My Dreadful Body

By Egana Djabbarova
Translated by Lisa C. Hayden
New Vessel Press; 144 pp.; $17.95
Buy the book

This tour de force short novel recounts the narrator Egana’s various neurological disorders, including dysarthria and “generalized dystonia,” through which a doctor tells her “that over time practically all of the muscles become implicated.” Her diseases and their treatments cripple her: “my foot clenched as if it was wearing an invisible pointe shoe… My muscles contracted constantly and uncontrollably, becoming ironlike rocks.” Eventually doctors implant an electronic stimulator in her. For her “tune-up” a month after the operation, a doctor “warned that she was going to change my settings. A moment later, my eyes darkened, strange colored blotches appeared, and my right hand cramped and spasmed. The doctor looked at me and changed the settings back. Another minute later and the whole right side of my body cramped and I couldn’t open my mouth, which was taut as a thread.… After a couple of more unsuccessful attempts, she finally found a frequency where I maintained my functionality… She had essentially controlled my body, almost as if it were a toy car: the buttons on her tablet determined if I’d be able to speak, move my hands and legs freely, see, and lead a full life. My body had become as functional and controllable as a household appliance…”

Djabbarova’s clever narrative is not straight-forward; it’s like discovering over time from a charming, charismatic friend various shocking and fascinating details from her life, as the thematic chapters take up her and her mother’s and grandmothers’ body parts: “Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair,” “Mouth,” “Shoulders,” “Hands,” “Tongue,” “Back,” “Legs,” “Throat,” “Belly.” Associations of words and topics “stimulate” Egana’s narrative across time and cultures.

The larger context is the situation of Egana and other Azeri-Russians in post-Soviet Yekaterinburg. Through unveiling the aspects of Egana’s faulty (“dreadful”) body parts, Djabbarova, a 33-year-old poet and novelist, has discovered a dynamic and impressive way to account for not only her quick-witted narrator’s story (a story quite similar, seemingly, to her own), but also her family’s story and the Azeri diaspora’s cultural story. Though there is nothing funny about her devastating health issues or her father’s raging alcoholism or her mother’s or grandmothers’ submission to male violence in the home, Egana just can’t help making cracks about the fateful life she has led: “Immediately after surgery, my body became more and more like my mother’s, as if deferring death had allowed it to finally recall its own ancestry.… My body was getting larger and heavier… gravitating toward the ground as if it knew that was where it would eventually end up.”

Bookish, brilliant Egana is not going to submit to her father’s prohibitions against speaking up and writing about herself and her situation: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” The original 2023 Russian title of the novel is, tellingly, Руки женщин моей семьи не для письма (“The Hands of Women in My Family Are Not for Writing”).

Because of Djabbarova’s outspokenness about Russia’s war on Ukraine, she left the country, under threat of arrest and prosecution, in 2024 for Germany, where she now lives and teaches. In May of 2025, Amherst College’s Center for Russian Culture showcased Djabbarova reading her lively poems in Russian and charmingly answering questions (in colloquial English!). See and hear for yourself what a wonder she is.

- Reviewed by Bob Blaisdell