The Hair of the Pigeon explores suffering and love
- Written by Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Mohammed Massoud Morsi is a master storyteller and it is no surprise that the manuscript of his new novel won the prestigious 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. He brings stories to light that unsettle stereotypes and show unremittingly the fault lines, hypocrisies and ethical dilemmas of lives lived under theocratic systems amid bloody political conflicts.
The Hair of the Pigeon – Mohammed Massoud Morsi (UWA Publishing)
Morsi is particularly acute and convincing when entering the worlds of young men out to prove themselves in situations likely to become far too desperate, deceptive and dangerous for them to survive.
In his previous novel, In the Palace of Angels (2019), a group of young Palestinian men on the Gaza strip head out to buy armaments from Israeli soldiers with a van full of hashish as payment. It can only go badly wrong. Morsi is also committed to the novel as an opportunity to move into the intimate souls of characters, and his portrayal of a Palestinian’s love for an Israeli soldier in this story becomes somehow a source of hope in a time of despair.
But from 2011, when the Arab Spring uprising reaches the streets of Syrian cities, the alley in Yarmouk comes under attack and Ghassan finds himself imprisoned by the Assad regime. He is tortured, starved, beaten and forced to lie with corpses while the guards urge him to die.
This portrait of senseless prison violence is so unrelenting and presented so simply as an impossibly evil set of facts that it becomes the most heartbreaking passage in the novel. Orwell’s 1984 seems a fairy tale in comparison.
Beyond the prison, there is Ghassan’s journey across the Levantine Sea into Europe through Greece with his mother and a young girl thrown to him by a dying mother as hundreds drowned at sea. From here the novel takes many more turns, though always with some redeeming light despite the greyness of skies above Copenhagen, where they eventually settle.
Ghassan becomes a man capable of fixing almost any motor car, and of making deep friendships with other young men. Both these qualities become important to his survival.
But always, the fate of Sama is a source of inner suffering for him. While in his heart he must believe she is alive, he has no idea if she has made it out of that alley, where, he believes he witnessed her being raped by his best friend.
A shroud of questions about honour, revenge and forgiveness is flung over him, threatening to confound and smother his life. He must face these questions by bringing them out into the open before the end of the novel if he is to become a man who can see and face himself clearly.
I have been reading The Hair of the Pigeon alongside Julian Barnes’s “final” novel, Departure(s), and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, a book that brings up to date the ongoing genocidal devastation of Palestinian people in Gaza, challenging readers to reconsider their own attitudes, prejudices and actions.
Barnes, ill and meditating on arriving at the end of his writing life, remarks, “All writers want their words to have an effect. Novelists want to entertain, to reveal truth, to move, to provoke reverie. And beyond? Do they want their readers to act as a result of their words?”
A call to action
With a novel such as Morsi has written, the events recounted are so extreme, so distressing and so anchored in communal, theocratic, and political violence that it seems anaemic on the part of a reader not to put the book down and want to act in some way to reduce needless violence among all the sufferings we witness.
Mohammed Massoud Morsi.
Goodreads
There are a difficult lessons in ethics, judgement, and balance that possibly a novel is ideally suited to bring home to us, though of course a novel can always at last be put aside as fiction.
Morsi pins beautifully the yearning at the heart of this novel when his character Ghassan reflects from the Yarmouk camp in Damascus: “… we had all been seeking a home – and home was maybe somewhere we were all going but had never been before”.
This strange and strangely touching novel of chaos, toughness and love is a document of its times. In the acknowledgements Morsi offers thanks to those who have entrusted him with their stories. He has taken these stories deeply seriously, unflinching in facing their details and he has felt them too with a wide range of contradictory emotions.
This novel’s encounter with undeniable evil enacted in the Assad regime’s prison system is set against more complex compromises, missteps, dishonesties and prejudices in those desperately exiled communities where characters can only seek relief from poverty, find self worth in work and hope for meaning in love.
Authors: Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
