Moth Journeys and Butterfly Effects: Longing and Postmigrant Intertextuality in Johannes Anyuru’s De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar

Johannes Anyuru’s novel De kommer att drunkna i sina mödrars tårar (They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears, trans. Saskia Vogel) offers us an important query into longing as a powerful, yet unstable, enterprise. At the center of Anyuru’s novel is an adolescent girl, who provisionally goes by Nour (“light”), who claims that she comes from a future Sweden where yearnings for national purity have led to a society where Muslims, Jews, and political dissenters face persecution and extermination. Enigmatic moths—only visible to her—appear in moments of porosity between her two timescapes, evoking the classic Sufi trope of the moth yearning for the flame. This talk considers the novel’s intertextual poetic world, including Harry Martinson’s Aniara, the figure of the moth in Sufi poetry, and Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic exploration of the butterfly effect, which illuminates the interrelatedness evoked in time travel narratives. Reading the butterflies and moths that flit through these texts as a dialogue between poetic inquiries into longing offers us a vantage point for exploring the relationship between the postmigrant and the intertextual, an opening to many worlds.

Johanna Sellman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. A scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature, her research interests include modern and contemporary Arabic, francophone, and Scandinavian literatures, migration and postmigration studies, translation, gender and sexuality studies, and ecocriticism. Her book Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Defamiliarizing Forced Migration (2022) traces the emergence of post-1990s Arabic literature on forced migration in Europe and its sustained yet multifaceted engagement with questions of borders, and exile writing. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Karavan, Banipal, and Theatre Research International. Johanna is currently co-editor of Comicalités, special issue on Comics and Ecopolitics, and a member of the 2024-25 cohort of GAHDT faculty fellows working on writing linked to her project, “Narratives of Care Across Borders in Contemporary Arabic Literature.”

To attendants from outside the Department: Please pre-register with the seminar organizer, Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se), to allow access to the venue.