The writer Shida Bazyar told us at the recent Goethe Institut event that Sisters in Arms, longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, was partly inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s book Three Comrades. She’d been intrigued by the pull of the ‘buddy’ novel that seemed to fascinate men, and wanted to explore what a novel about female friendship would look like. The novel tells the story of Saya, Kasih and Hani who grew up together in Germany, and who’ve come together once more to celebrate a friend’s wedding. We, the readers, are straightaway pulled into their world by a text prefacing the novel, written in tabloid newspaper style, which has one Saya M in the frame for a politically motivated arson attack—and which sets the tone of unease for the rest of the narrative.
The three friends all come from a Migrationshintergrund: they have foreign roots, though where they come from exactly is deliberately withheld from us by the playful, teasing, and sometimes accusatory narrator, Kasih, whose presence looms large as she erupts into and fades out of the narrative. We see what this means for the characters, both in their lives as young adults over the few days they spend together around the wedding, and in the anecdotes and flashbacks to their childhood and adolescence. These are linked associatively—the narrator deliberately rejecting an idea of order imposed by others—but give us a vivid, moving, and sometimes humorous picture of the girls growing up on the estate, the cramped flats with their smell of feet, old wallpaper and dried herbs. There are stories common to kids everywhere: going round to the flat where the parents are out to watch TV in peace, sneaking outside to pore over Bravo, with its Dr Sommer sex education column. But there’s an awareness, too, of their difference from the homegrown Germans: Saya’s mother had been in prison for her beliefs, Saya’s complicated feelings when her three visiting aunts in hijabs are stared at in public, the three girls telling classmates they’re going on holiday when in fact they’re going to stay in the flat of some family friends to watch TV for a fortnight.
We’re told that Saya was always the boss of the three and indeed this charismatic and provocative character always made up great stories. She still has this gift: when they come together for the wedding, Saya has the others in stitches recounting the reactions of her fellow airplane passengers to a woman in a hijab—which turns out to be just a headscarf to keep the rain off after all. But there’s another part of the plane story that is more consequential: the man sitting next to her who assumes she can’t speak German. When he accidentally drops his passport she catches sight of his name and finds out later via social media that he’s a Nazi. We’ve been told that this very week a group of Nazis are on trial in Germany for the planned and systematic murder of Muslim women, so this encounter only adds to the underlying feeling of social tension. And Saya can’t let it go. She’s not only constantly scrolling and following the trial day and night, but starts messaging Patrick Wagenberg under a false profile.
Now, it’s not all about Saya. As I said, the narrative goes back and forth between past and present, and some of my favourite set pieces are in Hani and Kasih’s stories. There’s social satire in the accounts of Hani’s workplace: an NGO that reconciles animal rights with consumer capitalism, its right-on team rejecting hierarchies, yet somehow overlooking the fact that modestly- paid receptionist Hani is doing the annoying fine-tuning on her colleagues’ projects as well as cleaning the sticky oat milk off the milk frother. Another thread is Kasih’s ongoing friendship with her ex, Lukas, whom she meets up with when he offers to help her find a job. She’s a little in love with him still, but knows there’s no hope as by this point Lukas’ hormones were partying elsewhere—I loved the pithy rendering into English here—and she’s left, a puddle of tears in a tracksuit. And Saya, with her strong views, doesn’t hold back from telling them what to do. She orders Hani to demand a pay rise, is outraged when Kasih is advised to apply for a job in Migrant Services. Our sympathy wears thinner when she interrogates Shaghayegh on why she’s getting married, and is utterly unrepentant about keeping Kasih’s flatmate awake with drunken talk and laughter the night before his exam. Strong views, or uncompromising? There’s some clever and nuanced characterisation here, which, together with careful and measured plotting, is utterly compelling and keeps us fully engaged on what is to come.
The denouément is the wedding and the night of the fire, when a block of flats goes up in flames, and many lives are lost. For UK readers there are sad echoes of Grenfell, and for Germans there will be echoes of the racially motivated arson attacks at Solingen and Mölln. I’ll say no more about the activities of our Sisters In Arms that night. You’ll have to read the book to find out what they were doing, and how Saya has become the victim of the tabloid press. You’ll also discover that our narrator Kasih has been a little unreliable. When asked about this at the Goethe event, Shida Bazyar said people who didn’t look like homegrown Germans often found they weren’t believed, that their stories were dismissed. As Saya says, her role was to throw provocative statements into the ring and argue fiercely with everyone….not to be right about things. So why not write a narrator who is unreliable and inventive? I saw this as narrator Kasih taking control, whether withholding information from her readers, or by telling their truth, the truth as she, Hani and Saya see it.
This is an immersive novel about casual every day racism that challenges our expectations and holds our attention with its superb and pacey storytelling, the tone excellently rendered in Ruth Martin’s translation. The personal story is underpinned by a deeply worrying account of the rise and influence of the far right in contemporary Germany that should make us all sit up. Yet it’s also about friendship–the deeply sustaining nature of the protagonists’ long friendship, that friendship that goes way back, that binds them together in fun times as well as adversity. The only advice Hani’s mum gave them as teenagers was Stick together! and that’s just what they do.
peakreads 