"Our public language accommodated a genocide," writes Johannes Anyuru in the early summer of 2025.
Israel's war in Gaza had then been going on for a year and a half. Nearly 60,000 people had been killed, and the disaster would only continue.
In "Illuminated Stone. 2023-2026", one of the country's leading prose writers collects his own (and others') texts about what has happened in the Gaza Strip in recent years. All while the world watched. Anyuru has tried to write her way out and find a way to talk about the abyss. Among other things, by summarizing South Africa's ICJ complaint against Israel in the publication "Faktan".
Early in "Enlightened Stone" he declares that the book will "destroy linear time". And yes, time twists around itself, the chronological chain of events with some kind of starting point in January 2023 runs below the main text, not as footnotes but as a story in itself, to occasionally branch out across the pages and take over completely (there is also a third time axis that runs into the "main"). The chain of events also continues through and past the reference list towards the end. It becomes incredibly effective and conceptually skillful.
This work across multiple planes and dimensions creates a dizzying hybrid of a book, bringing together essays, poetry, statistics and letters, but without coming across as haphazard. Anyuru engages in dialogue with films, poems, video works and short stories, with Instagram updates, news and heartbreaking testimonies, all the while with the death toll like an implacable clock:
"September 4. 65,209 killed. Israel bombs Gaza City. Dead and wounded pour into hospitals. Schools, tents and ambulances burn."
Three million years of life have been destroyed, the medical journal The Lancet stated in the fall of 2025. Yes, our public language actually contained this. Anyuru's texts become a constant negotiation with language, which is reasonable considering how language has become a tool for genocide to take place. How it annihilated the Palestinian, reduced a boy to nothing. In the fifth text, "No words for the disaster", he writes:
"It is impossible to name what is going on, because its name should make the world shake."
It is precisely this inability of the outside world to act that becomes apparent.
Early on, he makes a connection with Olof Palme's Christmas speech in 1972 about the Vietnam War and thus effectively contrasts the backbone that characterized Swedish politics at the time against today's flawed counterpart:
"Imagine that the name Gaza does not forever stand beside the names of Hanoi, Guernica, Oradour, Sharpeville, and Srebrenica, and other names that I omit to mention, for love, after all. You pretend. You who look at a photo of a ten-year-old throwing a rock at a tank and, rather than see a glimmer of your own humanity in the boy, search for your features in the machine's scarred mask of composite metal and camouflage netting."
All the time: the hypocrisy. The comparisons with the mangrove support for Ukraine, the witch-hunt for those who took the blade from their mouths. Ebba Busch can claim that Israel is doing the world a favor by trying to neutralize Hamas, while the Israeli military is shooting people queuing for food in starving Gaza.
But even though "Illuminated Stone" is an extremely heavy book, and sometimes demanding in terms of literature, I can be amazed at Anyuru's poetic and direct way of formulating himself. Like when he talks about the friend who, according to Anyuru, was fired from his port job since the union he got involved in blocked munitions.
"An attempt to silence him by forcing him to speak."
In another passage, Anyuru reproduces a scene from "True detectives" first season, when Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's officers force a corrupt police chief to watch a video where a child is killed. A crime the police chief is partly responsible for.
"Look at that," says McConaughey's character. “Look at it.”
"Illuminated stone" works in the same way, as a reminder not to look away. The result is a work as magnificent as it is horrific, a record of this failure of humanity. And then? What happens then? Anyuru replies:
"[T]here will never be an after. None of what is happening these years will ever be over. It has happened and will always have happened."
Even though 'Enlightened Stone' is an incredibly heavy book, and sometimes demanding in purely literary terms, I can be amazed by Anyuru's poetic and direct way of formulating himself
One can advantageously incorporate another axis and parallel read "Illuminated Stone" with "The Mountain to the Valley, the River to the Sea" by Burcu Sahin, Athena Farrokhzad and Merima Dizdarevic, furious poetry that, like Anyuru, summarizes what will always have happened:
"There is no mercy for you, neither here nor anywhere else / Daughters of empire, the patriarchy of our lives, girl bosses of genocide / You jerks to democratic rights / whose restrictions make your plums swell."
Anyuru writes:
"Israel never hid what they were doing. On the contrary: they stated the ambition to kill children already in the first days of the genocide (which were not its first days), when they said that the people of Gaza were beasts and should be treated as beasts."
Look at it.
We should be grateful for Johannes Anyuru's pathos and pen - and utterly horrified that "Illuminated Stone" even needed to be written.
