Reviewed by Michael Northen
As an author I don’t wish to abide by the rules of genre and beginnings and endings. This narrative was not all mine and while hearing voices might render me the mad author, I have to allow for the risks and potential of breaking past my inner critic and the reader who has stayed the course.
Shahd Alashammari, Confetti and Ashes, p. 215
In her first book Notes on the Flesh (2017). Shahd Alshammari argued that if we want attitudes toward disability, particularly those directed toward women, to change, we have to start documenting our stories. Searching for a model from Middle Eastern culture, Alshammari chose Scheherazade whose storytelling was not merely an art or pastime but a means of survival. In her “Notes,” Alshammari raised a number of issues that she has faced as a disabled woman in an Islamic culture. As she turned to continue her work in Head Above Water, Alshammari faced a dilemma: how was she to solve the problem of telling her story when as a woman living with multiple sclerosis she was often not able to get out of bed, let alone organize her thoughts? As a writer, the device she chose was to have another narrator come into the story to accomplish this organization. She also returned to the claim that what she wrote was biomythography, a form where the lines between personal experience and fiction are blurred. At the same time, she also continued to make use of the frame tale structure that she drew from the Scheherazade stories.
It should not be a surprise, then, that in her most recent book, Confetti and Ashes, all bets are off. As the above quote indicates, Alshammari feels that literature (and those who read it) need to accommodate what the disabled body has to say in the way that it is able to say it. To be sure, as in Head Above Water, the table of contents indicates the vestige of traditional form, but much of it is veneer. Confetti and Ashes is divided into two parts, the first labeled “Beginnings” and the second “Becoming.”
The first piece in the “Beginnings” section, called “The Memoirist’s Chatter,” sets the tone for the book and the various pieces in the section that follow. It is equally valuable as a piece to read once one has finished the book. Alshammari tells us up front:
I am tired of authors. I am tired of myself speaking. I am exhausted from what publishers want to hear, the excessive edits, demands, and the claims of wanting to be inclusive. (p. 7)
She is tired of having to ask for permission to speak and in this book she asks the reader to “grant us your body as witness to these conversations. I am just here to testify.” (p. 9)
One of the first things that Alshammari asks us to witness is a certain day that sticks in her memory, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, on August 2, 1990, when she was five years old. The author’s lived experience illustrates how trauma early in life can manifest later on in the body and in trying to find a sense of identity. She implies that this early dislocation foreshadowed a subsequent grappling for a sense of self that dominates much of the book. Alshammari notes, “The war brought with it the loss of language and family, and my body began to break slowly, deliberately and invisibly.” (p. 9) Given the current political situation in the world at large, it is hard to underestimate the importance of these words.
Alshammari was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at eleven years of age and much of the first part of the book describes her attempts at trying to reclaim a state of wellness. Her frustration with doctors leads her to assert, “Every doctor I met handed me a death sentence.” She moves from traditional doctors to neurologists and then into less “traditional” methods.
Throughout this process, Alshammari frequently pulls in references to the English literary classics that she teaches to her students as a university professor. In one interesting analogy, she compares herself and her search for wellness to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Trying to master her pain and take control of her body, she wonders, like Marlowe’s hero, if she is not trying to make a deal with the devil. “I wonder, Faustus, why wasn’t it enough to just settle for what you had?” (p. 40) For a reader, it opens up the conversation about the idea of what wellness is and to what extent we are falling into the trap of ableism by trying to overcome our bodies.
Using literature as a tool to help her negotiate her body’s experiences, Alshammari also returns to Scheherazade’s stories for inspiration. Just as Scheherazade told stories to keep herself alive, Alshammari sees the writing down of her stories as the means to her own survival. One of my favorite passages in this regard is:
I continue to write about the pieces of me that are lost, the parts of my life that are gone, and the buried parts that I can no longer access…To rewrite is to recreate. Writing is a process of rebirthing, recreating life from the ashes of yourself. (p. 46)
Particularly in Kuwait, where she lives, this writing of her own experiences is a way of pushing back against the patriarchy of doctors, in a way that resembles how Scheherazade pushed back against the king.
It is at this point in the narrative that Alshammari turns to explanations not typically explored in American accounts of disability. In a section called “On Rebirth,” the concept of writing as rebirth takes on a much less metaphorical role. It’s one whose nearest analogue might be the Christian fundamentalist view of disability as punishment for or indications of moral failure, a viewpoint frequently represented in classic literary works. Despite her protesting, “I couldn’t understand why I was paying the price now for a life that I didn’t or couldn’t remember or imagine” (p. 88), Alshammari seeks out a healer who, integrating theories of epigenetics with the concept of rebirth, puts her through a non-medical course of treatment called hypnotherapy. This process eventually allows Alshammari the confidence to begin taking control of her own healing process and begin to engage with others in physical activities that bring a sense of joy back into her life. The final chapter in the first section ends with a description of this return, in “On Dancing.”
In glossing over Confetti and Ashes as a linear narrative, I have done the book a great disservice for three reasons. First, each of these prose sections is sandwiched by poems that have some relevance to the story described. Second, Alshammari infuses her own story with knowledge that she has gained as a teacher of canonic English literature. The section dealing with alternative healing that she calls “On Witches and Wizards” is launched with a discussion of the witches in Macbeth; her discussion of the importance of writing for women pays homage to the work of Virginia Woolf. The third and biggest misrepresentation (on my part, thus far), though, is that the prose sections of the book are written not in one voice but two.
One of the first things a reader notices about Confetti and Ashes is that there are passages, sometimes a sentence, sometimes over a page long, that are rendered in italics. These sections in no particular pattern confirm, cajole, critique, and contest comments made by the primary narrator. When Alshammari begins her discussion on Dr. Faustus, she finally gives this voice a name: Zari. However, it is not until mid-way through the book’s second section that we are given the word qareen, and light is shed on what has been going on throughout the book. Essentially, a qareen1 is a spiritual companion or jinn who is born with each person and influences their thoughts and actions throughout their life. It is frequently thought of as a sort of tempter (the little devil with horns who sits on your shoulder) that tries to lead you away from the path that you should follow. In Alshammari’s version, Zari pre-existed, was born with the narrator, and takes a rather dim view of human beings generally. This helps to clarify some of the observations made in italics about past lives. Throughout the book, Alshammari has laid down clues that make the dialogic narrative transparent to those with the cultural background to see it, while serving as a kind of chastening to those of us who do not.
Compared to the book’s first half, the second half is almost monolithic. Called “Becoming,” it has one main subject, squash–not the vegetable, the game. Concerned with growing toward wellness, it is not a story that is going to keep every reader on the edge of their seat. Unfortunately, the repeated vicissitudes of learning to play squash tend to make one wonder at times if they have wandered into a YA novel of teenage angst. In fairness, and in the spirit of biomythography, learning to play squash, in addition to being a factual account, is intended to be read as a metaphor for spiritual and emotional wellness. While a logical addition, one could argue about whether it actually enhances or detracts from the first part of the book.
In closing the book, Alshammari reminds the reader that although this work can be seen as a sequel to Head Under Water, she is trying to break new ground in disability literature:
Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness explores the genre of life narratives and speculative non-fiction. By breaking genre and stretching our imagination, I re-imagine a world where illness and wellness blend perfectly to reveal the resilience of human and non-human spirits. (p. 217)
Like any genre-bending writing, Confetti and Ashes is bound to make some readers uncomfortable, just as disabled bodies make some in the population at large uncomfortable. The author’s decision to be inclusive by incorporating lengthy back stories of characters that draw readers away from the text’s main thread and her inclusion of the Zari commentary are both valid forms of risk-taking that might deter a single-minded reader, but contribute to this exploration. The section where Alshammari melds the story of her body with that of how Zari enters into the physical world is fascinating in itself. Simultaneously, Alshammari’s inclusion of her own poems, from previously published books, does little that the prose alone would not accomplish.
What makes Confetti and Ashes most valuable is the perspective that it gives on living with disability in a non-Western culture. In Notes on the Flesh and Head Above Water, Alshammari made clear how disability and the status of women are intricately intertwined. It is probably fair to say that American women as a whole would probably have to return one hundred years to the lives of their grandmothers to understand. It is an important lesson to those of us who tend to rush to judgment. Alshammari is aware that some of the positions she takes on wellness in her newest effort, especially in her determination to become viewed as a competent squash player in the latter part of the book, leave her open to charges of ableism, but it is the path that she has been able to carve out for herself under the circumstances. Moreover, her pursuit of what to many would be unorthodox explanations for the genesis of disability reminds us of the need to try to get beyond the cultural conceptions that constrain our own imaginations. The current time seems to be a perfect one for us to rededicate ourselves to that pursuit.
Note:
- Thank you to disabilities scholar Saloua Ben Zahra for her help in clarifying the meaning of the term qareen and how it might be used in a literary context.
Title: Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness
Author: Shahd Alshammari
Publisher: Shahd Alshammari
Date: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Michael Northen was the facilitator of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop from 1997-2010 and the editor of Wordgathering from 2007-2019. He was also an editor of the anthology, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (both from Cinco Puntos Press). He is currently working on Every Place on the Map is Disabled, an anthology of disability poetry to be published by Northwestern University Press in 2026.