State of Emergency: Travels in a Troubled World.

• Author: Chevik, Natasha

State of Emergency: Travels in a Troubled World

By Navid Kermani

Cambridge: Polity, 2018, 299 pages, [pounds sterling]17.99, ISBN: 9781509514700

The prologue of Navid Kermani's travelogue describes an eclectic teahouse in Cairo, and what follows is, indeed, an eclectic collection of writings with no chronological, but rather a topological order. Kermani moves westward from Kashmir, beginning his odyssey in the Indo-Iranian region, proceeding to the Middle East, and wrapping up the action in a movie-like scene on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. This principle might seem odd to a pedantic reader, or simply to someone who prefers reading reports--especially from sensitive and war-torn areas--as close as possible to real time, fearing that they might lose freshness and relevance over time. Initially, I found the sequence distracting too, and I felt compelled to list Kermani's logs chronologically: Palestine in 2005, Afghanistan I in 2006, India (Agra/Delhi, Kashmir, and Gujarat) in 2007, Italy in 2008, Iran in 2009, Afghanistan II in 2011, Pakistan and Syria in 2012, and Iraq in 2014. However, as I read the book, I kept discovering reasons as to why the author made such a choice.

One of the factors that make the flow of the chapters natural is the crescendo of emotional states, which go hand-in-hand with the personal growth of (what I perceive as) the homodiegetic narrator personified in Kermani--his tone seems quite detached in Kashmir, where he refrains from telling a local, worried about the bad international reputation of his country, that the world does not think about Kashmir at all, he becomes teary-eyed while visiting a mine victim in Afghanistan, he suffers the effects of tear gas with his co-protesters (and to a certain extent compatriots) in Iran where, faced with antiriot troops, he remarks that he cannot be just a reporter even if he wanted to: "behind us the clubs, ahead God help us" (p. 181), he grows more and more perturbed in Syria, as the atrocities therein are more perturbing, in the short chapter on Palestine, a partial, disillusioned, and speechless Kermani admits that he has stopped reporting and started judging instead, and finally, he rejoices at the arrival of a ship that has saved refugees from death at sea (who are about to find a pseudo-paradise in the safe/barbed haven) on Lampedusa, as if welcoming Noah's Ark post-flood (which is a far more appealing image of refugees' arrival than that of the Trojan horse...