Yara by Tamara Faith Berger

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At the age of fifteen Yara Yavelberg, the eponymous protagonist of Tamara Faith Berger’s latest novel, has her nose broken – part of rhinoplasty and part of a larger pattern of brokenness in the novel she narrates. Her first-person narration begins with her arrival in Israel on a Birthright tour: “I arrived in your country in August 2006. Shalom, the only word I knew in Hebrew.” It is unclear at this stage who is being addressed as “your.” More important, however, the singular Hebrew word with multiple meanings includes wholeness, which contrasts with the brokenness in the rest of the novel. The narration returns to the night before when she is still with her unnamed girlfriend in Brazil, her real birthplace. They watch fireworks, which are “broken tubes. Shoelaces running away from the shoes.” This description of pyrotechnics highlights the fragmentation and fleeing of Yara’s body away from Brazil towards Israel, and eventually to Canada.

Her girlfriend tells her that “the stories of my life and of her life had been braided into one.” To combat brokenness, braiding becomes a central theme in Yara. Not only is Yara braided to her girlfriend, but the entire structure of the book is braided from the first section “Birthright” to the final section “Rightbirth” – a crossing over of language and locales from Brazil to Israel. When Yara declares “I always knew that a braid had three strands,” we recognize that Berger integrates her narrative in three sections. At times her braiding of language becomes obtrusive, especially in her use of similes. Consider her repetition of “like” in a single page: “Short white hairs poked out like fork tines all over his jaw. He laid his pink earplugs like jewels on his tray. Through the window, the clouds looked like paper cut-outs…. Tell her what you’d like…. Then I placed my hands like his on my lap…. it felt like falling backwards into glass.” This accumulation of similes reinforces the braiding of language throughout the novel.

In Israel she has an epiphany about the “narrative of victimhood”: “It all suddenly came together, like a warping black braid: Israel, my girlfriend, the plight of the scapegoat.” Triple braiding and similes epitomize Yara, while the plight of the scapegoat places her personal narrative in a broader historical context. Indeed, William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1854-55) forms part of the cover art for this book and reminds us of its biblical origins, as well as the origin of the term – escape. Yara’s identity is scapegoated in Israel and the diaspora, while her body in the pornographic section of the novel escapes; that is, she is taken out of her cape or cloak of clothing during her victimhood as an exploited young woman. Furthermore, Yara is named after the real historical person, Yara Yavelberg (1943-71), a Brazilian psychologist and resistance fighter who was murdered by the military government.

Yara identifies with her namesake: “I wanted to be tough as rope, braided, resistant like her.” Braiding and likeness motifs recur until the end when Yara remembers her girlfriend: “She wanted my soul to be softer and braided with hers.” Braiding extends to intertextuality with Helter Skelter where Sharon Tate is stabbed. The middle section of Yara, “Hocus Pocus,” reverberates with helter-skelter. More significantly, this middle section begins exactly like the first section (“I arrived in your country August 2006”), but “scapegoat” follows instead of Shalom. Similarly, the third section begins with “I arrived in your country September 2006,” but replaces shalom and scapegoat with “porn.” The triple braid entails the novel’s three sections that are intertwined like bodies in the pornographic filming towards the end.

Yara reads José Saramago and the American poet H.D. She analyzes porn: “Outward distractions signify the inward … In porn, there’s female schism …. Like a girl can be two places at once.” Sometimes porn may be comedy, sometimes tragedy, sometimes a combination. By the end of the novel her girlfriend’s name is revealed as Gloria. The novel ends on an ambiguous, but redemptive note: “But porn was the crook where I found my soul, bloodied and live.”

From peace (shalom) to scapegoat to porn, Yara is a coming-of-age story with metafictional moments. Gloria marks Yara’s back: “My girlfriend was making a sigil, a mind drawing, with images not words …. A sigil is a transformation from real into symbol …. It is code.” Berger’s sleight of hand, her hocus pocus, codifies Yara’s metamorphosis; a sigil brands and braids the scapegoat.

Tamara Faith Berger writes fiction, non-fiction and screenplays. She is the author of Lie With Me and The Way of the Whore (which were collected by Coach House Books as Little Cat), Maidenhead, and Kuntalini . Maidenhead won the 2012 Believer Book Award. Her fifth book, Queen Solomon, was published by Coach House Books in 2018 and was nominated for a Trillium Book Award. She has a BFA in Studio Art from Concordia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She lives and works in Toronto.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Coach House Books (Oct. 17 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1552454673
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1552454671

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.