Canadian poet and author Amal El-Mohtar is probably best known for writing two novellas: This is How You Lose the Time War and The River Has Roots and I had very opposite experiences reading them. The River Has Roots was probably my favourite thing I read last year, but I didn’t enjoy This is How You Lose the Time War. Nevertheless, I became a fan of El-Mohtar’s writing (even with This is How You Lose the Time War, the prose was the best part). Seasons of Glass and Iron is a collection of previously-published poems and stories that have won her many awards, and in it I could enjoy the full spectrum of her beautiful writing. Sadly, I cannot avoid the cliché statement that some stories worked better for me than others. El-Mohtar’s writing is not always easy to parse and may require focus to fill in the narrative blanks. Some of the stories went over my head in that same way as This is How You Lose the Time War had done. I was charmed by the prose but found myself asking what that story was about. I enjoyed those stories with narrative arcs over snapshot images, messages and narration pulled together like word collages.

Whoever edited the collection wisely put my favourite, “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, as the first story. Similar to The River Has Roots, the story is a feminist fable about a woman who is captive at the top of a glass mountain, while suitors try to climb up to her to win her hand (or fall to their deaths). Eventually another woman cursed to wear iron shoes climbs the mountain to find her. The writing in this story (and most of the others) is lyrical, and full of allusions to a long tradition of folktales, fables, and myths. Even though she borrows so many images and ideas, it doesn’t feel patchy or derivative. Instead, her prose flows and blends naturally, as if El-Mohtar’s mother tongue is the language of storytelling. 

The second story, “Green Book”, was an excellent contrast and showed how impressive El-Mohtar’s writing can be (even if it didn’t work for me). There’s a fantastical, otherworldly library, where we are reading/hearing from various writings, like reading a bunch of letters and messages. The writing was so dense with allusion and references to literary tropes and themes, that I kind of missed the point of the story (and missed the plot if there was one). It became difficult to know where one letter or voice ended and another began. I had definite flashbacks to reading This is How You Lose the Time War; once again I was in awe of the writing but frustrated, lost, and disappointed by the story.

My other favourite was called “Hollow Play”, where a woman is invited by a coworker to attend another friend’s performance at a cabaret, and the woman is fascinated and quickly learns that the friend may be a lot more than she appears. I was surprisingly engaged and invested in the relationships between these women, but also enjoyed how magical the story turned out to be in the end. In the collection’s introduction, El-Mohtar expresses that she loves women, women talking, and women’s friendships with each other. That is a pretty clear theme in her stories. 

In this collection, the stories all feature women who are intelligent, substantive, and occasionally iconoclastic. While the more contemporary stories feature women discovering and encountering each other in ways that uplift them, the traditional and folksy stories grow out of an unpleasant patriarchal context. Where there are men, they are cast as oppressors with antiquated male-chauvinist values that the women resist, defy, and break free from. In one of the stories, “Florilegia; or, Some Lies About Flowers”, a woman was magically created out of flowers to be the wife of a witch’s son. By the end, the story felt a bit blatant and preachy along those lines. Nevertheless, with stories in both old and modern settings, El-Mohtar’s writing really expresses a deep understanding of these women and their thoughts and passions, and that really drew me in.

The few poems were also both hits and misses. One poem, “Qahr”, was written half in Arabic so I really didn’t understand it (or the point of it). But another poem, called “Pieces”, about speaking and glass (whatever that means), had such beautiful language that even though I didn’t understand that one either, I was entranced by the words and images. Here’s a quote of my favourite section:

… I would tell these sons of men
something so shiningsharp that they would sing with it
hold the sun in a cup of their hands
but this glass voice breaks in my throat
and I would speak swallows with clear wings
to scrape an augury against the sky in splinters
but no one speaks glass.

My grandmother is a country I would know.
It is her name, her voice I hear
when I read this gold-cloth word
this sand-gold word, this sun-bright word
with its vowels askew in my alphabet,
this word of riches and gates, of grapes and roads,
of layers and music and dust.

I don’t know that I’ve had so contradictory or paradoxical an experience with any other writer, where I love so much about the writing, so many of the words and images, and yet I keep getting thrown-off or abandoned by the narratives (if there even is one). Reading El-Mohtar is a challenge for me, but a challenge that I enjoy undertaking. This collection is an exemplary primer of her writing. 

4 stars

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