Bahu Virus (Covid-19), Consciousness, Jordan and the USA
How a novel, They Called Me Wyatt, captures consciousness, cultures, and current times through the life of a Jordanian girl in the USA
Consciousness is the state of being aware especially of something within oneself, the upper level of mental life that is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes, the mental faculties as characterized by thought and feelings and volition among others.
Is consciousness similar to the soul, or the spirit soul, which is released when a person ceases to exist?
Consciousness is the unique aspect of humans among creatures on the earth; a classical subject for philosophers to diagnose endlessly; a topic of interest for all those who dare to think of life and its after life apart from religious practitioners.
Life After Death:
What happens to a person when the person ceases to exist as in the body? If there is consciousness, or the spirit soul, what happens to it when it leaves the body? Particularly to the consciousness of a person whose life is cut short, pushed to death, pushed to death at a young age?
Can such a consciousness, consciousness of a person whose life is unfilled and unfulfilled, re-enter or reincarnate into the body of someone else on the Earth?
They Called Me Wyatt:
“I really hate the word reincarnation if that’s what really happened to me. I was raised Christian. I never believed in it. I have always believed in life after death, that after I perish I would be a drifting soul welcomed by the divine, but to come back like this is unreal. Where I grew up, no one believed in rebirth. It was sacrilegious. There was God, heaven and hell, and that was that. There were Christians and Muslims. Jews were not around. Years of conflict between Arabs and Jews pushed them aside. Growing up, you were not allowed to question theology. There were some rumours though surrounding the Druze community in Lebanon, an offshoot of Islam. They apparently believed in reincarnation, and there were many tales of children all of sudden narrating stories of their previous lived,” narrates the protagonist Siwar Salaiha in They Called Me Wyatt.
They Called Me Wyatt is the debut novel of Natasha Tynes published this year. The 361-page narrative is a symphonic novel raising the issues of consciousness and cultures, First World (the USA) and the Middle East (Jordan), battle of a girl growing up in Amman with traditions dictating at every stage in life and freedom in the USA, religious issues and social mores through the characters and the plot.
Consciousness of Siwar Salaiha:
Siwar Salaiha the protagonist wants justice, revenge, and her life back: It becomes feasible whose consciousness inhabits in the body of another person. They Called Me Wyatt deals with the protagonist’s afterlife and her earthly life. The novel is narrated in the first person but within the story there are other narrative devices: epistolary, diary and observations of the protagonist’s professor.
Siwar is a student aspiring to become a professional writer. The Jordanian student enrols at the University of Maryland for creative writing. She is out with her friends to celebrate her 25th birthday in 2001, on April Fool’s Day, along with her friends Sara the Italian, Arwa the childhood friend, and Ranjit the Indian at brewery Park Grill on Lafayette Street.
But Siwar is pushed to death from the roof of the building when she excuses herself from her friends for a moment of fresh air: life cut short: “DYING WAS NOT THE WORST PART. It was what came after dying. I was 25 when I died. The night I was killed was meant to be a night of jubilation, to mark my birthday, my entry into quarter life.”
Siwar has moved to the USA as a student two years before the day of her death. She goes through bouts of homesickness like many students. She tells, “I thought of Salma and Rula, I missed my sisters. They called me earlier and I wished I were with them, celebrating in Amman. I always tried to downplay homesickness, but that night I acknowledged it. I missed them dearly as if somehow I knew I would never see them again. I thought of the last time we celebrated my birthday together two years prior. We went out to a new Italian restaurant in Amman, and Salma brought me a book as a gift. The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera. She said she found it in Amman at a new bookshop that sold English books for expats. A great find in a land where English books were scarce.”
Why she enters, as the consciousness of Siwar Salaiha, into the body of three-year-old? Because she is only 25, has not even finished her writing degree, life’s journey just couldn’t end in this manner, sudden, unexpected, and unfair. She believes in happy endings, in justice and fairness, and that good triumphs over evil but as in life, it is not that way.
Re-Birth, Reincarnation:
Siwar’s consciousness is given a new life in Wyatt on the day she dies, 1 April 2001, ‘which was the same day he (Wyatt) was born, but instead of taking over his infant body immediately, my consciousness stayed dormant, taking refuge inside of him until I was jolted. Wyatt was almost three by the time my consciousness was awakened (2004)’.
Siwar’s thoughts control Wyatt, his actions, both mentally and physically. Her advanced 25-year old brain sends signals to manipulate the boy’s small body although she is limited by his size. She cannot force her new avatar to behave like the 25-year old Siwar. However, Wyatt thinks like an adult but behave like a three-year-old.
Wyatt: The son of caring privileged Seattle mother
“They called me Wyatt. That’s what came after dying. After that asshole threw me off the building, my resilient 25-year old consciousness moved into the frail body of three-year-old boy. I know it’s hard to believe, but what can I say? That’s really what happened. I was given a second chance at life in Wyatt, a little boy living in Seattle,” tells Siwar. But Wyatt’s parents are oblivious to her existence in their son. For ‘they are too busy with their own issues, their First World problems’ to notice Siwar’s consciousness in their toddler’s brain.
Krista the mother of Wyatt is ‘an attractive 35-year-old woman, with curly red hair that she attributes to her Jewish ancestry’; a caring woman despite her son’s speech delays.
Wyatt is an IVF child of Krista and Krista. Krista has tried to get pregnant two years after their fancy beach wedding but fails. And the reason? Noah. Krista blames her husband Noah for having to go through what she had to go through to have a son. Her husband has deprived her ‘of ever experiencing conception the natural way’ because he has slow simmers: low sperm motility.
In the body of Wyatt, as Wyatt grows the consciousness of Siwar in him nudges him to solve the mystery of her death. How is it to inhabit in some other person? “When you are a 25-year-old brain stuck in the body of a speech-delayed, privileged three-year-old, there is not much you can do besides reflecting. What kind of animal would butcher a 25-year-old? I thought of the usual suspects. Was it just a random person on the roof?” And she is not a Druze kid: Druze kids can tell their stories, stories of the past lives.
An Ideal Life: What Is That?
Every one dreams or wishes or desires life to live in some way. In the case of Siwar, the aspiring writer whose life is cut short, the ideal life is one or the other.
One is to be a successful author, married, living in Manhattan with three children; she would write bestsellers in the morning when kids are in school, later chauffeur kids to soccer practice and ballet class in the afternoon, at night meet friends (who also writer bestsellers) over drinks at The Village while the six-figure salaried nanny watches her children; she owns a house in the Hamptons, and take vacations to Cancun in the summer.
The other ideal life Siwar doesn’t mind to live is something simpler ‘like a middle-aged woman who owns a flower shop in the Italian island of Capri’.
But why Siwar’s life is cut short (by whom, why, how?). It is because of her life of deviations of transgressing social mores back home in Amman. Her father, Baba, remarks that this daughter is the one who ‘holds the ladder horizontally’. As a girl in the Jordanian capital, she is not the conventional one but the one with boyfriends.
Audacious Novel: Touches Thorny Topics
“When you grow up in the Middle East, people fuck with your mind. They tell you have to remain a virgin until you get married. Of course, when you are growing up, and your harmones take the best of you, you can’t help but mess around. You cross boundaries, but you stop at intercourse. I was no different. I made out with a few guys after a few alcohol-infused nights, but didn’t dare to cross the line. No consummation whatsoever. Even when I was in the US, thousands of miles away from all the sexual brainwashing, I couldn’t do it. Being in close proximity of the male organs was not something I was comfortable with. I have no choice now. Male organs are part of me,” says the protagonist about her life and afterlife.
Siwar is an unusual and unconventional girl. She is a rebel by the time she is fifteen, and starts to date Fadi. Fadi is a gorgeous guy: ‘the kind of gorgeous you would want to frame and display at the National Portrait Gallery’. She casts her eyes on him at the swimming pool of Al Ahli Sports Club in Amman, Jordan. The club is owned and run by the Greek Orthodox Christian mission, which serves the small the middle class who reside in West Amman; it is a hub of tolerance in a region on fire, housing both Christians and Muslims.
“Growing up in Amman, I was prevented from playing soccer after I hit puberty, and after the neighbors complained to my mother,” says Siwar. “No one in the neighbourhood wanted to see a female teenager with conspicuous signs of puberty kicking a ball with a bunch of male teenagers. You know, the hymen issue and all. You might rapture it playing soccer, or maybe one of those boys might rapture it for you. In the homeland, ham el banat lal mamat, you worry about your daughter until the day you perish.” Her mother prevails on her to give up the sport: falling prey to the judgemental society over the athletic pursuit of her daughter — foreboding force of fate?
Natasha Tynes’ touches the topic of hymen through Siwar when she starts to date her third boyfriend, Tommy Scott in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Amman is not only changing but turning more conservative, more Islamic: ‘The number of covered women outweighed those who were not’.
“Christians in Jordan always wore crosses around their neck. It was their way of reemphasizing their Christian identity. That was back in the early nineties, when it was hard to tell the difference between Muslims and Christians. It was back when the majority of Muslim women don’t wear the hijab, but like other Christian countrywomen flaunted their hair, and donned miniskirts,” informs Siwar to the reader.
Her boyfriend, Tommy Scott, is unaware of socio-sexual sensitivities of society and the expectations from would-be wife. Siwar educates Tommy: ‘“You really need to understand the social constrains of being a woman in the Arab world,” I told him. “You really can’t understand the Middle East if you don’t put yourself in Arab women’s shoes. It’s all about the hymen.”’ But Siwar dies a virginal life in spite of sexual freedom in the USA: “That time never came. I was killed prior to any consummation. I died a virgin.”
Life in the USA:
The USA is a country where ‘honor and traditions and customs don’t matter’ but color matters. Siwar is registered in the US official documents as ‘White’ (as are all the people from the Middle East and North Africa).
But Siwar realises she is a brown to the rest of America. ‘With my olive skin and my distinctive accent, I realized that no one would consider me white. I won’t have that privilege. My professors, including Professor Stein, would send me Emails encouraging me to apply to writing contests for “women of color”. Am I a woman of colour? What color? I was also told one time by a fellow Hispanic classmate that white people don’t know how to dance, “not the us.” Us who?’
Wyatt’s father Noah tells his toddler son to be prepared to live in the USA when it will be different as a result of ‘intermarrying, races are intermixing’; the dominant color skin will be light brown. He pleads to his son: “People will forget. They’ll forget that it was us Europeans who brought civilization to this world. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t forget who you really are.”
Israel-Palestine Conflict:
How can there be a story, fictional or non-fictional, without a reference to the never-ending conflict of Israel and Palestine. So, Siwar’s elder sister Salma is a political activist in Jordan; she also thinks she is better than her two younger sisters.
Siwar says about her elder sister Salma: ‘She was tall with a long silky straight black hair. That was the time of her life when she first started getting involved in politics, becoming a champion of Palestinian rights. Always saying words like “Justice” and “occupation” and “martyrs”. I couldn’t care less about his stuff. I had other things on my mind. My mom was not crazy about her interest in Palestinian affairs. We were Jordanians, an indigenous tribe, Palestinian issues didn’t matter to us, but Salma was different and continued to irk mama through the years by lobbying for a cause that was not ours.’
Bahu Virus: Coronavirus (Covid-19)
Natasha Tynes’s novel has the prevision of some future occurrence in the world: predicting a viral disease going around the world but only that it is named Bahu virus. In the novel Wyatt happens to meet Siwar’s housemate, the founder and owner of Impact Medical, a biomedical company, which employs 300 people in Columbia, Maryland.
Impact Medical has been in the news because it has developed a vaccine for the Bahu virus. Bahu virus is first detected in East Asia in 2020; it has been slowly spreading all over the world causing a global panic. The protagonist informs, “People who contracted the Bahu virus died within a week after most of their major body organs shut down. Impact Medical was the pride of the state of Maryland that even the governor paid them a special visit to thank them for their work on the vaccine, and for choosing Maryland as their headquarters. The company had recently received a special tax deal that angered some people in the state but the governor came out in its defense, saying the company had threatened to move to northern Virginia and he didn’t want to lose them.”
Who Killed Siwar?
Wyatt, in whose body Siwar inhabits, finally finds the killer of Siwar in 2026. Siwar’s sister Rula throws a party where ‘massive amount of food was placed on the dinner table’.
Wyatt is overwhelmed with so many dishes: Stuffed cabbages, freekeh, Kiftah, Mujaddara, Tabouleh, Hummus, Kibeh Nayyah, countless types of salad.
They Called Me Wyatt is a colourful story of cultures, consciousness, and crime: a smorgasbord.
