What if You Could Go Back in Time to Stop Terrorists Before They Strike?

THEY WILL DROWN IN THEIR MOTHERS’ TEARS
By Johannes Anyuru
Translated by Saskia Vogel

“We’re in the belly of Sweden,” writes the mysterious young woman at the center of the Swedish-Ugandan author Johannes Anyuru’s melancholic fourth novel, ably translated by the Berlin-based writer Saskia Vogel. The unnamed protagonist is telling her story to a visitor at a high-security psychiatric clinic where she has been held since her participation in a horrific terrorist attack in Gothenburg. She claims to have come from a near future in which populist nationalism has a grip on power, and any citizen deemed an “Enemy of Sweden” has been corralled into a brutal ghetto called “The Rabbit Yard.” This is the “belly,” the dark heart of a country that, in her timeline, has abandoned Social Democracy for an increasingly genocidal totalitarianism. Her visitor is himself a Swedish Muslim, a well-known writer who is feeling increasingly alienated by the political direction of his country. “Do I dare stay in this country?” he asks himself. “I was a Muslim, and … I started to think this made me a monster in Sweden.”

Time travel is, of course, a familiar device in speculative fiction, particularly the trope of the single event that changes the course of history. The terrorist attack — on a comic-book store hosting a talk by a cartoonist known for his provocative representations of Muhammad — is just one such epochal event. In the future from which the woman claims to come, 15 years later, lurid pictures of the cartoonist’s beheading will be streamed to the world, galvanizing anti-Muslim extremists and bringing about a dystopia in which the Swedish government now forces citizens to sign a loyalty pledge or face social exclusion, and white nationalist vigilantes called “Crusading Hearts” are given free rein to harass and intimidate. In the writer’s timeline, when the time comes to carry out the bookstore attack, the woman takes a decisive action that has drastic repercussions for the novel and for history.

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As speculative fiction, “They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears” is only intermittently compelling. Anyuru’s rationale for the captured woman’s time travel (and migration into another body) is vague, and relies on a dimly realized subplot about neurological experimentation and torture in a Jordanian “black site.” The notion that the political destiny of Sweden is changed by the bookstore attack is never convincingly sold.

However, the novel has a powerful emotional core. The writer and his wife, both so-called integrated Muslim intellectuals, are about to give up on Sweden and emigrate to Canada. As she scans their documents for a visa application, the wife remarks that “no one but Daesh dreams of us” (referring to the Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic State). The feeling of loss and betrayal is palpable. To discover that your family no longer forms part of the national dream, and that the only future that includes you is the one imagined by the murderous nihilists of the Caliphate, is a bitter experience.

Anyuru’s ability to imagine a thread connecting present-day exclusion to future atrocities makes this more than a genre entertainment. He has written a “state of the nation” novel for a country that seems to be losing faith in the civic values for which it is internationally admired. Often the mysterious time traveler’s voice seems to blend with the author’s, shouting out a warning that has relevance well beyond Scandinavia. “I’m writing to those of you who don’t know yet that madness will always become normal; in the end, normality becomes madness.”