My Dreadful Body is an award-winning debut autofictional novella by Egana Djabbarova. Originally published in Russian and translated into English by Lisa C. Hayden, it is an unsettling, disturbing, strangely absorbing read. I was unsure at first, but I became engrossed. Beautifully written in a strong poetic voice, you can’t help but feel great empathy and admiration for the narrator.
The young protagonist is born to Azerbaijani parents in Russia and grows up navigating an intense sense of displacement. Egana is viewed as an outsider and experiences racist abuse in Russia, yet when visiting family in Baku or Georgia, she is seen as Russian; condemning her to a state of rootless unbelonging from both cultures.
Invisible Women
‘A woman is not supposed to speak, is not supposed to contradict, and a woman is not allowed to forget that that she is an object in a sentence rather than its main subject.’
In her ultra-conservative community, a woman’s body is traditionally viewed in terms of marriage and childbearing. To fail in either leads to ostracism, exclusion and is a betrayal of family honour.
‘All women had to live with pain, and husbands beat all of them.’ The domestic abuse depicted in the novella, paired with the public legacy of Soviet-Russian colonisation, is one of the many forms of pain explored in My Dreadful Body.
The structure of the book follows a literal and symbolic cartography of the female body, set out in eleven chapters. Each is dedicated to a part of the body: the eyebrows, eyes, hair, tongue, back, throat, hands, belly and so on. For example, the opening chapter on eyebrows highlights the traditional Azerbaijani taboo against plucking them before marriage, marking them as a symbol of innocence and communal ownership. Egana longs to have blue not brown eyes (a legacy of colonisation). Tongues are the source of venomous gossip in the community. ‘Long hair conveyed its wearer’s patience and humility.’ A woman must always obey the codes of family and community, and be a committed home maker.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
‘I realised that something irreversible was happening to my body, something I couldn’t control, something bigger than me.’
Everything shifts when she begins to experience dizziness, multiple painful muscle dysfunctions, one of her feet begins to drag along the ground, and she struggles to speak. An MRI shows lesions on her brain. After various mistaken diagnoses it turns out she has generalised dystonia (a neurological movement disorder). Egana takes refuge in books, ‘My face was solidly hidden behind books in all the family photographs, which may be why Bibi called me “the Russian professor”.’ Paradoxically her illness frees her. But how will her repudiation of the social blueprint laid out for her be received by her family and a community bound to acceptance and silence? How will her writing be received?
The universality of the novella lies in its depiction of the ‘traditional’ societal obsession with controlling a woman’s appearance, her body and her life, while domesticating her. She must look attractive, be quiet, serve men and have children. In this way the book reads like a powerful feminist tract, illuminating the subtext that drives modern conservatism, from the MAGA movement in the US to the ‘trad wife subculture in the UK.
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