Anatomy of a Story: Letters from the Sea, by Liana Badr

In this Anatomy of a Story, we’re looking at Letters from the Sea, by Liana Badr. A speculative story written by the Palestinian novelist and short story writer in which a young man living after the “Great Tsunami” tries to understand the concept of love, and hits up against historical divisions, wars and weapons.

We are going to focus on one specific scene, explore how it sits in the story, why it makes us feel stuff, and see if we can more deeply understand what it does and how it does it and what we can learn from it. Then it’s over to you to take those lessons and apply it to your own writing.

Here’s the whole story on World Literature Today:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2021/summer/letters-sea-liana-badr

And here’s the scene we’re looking at:

I want to know what love is, to touch it, look forward to it, carry it forever—if it exists. The word touched me deeply and added a newly mysterious and intriguing meaning to my being. During the search, warmth ran through the tips of my fingers, which are usually ice-cold.

The letter in the bottle mentioned it is one of thirty more written by the same person. So far, I have found only one; the possibility of finding more is slim. I was the only one in my group who had practiced diving and living underwater. This helped me find the bottle after the loss of old maps, the division of countries, and a total change in the environment. Landmasses and their inhabitants were transformed. It happened when the “Great Tsunami” occurred, after the melting of the North and South poles. After that, humans became two types: people of the Mountains or of the Sea.

Only one human species of different forms and colours was left after the rest drowned. It came to be called the “survival-loving” species after an announcement by the United Nations, which became a virtual moral entity no more. It stated that all of earth’s inhabitants descend from a single gene and therefore must stop their trivialities about race, which pushed our planet to the verge of extinction. The 2017 discovery of the Brighton human and similar discoveries proved that inhabitants of the North and native English people had a dark complexion and blue eyes going as far back as the mythological age. This discovery coincided with the birth of a new generation with a fair complexion and strikingly coloured eyes. They mixed with other generations who had different skin colours and looks and settled everywhere. Their movement led to the end of a narrow-minded, limited imagination that defined the species according to skin and eye colour.

Questions we’re going to ask: how does this scene make us feel? What tension is in this scene? Who is talking and why? Where do we begin and end the scene, both emotionally and physically? What does this scene do?

These aren’t maths questions. There aren’t specific, defined answers that are right or wrong. So have a think and write some notes for what feels right for you.

Here are some of my thoughts: this scene makes my skin ache. The idea of future humans not understanding love but having an innate sense that this is something they want to know about. The inscrutability of love as universal, across cultures, across centuries, across every kind of human, just makes me feel – grief, joy, everything in between, a huge swooping sensation in my gut. Yay stories!

We already know that we are in the future somewhere and that the world we know has been wiped out. This particular scene starts with our protagonist wanting to understand what love is and ends with the global abolition of racism.

It’s a large, broad sweep and the implications are curious. The end of racism and petty bickering over differences emerges from a top down diktat, rather than a bottom up, grassroots movement. That feels somewhat contrary to contemporary discourse on racism, so what is the message here? That humans need a clip round the ear and a stern talking to from a parental figure? That we simply can’t get our shit together without a power structure guiding us? We could argue that the abolition of racism and colonialist, warmongering politics the greatest act of love we can imagine and so this human already knows what love is, but somehow hasn’t actually felt it. What a fascinating form of tension to put in a story.

Physically, we are taken from the ocean to the entire world, giving a sense of expanse and vastness. Emotionally, our protagonist maintains a studied distance from feelings, discussing only the facts, both here and across the whole story. When discussing the senseless murder of billions, the crimes of the past, he is factual, almost cold. But when he considers his desire to learn about love, his language shifts, becomes more full of movement and curiousity: “the word touched me deeply”, “mysterious”, “intriguing”.

As for what this scene does, it explains to us the point of the whole story (what is love?), it shows us what the world is like now (mountain humans and sea humans), and explains what happened to the previous world (we fucked it, mate).

What do you make of this? What are your answers to these questions?

And now over to your writing, here’s the exercise:

1. Think about how this scene makes you feel. What can you write that will make you or a reader feel the same?
2. Think about where this scene begins and ends. Can you take characters from an existing story of yours and insert them into a similar beginning and ending?
3. Think about what this scene does.  Can you take characters from an existing story of yours and insert them into a scene that plays a similar role?

And when you’re done, come tell us your thoughts and share your writing on the forums!

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By: SarahWHQ