Although it only marginally features any fantastic elements (mainly a rather ingratiating spirit), E. Lily Yu’s luminous first novel
On Fragile Waves has a lot to say about both the power of story and the limits of what stories can do. We first meet Firuzeh, the central point-of-view character, as a ten-year-old trying to escape with her family from a war-ravaged Afghanistan in which her earliest memories – rendered in a kind of impressionistic child-cenetered prose-poetry that oddly reminded me of the opening of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – are punctuated by the sounds of fiery explosions. As they make their way through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia toward what they view as the promised land of Australia, Firuzeh’s mother Abay tries to keep her and her brother Nour entertained with stories of classic Persian heroes like Rostam and his powerful horse Rakhsh. Almost equally fanciful, although Abay doesn’t know it yet, are her visions of a stress-free life in Australia, “a safe country…no bombs. No checkpoints. No soldiers or Taliban.” The contrast between these kinds of stories is the contrast between memory and hope, between old heroic models of behavior and dreams of a more manageable future. I was tempted to add between fantasy (dreams from the past) and science fiction (dreams of the future), but there’s really nothing to be gained by reading the novel in any sort of genre terms, unless you view the refugee survival tale as a genre unto itself, with roots as old as classical antiquity and as current as Britain’s “Refugee Tales” project. For some years now, refugee literature has even been a course offering in various university English and humanities departments, a sure sign that a literature has not only arrived, but may already be on its way to ossification.