulated with the fundamental laws of “God”. One surmises that the contemporary warring constructs of religion and queerness would encourage disbelief and a renouncement of faith, yet Fatima adamantly continues to believe that God loves her. As she seeks to know Him deeper, she discovers no affirmation of His disfavour in queer people, and her relationship with God further strengthens. Meanwhile, an estranged relationship with her parents and alienation from her Algerian half—comprising of both the language and the extended family—further complicates the debate of which identities are acceptable and which are not. Her Muslim life occupies the spaces in between her sexuality, with neither daring to bleed past their imposed boundaries to coexist, out of the fear that they would be inevitably forced apart by stubborn denial—fortified by the society dictum that her religiosity and queerness cannot coincide. And if her faith cannot be proven—tainted by the sin of nonconformity—her family and ancestry would refuse to be part of either.
. . . I didn’t know yet that, as lesbians, there was an entire world to be adopted or aborted.
The parental vocabulary of “adopt” and “abort”, applied in this sense, demonstrates the critical step of taking up and caring for water relations (friends, lovers), and of flushing out the toxic blood-relations from the vulnerable parts of her self. Perhaps it also asks us to unapologetically inhabit and embrace one’s agency over body and identity. Her longing to move further towards the heart of Paris—exacerbated by commuter fatigue—signifies her dilemma of leaving her family; “Left: betrayed, renounced, and abandoned.” Through a fleeting relationship with a woman named Cassandra, however, whom Fatima genuinely admires for her courage, she realises that “leaving doesn’t necessarily equate to rupture and abandonment.”
Yet, as she dates more women, she doubts her capacity to love. Romantic encounters—attempts to cultivate an intimacy and affection that have always been taboo in her childhood—results only in a temporality of unhealthy relationships. The ease and trust of her interpersonal relationship with God (“to practice [her] faith out of desire and love and not obligation”) versus her distrust of humans results in an intriguing contrast. On one hand, she expresses comfort in the distancing, conflict-ridden irregularities between her and her partners, viewing “a normal couple” as a “couple that checks all the boxes: jealousy, belonging, security, suffocation, love”. On the other hand, in her relationship with God, she demonstrates faithfully her attempts to be closer to God, to “re-center [her]self, to detach [her]self from this earthly existence that appears to be [her] main preoccupation”. All things considered, connection with the divine is one of dependence; it requires nothing but faith and trust, which are easier to cultivate with an intangible presence. Considering Fatima’s troubling parental relationships, her comfort with human disconnection is to be expected. Her forays into social life are marked by a heightened alertness and avoidance of situations which require high-level commitment and vulnerability, leading to a conspicuous lack of healthy bonds in her life, as well as her inability to meaningfully connect with Nina—the woman she falls in love with. The novel purposefully illustrates the overcoming of this general disregard—or rather, emotional repression—for both her needs and the needs of others, particularly in a partnership, as a crucial step to her healing.
The last few scenes of the text come off as imperfect, and yet perfectly and sweetly so—as expected, perhaps, of an epistolary work. Rather than providing readers with an assurance of acceptance, the book closes with an unfinished ending. Concluding with a vulnerable letter sent to Nina and a return to her mother’s domain, it offers some closure and the promise of acceptance. Fatima’s lingering dilemma in identity settles for just a moment. In certain small gifts of material, action, and language, the crevices between Fatima and Nina, as well as between Fatima and her mother, are tenuously bridged. Love, as a destination, appears at the edge of a window.
I innocently ask [my mother]: “But if you love someone who doesn’t love you back, do you still make them madeleines?”
“We don’t love people because they love us back. We love them. That’s it.”
Vergnaud’s translation deftly handles these tender, delicate vignettes, and honours the intercalation of Arabic words and wordplay that Daas interweaves in her spare narrative. Despite the little presence of descriptive writing, atmosphere and tone are not exactly sacrificed; rather, like the most vivid traits of memory, select specifics are emphasised in further relief, brought to attention in a deliciously concise style of writing:
When I’m sitting on the metro, I write about others, the people getting on, getting off, slipping through the doors before they close, the sad faces that I want to take with me. […] It’s a delicious feeling to recognize a face, a voice, an expression, a gesture.
With precise, spare paragraphs, one can be susceptible to overlooking what these experiences disclose. The Last One is a novel that challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms—the interdisciplinary and complex nature of love as subject, explored in mental and physical wellbeing, religious faith, sexuality, romance, parenting, and childhood. In dislodging taboo and its simplistic designations, it grapples instead with the multiplicity of our identity, exploring the full range of how we may fight to find meaning in the fragmented nature of life.
Fairuza Hanun is an Arts and Education foundation student at the University of Nottingham, and Assistant Editor in Fiction at Asymptote.
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