Mattar, Mira: Yes, I Am a Destroyer

First U.S. edition, originally published in the U.K. by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2020.

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labor and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting—a relentless undoing. (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE)

Praise for Yes, I Am A Destroyer

What if the self were necessary to its own undoing? As in: the only one capable of dismantling the first-person's tightly wound ideological conglomerate—on which literature so heavily depends—is the self itself. I did it, says the narrator in Mira Mattar’s prose novel slash fictional poem—a virtuosic feat unraveling this expansive contradiction. Expansive, because so much happens there. A character comes to life—a slightly monstrous creature bent on collapsing the boundary between internal and external world, shedding its human form, its organs and skin, so that the “I” can become the fiction it always was. This is an extraordinary book. Everyone who is someone should read it—to become no one. —Mirene Arsanios

Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance. “Live anyway” is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced. —Lisa Robertson

Every time I attempt to gather my thoughts about Yes, I Am A Destroyer, my words fail. This is the kind of book that pulls me in at ungodly hours, holds me transfixed in its questionings: "what can I recall without memory?" asks Mattar's speaker of family objects, or "why may they have their eyes when we may not have our own?" to punctuate yet another gut-punch of a chapter. A work of ineffable brilliance from one of my favorite Palestinian poets alive. —George Abraham