Denounced and framed as an enemy of the state due to her LGBTQ activism and opposition to the war in Ukraine, Egana Djabbarova fled Russia in 2024, now residing in Hamburg, Germany, where she wrote her debut, My Dreadful Body, translated by Lisa C. Hayden (New Vessel Press, 2026). In it, she describes her body as being the bearer of elegiac inherited stigmas, which turns out, at the demi-memoir’s end, to be a literal truth. Through Hayden’s deft translation, Djabbarova’s writing interrogates the ways we become estranged from ourselves physically and emotionally.  From the Zangilan Mountains to modern Russia, she speaks to the generations of cultural interdictions and ancestral prohibitions experienced in a diasporic Muslim Azerbaijani community; one where Djabbarova, suffering an undiagnosed neurological disorder, recognizes her illness emerging as another form of exile, noting “I was not Russian, so I was necessarily an outsider, an other.”

My Dreadful Body evidences the duality of chronic illness, alongside impossible standards placed on women’s bodies, in relation to generational oppression. Djabbarova’s dystonia was only treated successfully after many years of suffering, through the implantation of a deep-brain stimulator, adding to her “otherness” where “a woman is not allowed to forget that she is an object in a sentence rather than its main subject.” She acknowledges that “the East and the West have never come to resemble one another” and, therefore, “I have never forgotten my otherness since. I was an adolescent when Russian marches, skinhead attacks, and massive police raids at wholesale markets all began.” Navigating this systemic oppression led her to wonder: “Where, then, was our home if we didn’t belong here, either?” These inner dialogues inexorably led to becoming a writer:

Books helped me hide from my feelings of shame over my horrible pronunciation and ridiculous accent, forgotten phrases and everyday expressions, and my wayward and strange desires.

As an Azerbaijani woman, “any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” Djabbarova’s demi-memoir illustrates the forbidden, piercing a closed world where “the women I knew treated the interiors of their apartments more seriously than their own faces or health.” Djabbarova’s analysis isn’t critical toward her culture but to some of its outcomes, alongside a larger critique against oppression:

In the world where I grew up, gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes.

The one-sidedness of existence as a woman is not spared. This includes witnessing her father abusing her mother: “A man’s actions were considered the appetizer since they were, after all, men, and were thus allowed to make mistakes, beat their wives, cheat on them, and have second families.”

Djabbarova holds deep sympathy for her closed-tongued mother’s fate.

Lavish language paints a vivid, often harrowing double-life for Azerbaijani females, and Djabbarova holds deep sympathy for her closed-tongued mother’s fate: “My mother’s tongue was sadness: it could be spoken in Russian, Azerbaijani, or Turkish, but it was invariably sad and it always had words for prayers, entreaties, and suras, though a sense of yearning was most important.”

And, of course, it isn’t only women and children who suffer under toxic patriarchy. Djabbarova observes, almost with pity: 

Fathers and husbands never knew the full story of their own wives’ and children’s lives because the men saw them only at family celebrations, in photos, and on short trips, meaning that wives and children for them were little images that lacked words.

Contending with the horror of her own body’s breakage, leaving her with “archival scars,” Djabbarova undergoes a semicurative procedure. Despite returning many of her functions, it leaves her entirely dependent upon the “little white box and the metal object sewn around my collarbone.” It leads also to a degree of emancipation, because it was harder to marry her off with this ailment.

Djabbarova shares the isolation of chronic illness, alongside her culture’s disregard for illness, speaking to the fragility of being biologically female and asking: “Is it really necessary to reproduce and continue the family line in order to have a heritage?” She questions how it is socially sanctioned to have such double standards where “the groom could return his bride at any moment if she didn’t meet his expectations. It was as if the virginal hymen were a sheep that had to be sacrificed in order to prove one’s love.” She bravely doesn’t hold back from naming her father as a culprit in her own illness:

Dystonia had developed due to hypoxia in the brain at birth. My father’s rage had yet again flowed over my mother’s body like lava, provoking the birth of a child incapable of breathing independently while damaging her brain and mutilating her body forever.

As Azeri diaspora immigrants, Djabbarova locates a woman’s experience in the sub-subculture of immigration.

Additionally, as Azeri diaspora immigrants, Djabbarova locates a woman’s experience in the sub-subculture of immigration:

Each of his strikes at our mother’s powerless body drove our freedom into the grave, hammering his words deeper and deeper, flinging our hopes like dirt, and using his big feet to tamp our little bodies into a box labeled “woman.”

Being born a woman, despite being accomplished, is viewed as having no use if she cannot also be a commodity: “A daughter unable to make her parents happy with her marriage was considered a bad daughter.”

Femininity and purity are viewed through a thin lens that doesn’t permit alteration and limits women’s freedoms to even cut their hair. These cultural signifiers speak into a new female Azerbaijani canon. Literally speaking, “The mouth was not intended for speaking. None of the women around me ever said what they genuinely wanted to say.” What Djabbarova distinguishes here is what comes of wordlessness in women:

All her words were turned into deeds, into the foods she cooked, the laundry, the sewing. Her words were shekarbura, thin kutaby pancakes with greens and cheese, buglama meat stew, and chigirtma. Whenever she wanted to say something, she prepared food.

As long as “the primary event in the life of any young Azerbaijani woman, after all, is undoubtedly her wedding,” then writers like Egana Djabbarova are essential. My Dreadful Body is intensely lyrical, evidencing beauty in language and the observed world, reflected in Djabbarova’s culture. She preserves the beauty of this culture alongside its limitations and doesn’t succumb to blowing it up, to make a point that the West is equally guilty in differing ways. The point being that the subjugation of women is not, and never has been, the answer.

Grasse, France