In the stranglehold of patriarchy – Yegana Dzhabbarova launches a literary liberation

It is a quiet yet sensational book: the first novel, "My Family's Hands Weren't Meant for Writing," written in Russian by Yegana Dzhabbarova, an Azerbaijani woman born in Yekaterinburg in 1992 and living in Hamburg since 2024. Her protagonist, like the author, belongs to the Azerbaijani diaspora in Russia and grew up under strict patriarchal laws. These laws force women to unconditional obedience, to a life as submissive wives and devoted mothers. Other life plans are not envisaged.

Dzhabbarova's heroine defies the rules of the community and her abusive father by escaping into the world of books—reading and writing. Her serious illness, dystonia, which paralyzes her muscles, offers a liberation of a completely different kind. Only through the implantation of a brain-stimulating device can she find a return to a certain normality, whereby she now becomes dependent on the functioning of technology—"controllable like a household appliance." However, she can no longer and no longer wants to meet the demands of her environment.

Dzhabbarova tells the story of this double emancipation in a calm and richly imagery manner, using chapters titled "Eyes," "Hair," "Mouth," "Tongue," "Shoulders," "Hands," "Back," and "Stomach." The body as a site of social oppression, ideological prejudice, and everyday stresses.

It then reads like this: "Why did the eyes of an Eastern woman have to be black and bottomless like the Kaaba? Why were a woman's eyes not allowed to have a bottom? They could only absorb the world, without the right to change it."

Yes, people eye each other closely so as not to attract unpleasant attention or step out of line, so as not to become the victim of malicious gossip. Hair must be long, as must clothes, and mouths must be kept as silent as possible, except when eating, singing lullabies, or whispering prayers, fairy tales, and curses.

But it's not just the self-regulation of the Muslim diaspora described that's misogynistic and repressive; the racism of the Russian majority society is also present. Insults are hurled at the protagonist in Russian "like dead kernels of corn," and she is reminded that she is "black, different, ape, foreigner, Kanake, a stranger." The paradox: "I had become part of this language, but it poisoned me like contaminated water, the words burned like the corpses of plague victims, they stung my foreign body (...), my sick, swelling Eastern female body, what should I call this body?"

Yet Russian, in particular, becomes a medium for both the protagonist and the author, not only to critically examine their background, but also to cast it aside and forge a self-determined path into the future. Writing as a liberating act, even if it means "tearing pieces out of one's own body in order to populate the imaginations of others with them." One can only be curious about Yegana Dzhabbarova's further literary career. With her debut novel, she has certainly created a work that is both illuminating and poetic, which Maria Rajer has translated into nuanced German.

Yegana Dzhabbarova: The Hands of the Women in My Family Weren't Meant for Writing. Novel. Translated from the Russian by Maria Rajer. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2025. 139 pp., CHF 34.90.