...a variegated tapestry that unfurls over more than 400 pages and weaves together myriad stories, voices, settings, and time periods ... novel that interrogates language, race, and identity from beginning to end ... resists the unifying force of fascism, and rejects the ideal of having only one identity, whether it be national, cultural, sexual, or otherwise ... steeped in bodily imagery and thick with bodily traumas ... this focus on the body and its functions, its innards, its mysterious and occult workings, its cramps and urges, is particularly resonant ... ironic, ebullient, and melancholic in turns...more comic than tragic, clamorous in spirit as opposed to a lament ... There is no better time than now to bring this novel into English ... a novel that takes the act of confusion—literally, the melding together of disparate elements—to its highest and most articulate level.
Scego doesn’t make any stylistic overtures to spare her readers’ feelings. Trauma is spoken of plainly and bodily ... And yet the register of each of the interwoven sections of the five characters is warmly humorous, superbly rendered in Aaron Robertson’s sensitive translation from the Italian ... Scego interweaves her characters with a keen eye for patterning ... Though the narrative’s tendency to fold back on itself is at times demanding, the novel’s generosity of sympathy relies on this narrative looping ... there is a freshness to the way Scego depicts their daily interactions from the perspectives of both mothers and daughters ... The swing to right-wing governments, the reassertion of national borders and the xenophobic fear of refugees and migrants are never far from its centre. Beyond Babylon ultimately succeeds in rendering these on a human level.
... sweeping and bold ... Scego’s book bears witness to the impossibility of remaining exiled from your own past ... The novel’s language is sensuous and playful, and Scego’s lush descriptions create imagery that gives a supple richness to her characters’ memories ... Scego is refreshingly unabashed in discussing the corporeal — what the female body does naturally — birth, menstruation, breastfeeding; and, what is done to and in violation of it — female circumcision, rape, coerced abortion. In this way she punctuates how a woman’s agency over her body is fundamental to her self-identity ... In portraying the inner lives of refugee women and their first-generation, immigrant daughters, Scego has created a work of great empathy that is a testament to the psychological dissonance that refugees suffer as they remake lives in foreign places while under the pervasive shadow of brutal pasts.
The reader of Beyond Babylon is able to make connections between the five characters’ lives and feelings that the characters themselves do not always make ... The power of the novel is the unexpected links among these different characters and places ... Not only do the characters at times see how their stories intertwine with others’ experiences, but readers may also see their worlds reflected in the stories ... Beyond Babylon is a brutal book that vividly describes multiple rapes, desperate poverty, suicide, forced abortion, racist violence, torture, clitoridectomies, and death in childbirth. But it is not without hope ... The work is full of characters who take joy in their ability to express themselves through music, dance, clothing, poetry, and prose.
While Morrison, Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Derek Walcott, and other writers of the Americas have developed the literary Black Atlantic, Scego’s project is specific to the Mediterranean, and particularly, the ways the legacy of Italian colonialism inflects contemporary processes of racialization ... Rather than suggesting that 'beyond Babylon' is a destination, the novel expresses the material and relational afterlives of resilience, anti-colonization, and collective racial solidarity in the present. Scego’s genius is to scale from the international to the intimate, from memory and materiality to music, mothers, and menstruation, the 'rhythm that transports me into a cosmic chaos that appears to be my own.'
This is not your traditional immigrant novel: Somali–Italian Scego creates something more shifting, more difficult to pin down ... True, we find the regular anecdotes of the outsider in its pages—hair conformity troubles, menial jobs, passport worries, and so on. But Scego is more concerned with turning the telescope the other way, towards the swirling insides of quietly eccentric family members, generational debts accruing interest, and the sins of the mothers ... Scego, like Toni Morrison, populates her fictional universe with crippled survivors and the ghosts that plague them ... In a novel of such grand measure, the best moments in Beyond Babylon happen in its tiny corners, not on the main stage of ideas, where the action can be overblown.
...vibrant and heartrending ... Robertson’s translation preserves Scego’s imagery but leaves intact the forays into Spanish, Arabic, and Somali, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s introduction excellently sets up the novel. This powerful tale winningly portrays the path from pain to recovery and wholeness.
