Memory and Forgetting in Of Loss and Lavender

Of Loss and Lavender, by Sinan Anton
Other Press March 2026
ISBN 9781635425703

In Reflections on Exile, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said writes that literature and history have often tended to romanticize exile, presenting stories of heroism, triumph, and glory. But the truth, Said asserts, is that these are “no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.” The reality is that exile is often a condition of stasis. One leaves, but does not fully arrive. The self lingers in a suspended state, neither here nor there, a dislocation as temporal as it is geographic. It is this quieter, more interior register of exile that Sinan Antoon’s Of Loss and Lavender inhabits most fully and, at its best, devastatingly.

First published in Arabic in 2023, and translated into English by the author, the novel follows two Iraqi men in the United States. Omar is a young deserter from Saddam Hussein’s army, who was punished by having his ear chopped off. Sami is an older surgeon whose life in Baghdad was violently dismantled: his wife was tragically killed, and he faced public vilification as a supposed Ba’athist in the aftermath of the war. The trajectories of these two men differ, but their conditions converge in exile, where memory becomes both burden and refuge. Here, Antoon sketches a resonant dialectic: the exile who clings to the past as a form of continuity, and the exile who attempts to shed it in order to survive.

Omar’s rejection of the Iraqi diaspora and attempt to pass as Puerto Rican (an invented identity he never fully inhabits) become emblematic of exile’s uneasy negotiations with selfhood. For Omar, reinvention is partial and provisional. It is not that he fails to become someone else; rather, he cannot entirely relinquish who he has been. “The head is a suitcase,” the novel tells us, “and the heart as well. They both carry and hold what hundreds of suitcases cannot.” What one carries into exile is not only the memory of what has happened, but also its residue: shame, regret, unprocessed grief, and rage. There is no clean break.

Antoon is particularly attuned to the multiplicity of exile narratives. In one of the book’s more incisive passages, Omar reflects on his interactions with other Iraqis in the United States, many of whom, he feels, position their histories of resistance as morally superior to his own quieter flight. “The only battles he fought were internal,” the novel observes, “against his own fragility and the vulnerability that ensnared and defeated him.” In this, Antoon gestures toward an underexplored dimension of exile: the hierarchies of suffering and legitimacy that persist even in diaspora, where narratives of heroism and sacrifice can overshadow more ambiguous (and, indeed, more common) forms of survival.

If the novel has a central preoccupation, however, it is with memory. Memories appear here as fragmentary, recursive, and at times invasive. Sami’s storyline, shaped by the onset of dementia, renders this most explicitly. As his mind deteriorates, the past reasserts itself, displacing the present. The effect is poignant and unsettling: an eroding memory becomes the last refuge of identity. In one quietly devastating moment, when asked where he lives, Sami responds simply: “Baghdad.”

In this way, the novel’s emotional register is one of quiet suffocation, what Edward Said refers to as exile’s “essential sadness” that “can never be surmounted.”

The novel is punctuated by passages that distill the experience of exile into striking metaphors. Omar, at one point, imagines himself not as a sinking boat but as “a piece of land” that has broken off and drifted into isolation, “an island inhabited by ghosts.” Elsewhere, his mind becomes “an old, abandoned house,” its rooms intermittently illuminated by flickers of memory. These images linger, a reminder that more than just displacement, exile involves a reconfiguration of the self’s internal architecture: fissured, unstable, haunted.

It is in these moments of quiet interiority, when past and present collide as our exiles reckon with their condition, that Antoon’s prose is at its most powerful. When Of Loss and Lavender turns outward, to the textures of everyday life in the United States, it adopts a quieter, more observational mode. At times, this flattens the narrative’s momentum. While carefully drawn, the rhythms of Omar’s daily existence—his work, his fleeting encounters, his tentative attempts at connection—are rendered with a kind of deliberate ordinariness. Even moments that might conventionally serve as turning points, such as the aftermath of 9/11, are muted, as if to suggest that even the most seismic shifts in history do not necessarily alter the deeper loneliness of estrangement. There is an argument to be made for this restraint: exile, after all, often unfolds in the slow accumulation of uneventful—and at times alienating—moments. Still, one occasionally longs for these scenes to exert greater pressure on the characters’ rich interior lives rather than function as background hum.

Similarly, Sami’s narrative possibilities glimmer fleetingly before receding. Generational tensions between him and his Americanized son are alluded to briefly in a fraught conversation over cultural inheritance during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum. Elsewhere, we are made to feel the well-meaning but subtle violence in a request made by Sami’s American daughter-in-law for Sami not to watch Arabic news in front of her children. “I know it’s not easy for him to be here and he needs to watch the news,” she says to Sami’s son. “But I don’t want the kids to see all this violence and the horrific scenes of explosions, corpses, and body parts.”

If the novel resists conventional arcs of change or resolution, it does so in keeping with its underlying vision of exile as a condition that does not easily yield to narrative closure. There is no redemption here, no clear trajectory toward either belonging or return. Both Omar and Sami remain, in different ways, suspended between past and present, between selves they cannot fully reconcile.

In this way, the novel’s emotional register is one of quiet suffocation, what Edward Said refers to as exile’s “essential sadness” that “can never be surmounted.” A pervasive sense of helplessness suffuses the narrative, a recognition that exile offers neither salvation nor escape. But not just that. In Sami and Omar, we trace the scarring effects of the war and tyranny that have dominated Iraq’s recent history. Iraq, in Antoon’s rendering, is a place of irreparable fracture, a broken and defeated society still reeling from a dictatorship and a war that forced its people to become either sheep or butchers. But the United States does not emerge as its redemptive counterpart. It is, instead, another site of dislocation, where one can live, even belong in a provisional sense, but never fully arrive. This is perhaps most poignantly encapsulated in Omar’s reflection on how his exiled self resembles his reconstructed ear: 

Most of the time, Omar feels he’s a natural part of this place and he belongs. But there are those rare, but visceral moments when it hits him. The feeling that, just like the ear surgically sewn to his head, he’s neither authentic nor natural. He feels he is a fake and strange object cast away by time into this place. Whenever he felt that way, an internal debate ensued: even this new ear was made of his own rib, but he is not from this place, nor is he from that distant place any longer. A place he never wanted, and never wants, to go back to.

In exile, one is, in the end, both and neither. And Antoon’s novel invites us to sit with the discomfort of unresolved histories, with the knowledge that exile is not an event but a condition, one that continues to unfold long after the moment of departure.

If Of Loss and Lavender does not always sustain narrative intensity, it nonetheless accumulates a quiet power. Its pivotal, closing moment, which draws the two men’s stories into a shared frame, feels both inevitable and resonant, a convergence that underscores the novel’s deeper concern with the inability to fully shake off the past, and the enduring legacies of the violence that binds live across time and space.

In a literary landscape that often seeks to narrativize migration in terms of transformation or arrival, Of Loss and Lavender insists on something more ambivalent, and perhaps more honest. To live in exile, the novel suggests, is to inhabit a space where both remembrance and forgetting are equally untenable, where the past cannot be relinquished and the present cannot fully take hold. It is, in the end, to carry a world within you that no longer exists, and to discover that there is nowhere to set it down.