Steve Potter reviews Maged Zaher's On Confused Love and Other Damages
On Confused Love and Other Damages,
a Novella
A review by Steve Potter
A more specific take on the often shared advice to “write what you know,” goes, “write the book only you could write.” Maged Zaher has done just that. On Confused Love and Other Damages details a period in the life of an Egyptian-born poet and software engineer named Ramy. Excluding a brief flashback to the 2011 Modern Language Association conference in Seattle, the story takes place from 2013 to 2018. It begins on a fateful Thursday afternoon when Ramy gets fired from his position as Vice President of Software Architecture at what he later describes as an “average Seattle software company.”
It all started at a regular one-on-one meeting. His boss
told him, “It is time for us to go separate ways. It is not
your performance, but there used to be this look in your
eyes, and it is not there anymore.”
The heavily romantic language he was fired with was
beautiful.
That passage is the entirety of the book's first page. On Confused Love and Other Damages is composed of brief vignettes and poems. That sets a meditative pace for those accustomed to reading poetry who know how to read blank space. Rather than barge on into another paragraph immediately, we're encouraged to sit a moment with that funny final sentence and appreciate the awkwardness of Ramy's situation.
Like an experienced stand-up comic, Zaher knows to pause and let the audience laugh before he moves on to the next set-up and punchline. Like a good performance poet or storyteller, he knows to pause to let the audience experience the grief described vicariously before plunging on. Zaher's book is full of funny moments but also deeply sad ones. They often occur simultaneously. That is the nexus where so much magic happens in art. The Beatles' song "HELP!" came to mind while I read the book the second time. I remembered the day in childhood when I first paid attention to the lyrics, after hearing the song many times without focusing on them. I remembered the disjointed feeling when I realized how depressing the song was. How could such a sad song also sound so fun and upbeat at the same time? Zaher's book has some of that same quality—smiling through the tears, accepting the dark beauty of melancholy.
Zaher's book is full of funny moments but also deeply sad ones. They often occur simultaneously. That is the nexus where so much magic happens in art.
In addition to getting fired, Ramy suffers from a couple of romantic entanglements that go sideways sooner than he'd like them to. He meets Lia, an American Ph. D. student studying Soviet literature, through a mutual friend while hanging out at an Italian Bistro in Pike Place Market after the aforementioned Modern Language Association conference in Seattle. They bond over their mutual appreciation of some obscure (to Americans) Soviet literary figures such as Kyrgyzstani short story writer and novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov and Russian poet Rasul Gamzatov. Ramy and Lia fall in and out of love. Then, after returning to Cairo, he meets Lamya, a famous Lebanese journalist working in Egypt, with whom he has a brief relationship.
Along the way, Zaher explores what it means to be an immigrant, a foreigner, a stranger in a strange land. He laughs at American academics' misperceptions of the Arab Spring uprising. He contemplates what it means to be a poet. He makes insightful comments on the tech industry, Marxism, capitalism, workplace dynamics, office hierarchies, class, race, and more. He writes of the emotional and psychological toll the experience of immigration can take.
An untitled poem in the book ends:
Ah, this intense flexibility,
that comes with foreignness:
“for the gentiles, a gentile, for
the Jews, a Jew” damaged
and expanded Ramy. He can
navigate a conversation with
many people, he would
resurrect a part of
himself that is appropriate
for the conversation.
Ramy, expanded and flexible
to the point of core-lessness.
In the afterword, Zaher writes about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This counterbalances the book's opening when Ramy gets fired and his boss says, "It is not your performance, but there used to be this look in your eyes, and it is no longer there." The afterword gives the entire story an added poignancy and, in hindsight, a slightly different hue.
One could quibble with the description a novella that appears on the book's cover. That's a bit of a stretch. The word count of a novella is generally understood to be between 10,000 to 40,000 words. The word count of On Confused Love and Other Damages is less than that. A more accurate classification would be a novelette, but even fewer readers are familiar with that term than are familiar with the term novella. Using the word Fiction on the cover might have been a better choice. Anyhow, that is a minor point. Zaher has written an interesting fiction based on life experience. He has written a book only he could write.
Steve Potter's writing has appeared recently in E·Ratio, Golden Handcuffs Review, Otoliths, Pacific Rim Review of Books, Parole, and Word For/Word. He is the author of Easy Money & Other Stories and two poetry collections: Mendacity Quirk Slipstream Snafu and Social Distance Sing. Gangs With Greek Names, a novel, and Haunted City, a poetry collection, are forthcoming.
ON CONFUSED LOVE AND OTHER DAMAGES
by Maged Zaher
ISBN 978-1-6339815-3-9
Chatwin Books, Seattle WA
https://www.chatwinbooks.com
2022, paper, 71 pages, $14.00