In January, anticipating the paperback edition of my novel, I was invited to write a few words for this column. For days I walked around in poor disposition. I kept writing and rewriting. Then on 28 January in Victoria, Texas, some 300 miles from where I live, a mosque that had been attacked twice before was destroyed in a fire. Two days later, a gunman stormed another mosque, this time in Quebec City, and took six lives. The citizens of seven Muslim countries were banned from entering the US and even green-card holders – like myself and my wife – found themselves blocked out. A five-year-old boy, a US citizen like my daughter, was handcuffed and kept in custody for hours.

And since then? In the words of Jack Gilbert: “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere.”

Every day, it seems, we are tested, challenged, pushed. Every day, we’re made to face inhuman violence and with it, the very real danger of losing our own human face. “Liberties aren’t given, they are taken,” Aldous Huxley once wrote. Now, in the presence of so much darkness, hate and fear, it seems to me that we must resist the urge to take away, to strip from each other the freedoms those before us have sacrificed so much to claim.



For months now, people smarter than me have been expressing their outrage, anger, pain. What can I add to the global discourse that has not been said already? Whatever I write seems either self-serving or preachy; heartless or melodramatic; too naive or too pragmatic. On the verge of quitting, I feel compelled to paraphrase Gandhi’s famous line that my novel is my message, and say no more. And yet, I’m ashamed to sit silent. For years, I’ve been writing about precisely this kind of oppression; about ordinary people fighting to bring down borders and walls, to divert rivers, to move mountains, shatter the bonds of self, family, nation and call themselves free again.

My novel Stork Mountain unfolds in a fictional Bulgarian village on the border with Turkey. The village is divided into two hamlets: a Christian one, almost desolate now, and another, where a handful of Muslims still remain. This village is an allegory, a model in miniature of Bulgaria and of the Balkans, where for centuries Christians and Muslims have slaughtered each other and kissed each others’ hands in friendship. But now it seems to me this village might be archetypal, a model transcending nationalities, cultural and physical borders. The shapes change, the names, the points on the map – but not the substance.

“Return where you have failed,” Nikos Kazantzakis writes in his Report to Greco, “leave where you have succeeded.” This notion interested me while writing Stork Mountain: are we stuck in perpetual return, failing where those before us also failed? Can a family, a nation, all nations be trapped in repetition – to burn mosques, to slaughter one another – until one day an ordinary person resolves the task assigned, first for himself, and then, by proxy, for all of us at once, even for those who came before us? Or, as a friend used to say, is it all just karma?

This is not my country. Not my state. Not my president. I’ve been hearing such denial for weeks. And I myself can deny this world just as easily. After all, I’m not American, and I don’t have the right to vote. I pay my taxes, but otherwise I feel I am a guest in the US. And yet, it seems to me that to reject the world now will be a wasted chance. Now is precisely the time to claim the country, the state, the president as our own. I say, naive as this might sound, even if you are the citizen of another land: claim this America as yours. Get concerned, get outraged, get hurt. Because – and here it goes, that very foolish thought – aren’t we all one organism, one consciousness striving to know itself?

‘Sooner or later, terrified or not, the ego will have to let go’ … Miroslav Penkov. Photograph: Bart Michiels

Ego death. That’s what I think we are experiencing now, and have been for some time. Our consciousness, I think, strives to expand, to merge, to return to a state before divisions. But our ego, on the other hand, strives to hold on – to its small corner of dust, to its precious little things, to the categories from which it has built itself.

But sooner or later, terrified or not, the ego will have to let go. Of the petty divisions, of the “mine” and the “yours”, of the colours, genders, races and territories. Without the ego, perhaps we’ll see that we’ve been caught not in dying, but in a beautiful dance, dancing with oneself.

I think we deserve what we get, and we get exactly what we need. The real mastery is not to get what you want, but to want what you get; to make use of it, to work with it for the benefit of yourself and, by proxy, of others. Whether it’s karma running its course – cause and effect, the backbone of storytelling – or a lesson that must be learned before we can leave, there has never been a better chance to get things done than the chance at hand; never a better place than right here or a better moment than right now. Let’s succeed once and for all, and let’s move on.

Extract

When I was six, Grandpa took me to his native village to meet the oldest man on earth. ‘I’m a hundred years old and who are you?’ the old man said. ‘Your great-grandson,’ I answered, petrified. He turned his head this way and that, bared two rows of perfect yellow teeth, and let his milky eyes fidget in their sockets. ‘You’ll never live to be as old as me,’ he said. ‘Whatever you think of doing, I’ve already done it. Wherever you think of going, I’ve already been and returned. And it was nothing special.’ He raked my hair, then groped my face – my forehead, nose, and chin. He traced the gaps where teeth were missing and pushed against the ones that rocked. Then, as unexpected as lightning in the winter, he pinched a rocking tooth, yanked it out, and ate it.

More about the book

“This is a historically rich study of borders: those imposed by cartography and those that are self-constructed.” - Zoë Apostolides in the Financial Times [paywall]

Buy the book

Stork Mountain is published by Sceptre at £8.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £7.64.