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For those of us who work with the psychoanalytic and the political, Samir El-Youssef's powerful novel about the Middle East presents us with a rare opportunity to stretch our hypotheses. His use of repetition, stark poetic language, and the universality of an unnamed narrator, prepares us for Greek tragedy. Instead with his broad sweep of the canvas, and refusal to be drawn into partisan politics or ideologies, Samir offers us Middle East tragedy.
The Illusion of Return, by Samir El-Youssef London , is a novel about existence, a fragile precarious existence of Palestinian refugees during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The story is retold fifteen years later through the narrator's exploration of his own and his friends' personal stories.
We are in for surprises as the internal dynamics of Palestinian and Lebanese society unfold and Samir opens spaces in our imagination to rethink such sacred cows as ‘home’ and the ‘Right of Return’. He explores the complex relationship between present and past and future, and the intersubjective recognition, or lack of it, between host countries and refugees. A truly political novel, in which complex situations are bravely exposed and confronted, Samir transcends simplistic political rhetoric by unravelling the psychology of yearning to return, and separating out illusion from reality, a subject that has long interested me in the Jewish Diaspora. The description of his refugee characters' inner world is an enriching experience for any therapist. The tragic story unfolds with a rhythmic driving force; the past emerges and submerges in waves as the repressed past becomes conscious, and our hero risks dealing with his ‘unreal’ traumatic past and moving on into an uncertain future. El-Youssef weaves in and out of areas familiar to psychoanalysis: real and not real, trauma