My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabarova (translated from Russian by Lisa C. Hayden)
In a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, a young woman finds her future narrowing long before she understands why. Raised to become a beautiful, marriageable daughter, she instead comes up against the limits of expectation as her body begins to resist her – seizing, faltering, and plagued by pain and speech disorders in ways no doctor can explain. While her illness progresses, so too does her understanding of herself, as she examines each part of her body with the precision of a medical researcher. Eyebrows, tongue, hands, throat: each becomes a site where memory, identity, and power collide. Her body is a kind of living record, shaped not only by pain, but also by cultural pressures and the lingering forces of colonisation. With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation, tracing a young woman’s path towards her hard-won voice. Standing in the proud tradition of confessional writers like Audre Lorde and Jamaica Kinkaid, this debut is an arresting meditation on embodiment, inheritance, and freedom.