Snake Eyes

Look in my laundry room cabinet here in Los Angeles and you’ll find a Mason jar of clear alcohol. It’s never been opened, but I know its smell, its taste. Shake the jar: Bubbles will form on top and separate clean down the middle like a zipper: a good batch. My father, born on Clinch Mountain in east Tennessee 81 years ago, gave it to me when I moved to California. His cousin Willie brewed it. I’ve thought about pulling it out of the cabinet, putting it on the mantelpiece as a conversation starter for dinner guests. But I haven’t. I’m too afraid of the responses that even I, as an Appalachian, sometimes fall for: Moonshiners. Revenuers. Snuffy Smith. Religious rapture. Barefoot and pregnant.

Trying to enter the culture where those cardboard images were born is difficult. You’re tap-dancing on its edge, hoping the locals will turn your way and let you in. East Tennessee and Kentucky have a history of Third World poverty, oppressive coal bosses and Puritan religiosity, all of which have made mistrust of outsiders an instinct. And outsiders, finding that world closed to them, pick up the stereotypes without thinking. This is an especially grave danger for those whose charge is to slip into others’ lives. Writers, when taking on a world not theirs, must not only avoid the easy assumptions, they must study the preconceptions themselves, turn them over carefully with the tips of their pencils, see what gave birth to that image--without stumbling.

Gina Nahai, in her latest novel, “Sunday’s Silence,” has not stumbled. I don’t doubt that her knowledge of the Kurdish culture has helped her enter east Tennessee with the confidence and honesty that makes this novel so fresh. Nahai’s previous books, “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” and “Cry of the Peacock,” are set in Iranian history and culture. Those novels’ weavings of magic realism and religious fundamentalism reveal that the jump to Clinch Mountain and Devil’s Nose in Tennessee is not so great.

The Kurds and the Appalachians meet just east of the Cumberland Plateau. It’s 1975. Adam Watkins, a reporter, has returned from the wars of Beirut to his hometown of Knoxville. His father, Little Sam Watkins, moonshiner, gambler and snake-handling preacher, is dead, supposedly murdered by a woman who shoved a rattlesnake into his face. This final bite, after 446 bites that through the years have left him swollen and blackened with venom, does him in.

In Knoxville, Adam meets the woman: Blue was born “in an area divided among five countries, [where] live twenty-five million people who call themselves Kurds.” She was taken from her family in Iraq by a Jewish-Arabic man called only the Professor, who taught linguistics at the University of Tennessee. Once settled in Knoxville, the Professor wants to study Watkins’ church to record their speaking in tongues, hoping to find evidence of a genetic link that connects all humans to an original language. Little Sam doesn’t trust the Professor, but the Professor uses his svelte new bride as bait: He brings Blue to Sunday meeting.

Little Sam, an illiterate womanizer raised in a Christian fundamentalism that preached to the poor to become poorer in order to please God, found Jesus through a diamondback rattler when he was 30. That day he walked into a local Sunday meeting with reptile in hand and launched his career. Handling fire and drinking strychnine would soon follow. Nahai has accomplished in fiction what Dennis Covington, in his “Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia,” has done in nonfiction: She looks at snake-handling from the inside, and the cliches of Appalachia slough off like old skin, revealing the fright and the awe that make extreme Christianity so potent.

It is Blue, the Kurd, who lets us into this world. Snakes have been with Blue since conception. Her mother was haunted into madness by images of the reptile. For Blue, the snake is more than an embodiment of evil; it is a writhing power, one that she means to control. In her first visit to Little Sam’s church, Blue snatches up a rattler and wraps it around her body.

This is where Nahai is especially adroit in her storytelling; indeed, her writing feels like we’re witnessing someone snake-handling the lives of characters from distinct cultures. She shows, if not the similarities, at least the unique points of view that the Appalachian and the Kurdish cultures share. As Nahai’s omniscient narrator says, “At the end of the day, tempting death, praying to the Lord or digging your face in between a young woman’s breasts were all about achieving ecstasy.” It doesn’t get more Appalachian than that.

Still, Blue is an outsider and from another country. She has entered a world known for mistrust of strangers. She is also sensual and, in the raw sexism of Christian fundamentalism, she must be either coveted or banished. She refuses Little Sam’s advances, not so much for her marriage vows (her affair with Sam’s son Adam pushes the celibate Professor out of the story for a while) but rather for her disgust of the swollen, venom-bruised preacher.

Though Nahai has several large characters displayed throughout the story, she does not lose the weave of the narration. Her descriptions of Adam and his years growing up are exquisite in their brutality and poverty. He escaped through education, through reading and writing. He fled his warring childhood, then followed a road to something familiar but outside of himself: the war in Beirut.

Nahai has wisely chosen not to use the magic realism so integral to her previous novels in this most recent work. Who needs women growing wings and flying off into an Iranian night (as happens in “Moonlight”) when you’ve got a man with a copperhead coiled around his neck in the name of Jesus? And Nahai pushes the reader beyond the cliche, making us refrain from disparaging it. There’s a reason religious fundamentalism exists, and it’s not because of a people being innately impressionable. Rather, fundamentalism becomes the heated magic that, for a people who grew up dirt-poor, is a salve. Because Nahai is not interested in sensationalizing such extreme religious notions, “Sunday’s Silence” demands that we pay them attention and lets us understand a little bit better their powerful lure.