Yara El-Ghadban | The dream of a possible utopia

“Let’s imagine a society where we are happy with each other. Let’s start by imagining it. And maybe eventually, someone will end up inventing it.”

This utopia, the Montreal writer of Palestinian origin Yara El-Ghadban imagined it on the land of her ancestors, on the shores of the Dead Sea; in a salt desert where it would be easy to believe that no life could proliferate, much less flourish. And yet, The dance of the flamingoshis fourth novel, tells the story of how a small community was able to emerge in this valley, despite a mysterious plague that wiped out thousands of men, women and children.

At a time when dystopias are succeeding one another in literature, this luminous and poetic novel transports us into a dream tinged with pink – pink like the colony of flamingos that found refuge with these fifty human beings after the evaporation of the Dead Sea.

Contrary to what one might believe, it is not the pandemic that inspired this novel, the first scenes of which take on the appearance of the end of the world; it is rather a trip to Chile, in the Atacama desert, made shortly after the publication of his previous novel, I am Ariel Sharonin 2018.

“This landscape completely blew me away,” Yara El-Ghadban recalls. “It’s a landscape that is completely toxic to humans; but there are indigenous people and animals that live there, including one of the largest colonies of flamingos in the world. Right away, it reminded me of the Dead Sea.”

Live together

Dispossessed of everything, the survivors of this valley invaded by salt then become “equal for once”, writes Yara El-Ghadban. And this is what allows them to succeed in doing “what the whole world has not been able to do”: live together.

The first child of the community to be born, Alef – whose first name recalls the first letter of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets – is the son of a Palestinian botanist and an Israeli rabbi. Surrounded by his family, he grows up, learns and discovers love, his flamingo brothers never far away.

Strong female characters also serve as leaders within the group. Like Amana, Alef’s mother. Like Hypathia, named in homage to a great Alexandrian philosopher of Antiquity, assassinated by extremists who did not accept her scientific vision of the world. And who, despite her great wisdom, conceals her share of mystery and complexity.

In order for her utopia to be believed, the writer has pushed her research to ensure that all the facts are true, from the plants that grow in the region to the evaporation phenomena that lead to the creation of increasingly imposing salt formations. All this to succeed in making it “a novel of the possible” rather than a fantastic story.

“It was also very important for me to create a utopia in which I don’t put aside all the mistakes and flaws of humanity,” Yara El-Ghadban emphasizes. “That’s what has always frustrated me a little with utopian novels – which always end up becoming a dystopia, by the way. I wanted it to be a utopia that takes humans for what they are, that is to say imperfect people, with paradoxes, contradictions.”

Despite all her hopes for the possibility of living together, the writer felt so discouraged, angry and disgusted by the news of the last few months that she tried by all means to change her novel – which was already finished – to introduce more violence and “evil” characters.

“When the genocide in Gaza started, there was a moment when I wanted to throw my manuscript away,” she says. “But I have to thank my editor, Rodney Saint-Éloi, who said to me: ‘You’ve imagined a utopia, stay true to yourself.’”

If writing is her only weapon to hope to one day improve things, Yara El-Ghadban promises herself to never give up. “My responsibility as a writer is not to give in. It’s to try to feed the imagination with possibilities. Because if we can’t imagine it, we can’t create it. So I’m going to dream of a future for us,” she says.

The dance of the flamingos

Yara El-Ghadban

Inkwell Memory

268 pages