Shani Boianjiu's novel The People of Forever Are Not Afraid was longlisted for the Orange (now Baileys) Prize in 2013. The novel is actually a collection of interlinked stories based on the author's two years of mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces (both women and men must serve), which she began writing as a Harvard student for her English courses. Boianjiu began her service when she was only eighteen and the stories, written when she was 25, reflect the sorts of preoccupations any young woman would have, though with a twist since the women in these stories have the added pressures of living in a country where border security is a constant worry.
In an interview with NPR the author notes that borders are one of the prevailing themes in the stories--the physical borders of manning checkpoints or acting as guards but also the border between youth and adulthood. The stories center around three friends, Yael, Avishag and Lea, who live in a small northern border town, and follow them from high school through to middle age. The stories move from one narrator to the next and it's not always clear from the outset who is speaking, but over the course of the book the reader gets a sense of what each woman is like--her history and a feel for her own unique 'voice'.
Since Boianjiu wrote the stories as a student at Harvard it's not surprising that she wrote them in English rather than Hebrew. In a Q&A at the back of the paperback edition she discusses what it was like to write in English:
"I love the English language because it has a lot of words. Writing in English was sort of an accident, but I think it helped me. I had to work harder to find the words I needed, Describing a Hebrew-speaking world in the English language and translating Hebrew idioms and phrases helped me tell stories in a new way, or color a scene in an unfamiliar light."
Interestingly the book had to be translated into Hebrew when it was published in Israel, but the author was not happy with it and decided to do her own translation of the stories.
Boianjiu did not set out to write a book about the female Israeli soldiers' experience, rather it was meant to be simply a book about young Israeli women--her contemporaries--and by nature of what life is like for young Israeli women it's not surprising that the bulk of the stories are about guarding checkpoints, spending hours in watch towers looking across the border with Egypt, dealing with refugees or about young Palestinian boys who steal from Israeli military camps. There is a lot of the banal, occasional humor and sometimes scenes of horror and bloodshed.
I'm not sure I would call any of these young women heroines--not in the true sense of the word. They are very human and very much young women dumped into unusual circumstances with young men who are going to end up in the sorts of situations you expect that are going to occur when you mix together a mass of eighteen-year-olds. Sometimes they are not even very nice young women, so I was happy to see that was one of the questions the author answered in her Q&A.
"I am not interested in writing stories about heroes. I am far more interested in the darkest corners of my characters' minds. I think a lot of people might feel as though they are the only ones who have terrible thoughts or who have done ugly things, because everyone is so busy portraying such a wholesome image of themselves, young women in particular. I also think human beings in general are not sympathetic. They are beautiful, but not sympathetic."
This is such a curious book, interesting and in many cases very well done (considering she was not writing in her native language), but it has such a foreign feel to me (not a criticism or a bad thing in any way). She often walks a line between reality and something else, you wonder even in a fictional setting how much of the stories is real and how much fantasy. They sometimes verge on satiric or even the comic and perhaps best, what was mentioned in my class, there are moments of the absurd. Like soldiers working a checkpoint on a road that is no longer used and where three Palestinians (two men and a boy) return to again and again, hoping to create some sort of conflict worthy of making the news.
One of my favorite stories takes place in that guard tower I mentioned above that overlooks the Egyptian border. Across the way sits another guard tower manned by two Egyptian soldiers bored to the point they won't even look across the way. A diplomatic incident takes place when Avishag cannot take the feel of her uniform against her skin and disrobes, as does her fellow (female also) soldier, lying down in the tower but in full view of the other side. She finally (unintentionally) catches the eye of one of the Egyptian soldiers and one phone calls leads to another until it makes its way back to some high ranking Israeli official. Yes, causing a diplomatic incident (and resulting in a little time in jail for the nude sunbathers).
You don't often get to read about being a soldier from the woman's perspective, even if Boianjiu didn't set out to tell this sort story in particular, and even if these women are anything but heroic, it's an interesting set of stories to read. For these young women, those first eighteen years are a long breathless race--grades, boys, clothes, popularity, then a two-year long "mind numbing respite" and chance to think before whatever takes place after. Along with everything else, there is life and death and families, marriage and even the promise of children. Once again this is a view into a world I am likely never to see.
If you are curious, the New Yorker published "Means of Suppressing Demonstrations" (the story I mention above about the three Palestinians) in 2012, so you can have a taste of the author's work yourself.