God's love poem to the Prophet: reflections on They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

In 2015, the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, was the target of a terrorist attack after they published a number of cartoons that were insulting to Islam. They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears opens in the middle of an almost identical terrorist attack: one targeting a comic book shop in Sweden owned by a man named Hondo. Hondo has invited a cartoonist named Göran Loberg to host a public discussion about his provocative work. Loberg's art has made him a cause célèbre among free speech enthusiasts, but the cartoons, in their reduction of an entire religion to a lurid and prurient caricature, are also Islamophobic. They are dehumanizing, which is precisely what gives them their charge. Loberg argues that art must break boundaries. Art, in his view, is defined by transgression and expansion, but before he finishes explaining himself, a gun is pressed to his forehead.

There are no good guys in this scene. Loberg is Islamophobic, and the gunmen are inspired by ISIS. Readers might sympathize with everyone or with no one. As artistic expression collides with violence, the novel negotiates its deepest anxieties about art, what it does, and what it costs. What can art actually do to the people it represents? Does it liberate them into history? Does it immortalize or humanize? Does it fix a person in amber? Does it restore the texture of life?

Nour (a woman whose real name has been stolen from her by neurological experiments) is the terrorist responsible for filming the attack. She has even designed the flag that hangs behind the main gunman, Amin. During the film one of the other terrorists is shot by police. Nour turns the lens onto his dying face, and meditates on how the film captures and objectifies his body. In this moment, as she realizes the gaze of the lens is potentially a dehumanizing one, she suddenly remembers that she comes from a future in which the very video that she's creating becomes the most popular film in Sweden, serving as the foundation myth for a fascist organization known as the Crusading Hearts. In this dystopian future, the image of Amin with his machine gun is used to justify the annihilation of Muslim life in Sweden.

The video might immortalize Amin in exactly the way he's hoping for, but it does not truly preserve him. It replaces him. Amin, as rendered by those who love him is someone with dreams, someone with a deep inner life, and someone with complex subjective experiences, but this humanity is entirely absent from the video. What the video gives to history is merely a symbol that objectifies and dehumanizes, foreshadowing the subsequent dehumanization of Muslim people under fascism. In the end, the film and Loberg's cartoons might come from two ideological positions that are antithetical to each other, but whether intentionally or not, they both end up depicting Muslim people as symbols instead of subjects. For Hamad, the mastermind behind the attack, the camera was always meant to serve this function. He orders Nour to make a number of aesthetic choices in the name of ensuring the footage fits into a preexisting genre of terrorist videos, intending for it to be legible to a global media apparatus that has already decided what such images mean.

... Hamad said that everything should be filmed with a cellphone ... The format should attest to their modest means ... The film is supposed to be pixilated, shaky, with unexpected close-ups of the speaker's shoes and so on ...

Johannes Anyuru, They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

Nour is perhaps uniquely positioned to understand what it's like to be seen wrongly. Her consciousness has traveled to the past, but her body doesn't come with her. She ends up in a body that doesn't belong to her, living a life she doesn't recognize. On more than one occasion, people give her a new name. They first call her Annika, the name belonging to the previous inhabitant of the body she's trapped in. Amin later renames her Nour for his dead sister. Neither are her true name (and the narrator of the novel just refers to her as “the girl”). She repeatedly receives a history that isn't her own, so she knows what it means to be perceived through a framework that has already decided what she is before she can make the choice for herself.

As soon as her memories of the dystopian future return to her, the girl seems interested in reclaiming her identity, so she begins creating her own art. She begins to write. Her own writing is different from the cartoons and the film. It is not interested in spectacle. It is more of a testimony of her life. Against the world's fixed image of her as a mentally unstable terrorist, she offers something more textured, tender, and intimate. She describes her friends, her family, her classmates, her hobbies, and her life. One important description is of the girl's mother, a Sufi mystic who sits awake through the nights performing dhikr. Dhikr is a practice aimed at the dissolution of the self in order to find God. Sufi poets have used the image of moths flinging themselves into flames as a metaphor for this process. Similar imagery is also used in the novel: the presence of moths are understood to signify a flaw in time. Whenever they appear, they remind the girl that time travel (and the traumatic process leading up to it) has resulted in the unraveling and even the annihilation of her sense of self: her soul and body are separated, her memory is incomplete, and she doesn't even have her true name.

While it might not sound pleasant, Sufi tradition does not treat this unraveling of the self as inherently destructive. It can also be seen as part of the path to becoming more real. The self is neither fixed nor bounded. The self, according to some mystical views, is a thread interwoven into a larger fabric (a philosophical position that is forgotten entirely by the dystopian fascist system that the novel warns against, which sorts human beings into fixed categories). The girl may have been stripped of nearly everything. Most of her existence has been erased, but what little remains reveals something about what defines her identity and humanity. By writing down what she remembers, she crystallizes that humanity.

We had been born in Sweden without being Swedish, and that made us unreal. Only by dying would we become real again.

Johannes Anyuru, They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

One of the first things the girl writes about is another artist: Oh Nana Yurg. Oh Nana Yurg is supposed to be a pop star in Sweden. The girl later hears rumors that the singer is just a hologram, emphasizing the novel's anxieties about manufactured images, and the girl doesn't seem particularly surprised by this revelation. She has already observed that certain words and ideas lie about having any real substance. In particular, she has thought a lot about the lies around what means to be Swedish. She might have once thought that Swedish citizenship should be enough, but she has since learned that minorities like her cannot avoid being treated as outsiders. No matter what, they are seen as unassimilable.

Set in contrast to Oh Nana Yurg's artificial constructions is the concept of the love poem, which operates in this novel as something focused on the natural and the real. When the narrator sees a deer cross the road at dusk, he tells his daughter it's a love poem. When the fascists take over, the girl's mother finds it important to remind her daughter that they are both love poems. This love poem is not concerned with immortalizing anyone or anything. It is more of a recognition that the particular and the ephemeral carry infinite significance.

'We're a love poem,' she said. 'Do you know that?' She made a gesture that took in our kitchen, the dirt on the windows, the swings outside, the bus stop. 'You and me,' she said, 'and even the people out there ringing the doorbell. Everything is God's love poem to the Prophet.'

Johannes Anyuru, They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

Between the manufactured Oh Nana Yurg and the sacred and organic love poem is an infinite spectrum. Art can be and do a lot of different things. There are the poems that the girl's father can't seem to write how he wants. There are the science fiction images at the comic book store that make the girl laugh when she sees them. There are other terrorist videos. There are the little poems the girl posts on social media. There's Loberg's own bloody leg, which is described as a paintbrush during the terrorist attack. There are references to writings by Sufi mystics. All of the artwork that appears in the novel has something else to say about unpacking what art does to its subjects.

Of course, a novel this concerned with art cannot avoid commenting on its own existence. The narrator seems to be a bit of a self-insertion of author Johannes Anyuru. We never learn the character's name, but it's perhaps fair to think of him as the author's alter ego. What we do know is that he's a Muslim Swedish writer who visits the girl in a psychiatric clinic. When he reads what she's written about her life and subsequent time travel, he is moved to pen his own book or article about it. They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears can be framed as the very book he writes, but half the novel is in an epistolary format from the girl's perspective. He lets the girl write about herself. He gives her chapters in her own voice, allowing her narrative to exceed the frame the narrator constructs around it. The hope is to humanize her.

It might not be a perfect balm against art that has dehumanized her and those like her. Art is never framed as perfect. One question posed by the cartoonist in what may be the novel's most explicit moment actually highlights how certain anxieties do not get resolved in this book: if death is what makes people human, then does art, which immortalizes its subjects, make someone inhuman? The answer isn't obvious. Maybe some artists need to reject the project of immortalization. Others might reject the idea that death and immortality are opposites, and perhaps try to incorporate more mystical ideas around what it means to die. At the end of the day, art does not necessarily save anyone. It's not even clear if the girl's account actually manages to change the future. While Sweden doesn't immediately descend into the dystopian hellscape of her own timeline, there's a sense that it can still happen in the future. Whatever changes the girl does bring about may not be enough. The Crusading Hearts still seem to exist, even if they aren't particularly powerful, and the novel is clearly serving as a warning about what can happen to any place in the world. It may take more than good piece of art to stop it. The only thing art can do is render those who have been erased into someone present in all their human specificity, and it can refuse to the let the world's violence have the last word.