Reviewed by Leyla Shukurli
What is a body? How much of it truly belongs to us rather than to heritage, history, generational wounds? Born to an Azerbaijani family in Russia in the early 1990s, Egana Djabbarova grew up in a conservative diaspora that scrutinized every bit of her body with the meticulousness of a jeweler—and should any of those bits not fit within physical or cultural norms, they rapidly lose value. She recounts the omnipresence of this visibility:
In the world where I grew up, gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed. (21)
Yet Djabbarova notices and records, both the spoken and the unspoken. In her memoir, My Dreadful Body, beautifully translated by Lisa C. Hayden, she explores different parts of herself with the ruthlessness of a physician and the care of a poet. Organized in 11 chapters, each devoted to a different body part, the prose flows from source to mouth, covering the entirety of her body.
Djabbarova starts with the eyebrows, which carry a very particular meaning for any Azerbaijani woman—traditionally, the eyebrows symbolize innocence and are not to be plucked before marriage. Only marriage, as Egana precisely puts it, lifts these and other constraints, replacing “the reproving forbidden” with “it’s finally allowed”(5). Each centimeter of a female body functions as a symbol, not as a part of material reality. At school, her bushy unplucked eyebrows and brown eyes symbolize her otherness, and in the worst of cases, even turn her into “a vessel for rage” (50) for nationalists who roam the surrounding streets carrying a bullhorn, shouting “Russia for Russians.” Around the Azerbaijani community, on the other hand, every bit of her turns into symbols of purity, dignity, honor—valued property of the forebears. “We must always look after ourselves, noting how others see us, since we’re not just our father’s beloved children but also his capital, his reputation, his honor, and his face” (22).
But when Egana’s body begins to fail due to generalized dystonia—disease that causes severe muscle dysfunction—the body parts suddenly stop functioning as symbols and finally materialize, come into physical existence. It is no longer that important whether her eyebrows are plucked; it is much more important whether they can be properly raised and lowered while keeping a smile on. Her eyes may remain brown, not blue, as long as they can properly see, and her voice can be raised, expressing fury, as long as it still sounds like one’s own. Even her beautiful long hair may finally be cut or shaven off without any repercussions—and with it, a large part of the shared, collective ancestral destiny:
That was it. My past, the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body–all that now lay on the cold floor. I’d known I would never be part of the past, known I could never live as before, known I would never plait long braids as my grandmothers had. A completely different fate lay ahead of me. (37)
Not only does her hair fade as the disease progresses, but so does her mouth “not intended for speaking” (38) and her hands not meant for forming words. She reflects on the difference between women’s hands and men’s:
A woman’s hands were always supposed to be busy – only a man’s hands were entitled to be carefree. While men’s hands lay idly on a set table, women’s hands carried dishes of food, arranged plates, rolled dough to be cut into squares for khangayal, stuffed grape leaves, served platters of plov, and hemmed wedding dresses. Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing. (56)
The sudden combination of willpower and disease breaks this curse of women’s silence.
In the original Russian, Djabbarova’s book sounds almost poetical despite its harsh contents, and Lisa C. Hayden’s translation gives the English version an equally lyrical flow. Moreover, Russian is, strictly speaking, not the only language of the book, even though it is the main one. In one of her interviews, Djabbarova confesses that she, as many Azerbaijanis her age, “never lives within one language,” and her novel is a direct reflection of that multilingualism. The original text is sprinkled with expressions in Azerbaijani, sometimes transliterated into Russian; in her translation, Lisa C. Hayden keeps them all, sometimes in the original, sometimes transliterated, and provides footnote explanations whenever necessary. The mix of the two original languages – even three, if we count Turkish which also appears on the pages – work naturally together, creating a rich tapestry of Djabbarova’s fractured world.
But it is silence, in all its forms, at the core of her memoir. Be that the collective silence about women’s unhappiness, or cheating husbands, or generational abuse, or shared responsibility which ties mothers and daughters together in a cycle of violence, or anger, or pain. Women cannot speak out – so they write their stories in the interiors of their homes, with the neurotic cleanliness of their surroundings, and in their house decorations. In Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris Claude Frollo famously complained that a printed word would eventually kill the art of architecture, because the stories written on the walls of buildings would now be printed on paper; “This will kill that.” Yet, in Djabbarova’s universe that shift has seemingly never happened – and most things are still not being named by their true name.
So it is not surprising that she has dedicated this book to her maternal grandfather, for whom “a river was river, a grass was grass, beautiful was beautiful, the sky was the sky, the earth was the earth” (44). Mild and soft-spoken, he was the one who taught his granddaughters that “love is the ability to read others’ bodies, to see the good in the mundane, and to see light in darkness” (78).
Generally, a strained relationship with the extended family is a common trope among younger Azerbaijanis. The word “gohum” or “relative,” carries a distinctly ironic or negative connotation; the modern Azerbaijani internet space is full of jokes and memes, highlighting the urge to avoid or shun one’s relatives—as they serve as a source of judgement, oppression and negativity. Interestingly, this attitude is mostly directed toward “ata tərəf,” or relatives from the father’s side. The mother’s side is considered mostly benign, both by men and women. So, in her book, Djabbarova accidentally nails this trope completely: her maternal grandmother earned her own money and wore jewelry; her paternal grandmother never wore jewelry and paid for every outing with a beating; her paternal grandfather could never control his violent fits of jealousy while her maternal grandfather “never contradicted his wife when she was alive” (43).
However, the maternal grandfather’s silence was a sign of love—a deliberate choice in a world where all choices were his to make. Djabbarova, in contrast, is doing what most men in her community have always seen as problematic: she talks too much, reveals too many secrets, and doesn’t endure in silence. By speaking up, she performs a ritual of breaking the silence curse not only for herself but for the whole matrilineal side of her family. For all the women who kept silent before her. And the revelation at the very end—a heartbreaking answer to the question about the origins of her disease—is the culmination of that ritualistic gesture.
What many Azerbaijanis of Djabbarova’s generation now actively do through other media— exposing this particular hypocrisy with music, humor, and the spoken word—she does through the written one, expanding a cultural voice traditionally centered on poetry and song into both poetry and prose. And hopefully, the more voices join the ritual, the greater the chance that the curse of silence – and of the violence behind it – will one day finally shatter.
Djabbarova, Egana. My Dreadful Body. Translated by Lisa C. Hayden, New Vessel Press, 2026.
Leyla Shukurli is an Azerbaijani German writer, singer, and songwriter. She holds an undergraduate degree in English philology and two graduate degrees in intercultural communication and media studies, from Hochschule Fulda, Germany, and New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Words Without Borders, The Dial, Turkoslavia, and Tint Journal. She works in academia and lives in Frankfurt am Main.