The Singularity

The following is from Balsam Karam’s The Singularity . Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author and librarian and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon , which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity is her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021. Friday morning one late summer in a city where the trash from the buildings with balconies facing the corniche is driven to where the palm trees droop and the earth corrodes green and brown; to where the children with palm fronds in their arms stop every day to poke around in the puddles of mud, waiting for the dogs to eventually arrive and tear the trash bags wide open. The children anticipate the dogs bounding atop the trash pile soon taller than the house along one side of the alley, and then them bounding back down and the mound sinking and spreading out; the children watch muddy water pulsing, filling the pits in the ground and flowing out to the cars and the newspaper stands, the shops, the fountain and the cherry trees too. The woman searching for her child wakes up in the morning sunburnt and sits up in the sand. The great loss has already rolled in across the earth, grief and drought, a tattered sunbaked landscape cupped by two empty hands; these days are not the days that once were and this place is a different place, the air close and old, and the city a hole between what came to be and what could have been. If I feel the sun to be large and hot, it is even hotter to the child she says from her place on the beach, lifting a fistful of sand to her cheek— if in daytime I always appear as the stranger I am in this city, then the child must also appear somewhere—if only I could find the right position and turn my gaze in her direc tion she says, looking around as […]

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