“There is always something out there which is far more than you, more intelligent than you. It is in permanent communication with you, but your receivers are shut.”
— Hélène Cixous“The colonised man is an envious man whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
There is a moment in The Book of Disappearance1 when the narrator’s grandmother, sitting quietly on a wooden bench overlooking the Jaffa shoreline, dies. The death is modest and unannounced, her body discovered only because her grandson retraces her steps. She dies as she lived: alone, unassimilated, half-invisible. Her death prefigures the novel’s conceit, what if all Palestinians simply vanished? But it also serves as a reminder of something more prosaic: that lives under occupation are already lived at the edge of visibility, at the limit of recognisability. Ibtisam Azem’s novel, translated by Sinan Antoon, never fully commits to allegory, even as it borrows from it. Instead, it stays with the political trauma of disappearance, the sort that is lived, day by day, in a city like Jaffa.
Both novels begin with disappearance, but they end in very different kinds of aftermaths, one mournful, the other monstrous. Together, they illuminate what it means to be erased by history, and what it might mean to survive it by becoming something else entirely.
In Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery, disappearance takes another form: grotesque mutation. Set in a flooded, scorched, post-Antarctic Argentina where the ice caps have melted and “virofinance” is law, the novel follows a mutant child born of insect and human, mocked, feared, othered, until the moment she tears herself open and becomes something else: Dengue Girl, avenger of the future. Where Azem lingers in the spaces of erasure, Nieva explodes them. But both novels ask, in different registers, what it means to live on after history, after catastrophe, after the violence of being made monstrous or irrelevant by the state.
Neither novel sits easily within the label of speculative fiction. Azem’s book, for all its oneiric premise, is rooted in the politics of memory and place, its surrealism emerges less from fantasy than from the unnaturalness of the real. Jaffa, after all, did vanish; its Palestinians were removed, resettled, or confined to the margins. What remains is a simulacrum, a “city of glass”, in Alaa’s words, “impersonating” his grandmother’s Jaffa but bearing no resemblance to it. Nieva’s world is a cyberpunk phantasmagoria of necropolitics and economic mutation. Yet even here, the violence is local and embodied: Dengue Girl emerges not just from narrative excess, but from labour camps, toxic beaches, and the slaughterhouse logic of capitalist ruin.
That both novels arrive in English through the hands of translators, Sinan Antoon and Rahul Bery adds another layer to their meditation on memory and loss: survival, in both cases, depends on transmission.
Both novels are preoccupied with inheritance, genetic, political, historical. Dengue Girl’s beak, wings and stench mark her as hybrid horror, the issue of a world poisoned by its ruling class. But she is also a child. Her revenge, the disembowelling of her tormentor El Dulce, the arterial frenzy that follows, is a grotesque reappropriation of power. The insect-child who was warned she would become a disease vector becomes instead a weapon. In Azem’s novel, the body changes through grief. The inheritance is quieter: a pearl necklace, a smell of jasmine, a memory not quite captured in a photograph. Alaa inherits the loss, the longing, and the fear of being the last to remember.
Neither novel allows for reconciliation. Ariel, the liberal Israeli journalist in The Book of Disappearance, begins as sympathetic, ends in paranoia. He scours Alaa’s flat for meaning and finds only his own reflection. Nieva’s world has already passed the point of repair. Dengue Girl flies off, buzzing and bloodied. Her future is feral, unknowable. Perhaps that’s what survival looks like now.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, saw the colonised as not simply dehumanised, but unmoored from time itself, denied history and denied futurity. His insight, that the dream of the colonised is not freedom but substitution, sits uneasily with Ariel, who dreams only of restoring order. He cannot see the Palestinians as anything other than servants, problems, absences. The fantasy of peaceful coexistence collapses the moment the colonial architecture is even lightly disturbed. Ariel does not wake to a new world. He wakes to a world that no longer reflects him.
Azem’s counterfactual is not a thought experiment. It is a mirror held up to the state. The Netanyahu regime, in its present form, has taken the logic of Azem’s novel to its conclusion. Since October 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza has evolved into an explicit campaign of annihilation. Whole neighbourhoods flattened, refugee camps bombed, entire families wiped out with clinical precision. It is not military strategy. It is the political project of erasure, one long foreseen but rarely so openly pursued. The strategy now is not control or containment, but disappearance. The Netanyahu regime calls this a war. It is not a war. It is an erasure.
The horror in Azem’s novel is not just that the Palestinians vanish, it’s that their disappearance is noticed only when it becomes inconvenient. What is missed is not the people but the labour. The same logic applies now: what Israel risks losing in Gaza is not lives but governance. The population becomes visible only as a logistical failure.
In Nieva’s Argentina, the population is no longer recognisable as human. The floodwaters have risen, the viruses have won, and capital has mutated into an organic, parasitic form. The only resistance left is bodily: teeth, blood, wings. Gender in Nieva’s novel is not identity but mechanism. Dengue Girl bites because she must. Female mosquitoes feed. Male mosquitoes do not. The transformation from boy to girl is not symbolic, it is functional. And yet in that moment of mutation, something else emerges: pleasure, purpose, rage. If Azem’s novel is elegy, Nieva’s is incantation.
Fanon understood that decolonisation was not recovery but rupture. “Decolonisation,” he wrote, “is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another.” Azem’s novel asks what happens when the species disappears. Nieva’s shows us what happens when a new species rises. The question is not whether the world can be made whole again. It is whether something new, born of loss and rage, can thrive among the ruins.
In both novels, gender mediates power and pain. Azem’s narrator grieves not as a man but as a grandson. His grandmother’s stories form the architecture of his resistance. Her death is the moment he fully enters the historical condition of loss. His mother, roaming the streets with wild hair and mismatched shoes, is Antigone in reverse, grieving for a history still alive in fragments. In Dengue Boy, the maternal bond is toxic. The mother fears her child’s body, hides sausages in lunchboxes, hopes containment will replace care. Dengue Girl learns what every monster learns: that survival requires disobedience.
There is no redemption in either book. But there is a theory of survival. Azem shows that even in absence, the erased remain, speaking, resisting, walking through cities that no longer speak their names. Nieva goes further. He suggests that the only way to survive is to become unrecognisable. To mutate. To feed.
In Gaza, children write their names on their arms in case their bodies are lost beneath the rubble. The Netanyahu regime has abandoned the pretence of security. Its war is metaphysical: not to defeat Palestinians, but to unmake them. Azem knew this. So does Nieva. The novels differ in tone and tradition, but they share a commitment to the ghost, to the thing that will not die, that will not disappear, that haunts the city of the living. This is not simply memory. It is a politics.
In one of the final scenes of The Book of Disappearance, Alaa writes in his red notebook: “I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. And we call both cities Jaffa.” The task now is not to banish the ghost, but to learn to speak with it. To write with it. To resist, like them, the final vanishing act.
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Footnotes
- Which has been longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize ↩︎
