“Divine Thing”: Pregnancy without sex, reading without dopamine

It takes a mix of willpower and nerve to put down your phone, switch off the screens, set the world and its catastrophes and pressures to one side, and sit down with a novel. Willpower, to say no to the numbing entertainments engineered to deliver rapid-fire hits of dopamine and draw you, peacefully and meekly, toward brain rot. Nerve, because a novel is unlike other books: it promises no knowledge, doesn’t tell you how to self-actualize and become a millionaire, and doesn’t reveal the secrets of leaders or of corporate success.

Novels, as a rule, are written by people who make up lies, then print them and sell them to us. Stranger still, readers know, when they buy the book, that they are spending their money on a beautiful lie. They pass over books that promise wisdom, happiness, and self-improvement and pay instead for one they know in advance is nothing but a string of lies cast in a literary form called “the novel.”

Yet a novel’s lies sometimes have the power to strip bare the lies of life and stop time around us. When we finish reading, we glimpse a dim corner inside ourselves whose existence we hadn’t suspected, and we go out into the world understanding it better, more appreciative of its swings, and with a passion to know it.

Recently, I was lucky to find this magic in “Divine Thing,” a novel by Muhammad Abdelnabi, published by Al-Mahrousa. It is short, yet it carries you from the pits to the peaks, from disgust to the scent of flowers and the colors of butterflies, before leaving you facing yourself. You look around, and the world you knew before you began reading is gone. The taste of the novel lingers.

Salama is “pregnant”

Living up to the irony of his name—which translates to "safety"—the novel’s protagonist spends his life in perpetual pursuit of it. He keeps his head down, and would keep it lower if he could. He was born into a poor family whose only income came from the pot of stuffed vegetables his mother cooked and sold by the piece. His father named him Salama—the birth name of Abu Zayd Al-Hilali, the hero of the Arab folk epic Al-Sira Al-Hilaliya—out of a passion for the story. 

Beyond the name, the only thing Salama inherited from his father was his ugliness. Slow to speak as a child, he was branded simple-minded, and the charge stuck. After middle school, he was forced to drop out and take backbreaking, degrading jobs, and he endured the abuse of the neighborhood’s teenagers and young men so that he could provide for his mother and sisters.

Appointed a teaboy at a government bank, Salama lives to a monotonous rhythm. He does his job, returns to his room on the ground floor of pretty Aziza’s house, switches on the television, and watches until he falls asleep. Then he wakes up and goes back to work. On his fortieth birthday, he is afflicted by strange symptoms: stomach pains, vomiting, dizziness, a mad craving to lick the gravel in the street, and then a voice speaking to him from inside his belly.

As the symptoms multiply, Salama becomes certain of the terrifying truth that will overturn his life: he is “pregnant.” He sets about looking for a way out of the calamity that threatens his masculinity. “I’m pregnant, Souma, and I want to get rid of what’s in my belly,” he tells his neighbor, a nurse. She laughs and takes it for a joke. But the sonogram doesn’t laugh. The doctor, seeing the image of a “thing” in Salama’s belly for the first time, marvels at the will of God.

Miracles happen

The real miracle of the novel is not that a man becomes pregnant and goes through motherhood without any previous sexual experience. That is a narrative device, a novelist’s lie tossed to the hasty, ravenous reader. The miracle is that the “thing” opens Salama’s senses to the world. For the first time he grasps the pleasure of walking for the sake of walking. He smells, he tastes, he buys clothes, he thinks about love and about looking for Souma. He comes to know the pleasures of life that he used to pass by without noticing, just as life passes us by while we sit glued to our screens, as Salama sat before his.

“Thing” opens Salama’s eyes to life, but Salama is afraid of life, and of “Thing” itself. He sees it as a threat of public disgrace, a scandal, and the demolition of every image of masculinity he absorbed from the epic of Abu Zayd and from television. Fearing that shame, he sets out in search of deliverance from “what’s in his belly” and lands at a private fertility clinic belonging to a global network headquartered in the United States. There the novel shifts gears. Salama is no longer a man carrying a “thing” in his belly. He is a “case,” a scientific discovery that rivals compete to claim. Some want to own the discovery of the first man to carry a pregnancy without sexual intercourse, a finding that will change the history of medicine. Others want to move him to America, where the facilities, funding, and real scientific glory are.

To be inhabited by a strange thing

Little by little, the protagonist who spent his whole life trying to vanish from sight becomes the most coveted body in the eyes of global and local powers alike. Here Abdelnabi widens his game, and the truth of the novel is revealed: it is not about Salama’s body but about our own. Who lays a hand on them and claims to own them?

It also becomes a novel about class and power, about bodies that violate one another, and, before all that, about an authority that always says it is “doing this for your own good.” That authority locks Salama in an underground room on the pretext of protecting him and keeping him safe, but when America arrives, it hands his body over without a struggle.

As for “Thing,” which at first wanted nothing more than to get out and see the flowers and the butterflies and stroll beside the Nile, it too begins to understand the world it is preparing to enter: a world in which everything, it seems, is settled “by fighting.” It asks, astonished, why everything can’t be settled by agreement, and it resolves on the hardest decision, for itself and for Salama, as the only way to give survival a new meaning.

Because Abdelnabi writes obliquely, hinting by wink and gesture, he keeps the reader doubtful and alert, preoccupied with what this “thing” in Salama’s belly is, since it never reveals its nature. Still, anyone who touches Salama’s belly comes to know his history, his sorrows, and his few moments of happiness.

Abdelnabi’s novel does something similar to its reader. Around the middle of the book, some of us, like me, may feel bloating in the belly, sagging breasts, and perhaps white fluid seeping out and wetting the shirt. Something makes us turn toward all those colors, smells, and bodies around us that we chose to ignore, or were taught not to see.

Near the end of the novel, Salama discovers that every person carries a story that others never fully know, and that an individual’s story is complete only with the stories of those around him. He discovers, too, that any story is, in the end, nothing but a lie. It is a fiction that rises on the interpretation of facts and experiences, yet when we retell it we see the past and the present through it with fresh eyes, and see ourselves as part of a larger collective consciousness that shapes us and that we shape.

I don’t want to oversimplify and spoil the joke by explaining it, by saying that this thing, or fetus, in Salama’s belly is the novel itself, which toys with that possibility, and with the promise carried by every novel we open to read: that a strange thing will inhabit us, hearing and seeing through us, and then give us the capacity to see what we hadn’t wanted to see.