In a short introduction to Ixelles, Omar El Akkad invokes Faulkner on the subject of states depriving and disenfranchising whole communities crucial to its existence: “[T]he past is never past, but in places where this kind of damage is done, neither is the present fully present. Instead, there is a strange uncertainty that takes hold, like the soft, raw skin that forms after the wound but before the scar. A middle place.” This is perhaps the best way of describing what lies at the centre of Johannes Anyuru’s latest novel, first published in Swedish in 2022 and now translated into English by Nichola Smalley. While it covers a lot in terms of themes, the narrative is largely centred around Ruth and her young son, Em. Mio, Ruth’s now dead ex-boyfriend and the father of her child, is an absent presence who occupies the third point of the narratorial triangle.
The story is set in Brussels, where Ruth and Em live in a nice house on the beach in an affluent district. But this was not always the case. Ruth hails from Twenty-Seventy, a “rough” neighbourhood composed largely of immigrants and working-class people. Her mother, who came from the Congo to Belgium, is an alcoholic and a gambler who has been separated from her father ever since Ruth was a child. Mio, whose real name is Muhammed, is of Arab origin. His parents and his two younger siblings—also move to Twenty-Seventy and are Ruth’s neighbours, which is how the two meet and fall in love as teenagers. Mio moves in dangerous circles and is somewhat of a local gangster in his own right. He is knifed to death by an unknown assailant at the age of seventeen. Ruth is pregnant at the time. She reinvents herself and moves out of the area.
In the process of putting all this behind her, Ruth hides the truth from Em as he grows up, lying about Mio and much else besides. This is where the novel’s title comes into play: Ruth tells Em that she comes from the area known Ixelles, saying this was where she was neighbours with Mio. In doing so, she erases the much less posh Twenty-Seventy, which has no name and is just identified by its postcode, from their history. Ixelles, on the other hand, is a well-to-do municipality in Brussels, an out-of-reach aspiration during Ruth’s real childhood. In the present, she describes herself as a refugee from her own past and is loath to be solely associated with Twenty-Seventy, which marks her out as exotic to clients, to whom she is routinely “sold” by her boss as a consultant with a “troubled” background. She desires to be “like anyone else, a figure who passes and is gone, without a trace.”
Reinvention is the central pillar of Ruth’s life in other ways too. Her job, for example, is at a shadowy agency that relies on the interplay of fact and fiction, skillfully blurring the boundary between them to create and manipulate public opinion towards any desired outcome. Picture crisis management firms but on a whole other scale. While her paychecks might say “consultant,” then, Ruth’s work is difficult to describe. When meeting a tentative client for the first time, she explains:
“I help the client navigate a media landscape in which the person speaking is often as important as what they’re saying … History has left traces in the language we use. Ripples. I work with fiction in order to … smooth out these ripples, or in some cases utilise them … My job is to invent human beings, to create people who tell a particular story or stage certain events.”
As the client later remarks, the agency is artfully “mapping the sociological landscape of the future.”
In a world where AI bots and deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and hard to tell apart from actual human beings and real footage, the work of the agency is all too believable. One luxury clothing brand does not want to be linked to “a certain type of milieu”; Ruth recommends that their next collection feature a T-shirt with a photo of Gene Kelly in blackface, after which one of her “activist voices” will start a campaign against it and give the brand the “right amount of racist associations” to keep their customer base stable. A female politician from Brussels is afraid that her extramarital relationship will come to light; the agency suggests that if she starts funding a social activist vociferously opinionated on “the very subjects the party is pussy-footing around,” any attempt to remove her will be connected to the activist and any scandal will look like an excuse. The activist, of course, does not exist in reality and is just a social media personality with a credibly concocted backstory.
None of these strategies are half-baked. Their various elements are years in the making, with Ruth and her colleagues deciding which to employ, where, and in what manner. There is a verifiable paper trail, documented evidence, and even trained actors hired when it is time to make physical, public appearances. This is doctoring of facts at the empirical level, with enough attention to detail to fool almost everyone. It is seduction and power play. Ruth pushes it a step further while waxing philosophical:
She would like to be able to say that the work is even more complicated, that it’s about constructing a game with language that writes the client’s needs into the story of time itself—time understood as a measure of our species’ progress: cave paintings followed by penicillin, followed by human rights—time as resistance to the sucking, dark ebb of entropy.
It is interesting to note that the power Ruth holds in the present is in direct contrast to her powerlessness in the past. The main action of the narrative is precipitated by the two colliding against each other. A client consortium wants the agency to help them in manufacturing public consent for the demolition of Twenty-Seventy to make way for redevelopments. While a new residential area is being planned, it will price out the current residents of the neighbourhood and invite a more gentrified crowd. While Ruth hasn’t entirely cut contact with the locality—her mother still lives there and she frequently meets another friend—she is now fully thrust back into the old days. On her many excursions to the area, she discovers a golden disc that holds an audio recording of a man claiming to be Mio. She is left shaken. The voice claims that Mio never died but instead faked his death to escape certain violence—and that he is currently in a place called the Nothingness Section, a purgatory for the lost and broken. Meanwhile, Em is increasingly curious about his father and can tell Ruth is lying about things.
Anyuru takes an inherently straightforward-but-nuanced narrative and enhances it further by structuring it in a way that brings out its polyphonic potential. The chapters smoothly shift between past, present, and future. The perspectives are also not just limited to Ruth, Em, and Mio but bring to the fore a whole cast of characters. There are chapters from the point of view of Ruth’s parents, Mio’s brother, and other residents of Twenty-Seventy. There are also other special chapters that repeat across the book: “Gold” is essentially transcripts from the golden discs of the voice claiming to be Mio; “Control” is from the perspective of Em, who loves roleplaying games and the esoteric, serving as a game master; “Monster Manual,” a reference to the D&D bestiaries that Em likes to read and collect, is more diffuse as it sweeps across various characters. Simply put, the novel does not have a unifying voice but rather a medley of tones and registers.
Fittingly, Ixelles is a book that draws a lot of attention to the auditory. There are of course those recordings on the golden discs, which have a hallucinatory quality of their own and hint at a reality different than the current one. Ruth calls them “artifacts from another world,” and that is not just a reference to outdated technology that compact discs represent. Music also plays a huge role in the book: The rap and hip-hop that the boys of Twenty-Seventy are always listening to and replicating; the quirky instrumental pieces that Ruth’s mother creates for her; the giants—Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone—who let Ruth get closer to her mother before she moves on to more atonal, “pure” sounds beyond the verbal: cities at night or giant singing bowls. No wonder that El Akkad describes the experience of reading the novel as akin to detecting “faint transmissions from uneasy, adjacent universes.”
While the novel’s setup might hint towards parallel realities or dystopian futures with the possibility of conversations with the dead, the actual narrative comes to a resolution that is far from the popular trappings of speculative fiction. Anyuru’s equally brilliant previous novel, translated by Saskia Vogel as They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears (2017), also employed an SF framework for a story that sat primarily in the realm of literary fiction; but the elements of the genre are even fewer in Ixelles. The discs have a perfectly grounded explanation and, in the end, there is nothing fantastical here. Nevertheless, the themes Anyuru touches upon have a lot of commonalities with science fiction. The narrative ably interrogates the idea of memory, both personal and communal, through the figure of Mio and how he is remembered. He is the boy who loved to collect feathers and distributed PlayStations among kids; but he also sold drugs and those PlayStations were stolen goods from burglaries.
Twenty-Seventy, the neighbourhood and its people, come to symbolise stagnation and decline, a present that’s so beholden to the past that it cannot keep pace with the future. Even though they have lived in Belgium for years, the neighbourhood’s inhabitants’ history in other lands and worlds follows them. As a biracial Muslim man born and brought up in Sweden by a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, Anyuru has first-hand experience of the prevalent racism in the region. He brings this experience to how he writes his characters and the spaces they inhabit. It is poignant to see how dreams and aspirations clash with reality and the system, leading to a life on the peripheries of an alien world in which many do not have ownership of their own stories, let alone the language to tell them.
El Akkad compares Anyuru to Borges: “It occurs to me that, just as so many of Borges’ characters might be said to share his fear of dying in a language they can’t understand, Anyuru’s characters often navigate the world as though gripped by a fear of dying in a culture that doesn’t understand them.” Hope for another world—a world which can finally understand them and in which they can shed off the burden of the past—keeps Anyuru’s characters alive. It’s also hope that makes the golden discs so alluring: For Ruth, they bring the possibility of love being alive, even though the belief might be fantastical. For the others who find these discs over the years, the young boys and girls of Twenty-Seventy, they represent a reversal of fortune: They have followed Mio and now find themselves trapped in the same cycles of violence and want. Mio’s voice offers escape, a way out of Twenty-Seventy through the promise of the Nothingness Section where things are better. What seals this speculative deal is that Mio was someone like them, someone from the same place as them.
There are of course a couple plot threads that Anyuru keeps close to his chest until the end of the novel. They recontextualise certain formative incidents in the lives of these characters. On one level, all this acts like the unfolding of fate and destiny in a Greek tragedy, a story in which hope seems misplaced. Yet, despite it all, the promise of other worlds holds. A glimmer on the horizon of possibility.