Teenage Milde, who once beat all of her peers in a contest to see who could stare into the sun the longest, sits in a shadowy, cold cave, trying to avoid capture. She and her mother are from the Outskirts, a camp full of mothers and daughters who have been half-deported and ultimately forgotten by the city. There, the mothers have built a home from the ground up, determined to give their children a chance. Only when construction threatened their home did Milde and her friends decide enough was enough: their decision to burn it all down is the instigating action of Event Horizon by Kurdish author Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. It is technically Karam’s first book, although The Singularity (2025) was published in English before this one.
In what slowly becomes a metaphor for the rebel, the exile, and the plight of the undocumented community in too many places on earth, Milde and the Outskirts for a long time are kept both marginalized and safe due to their invisibility, the liminality granted by their undocumented and out-of-sight status. When Milde and her mother are first deported, the soldiers make it clear that once they are across the border, they will no longer be the soldiers’ concern: out of sight, out of mind. Once the borders open, they are given papers with a series of impossible rules that in the end, render them more or less belonging nowhere, documented nowhere.
The mothers embrace this liminality. They become one with the mist that covers the mountain, which conceals them and gradually allows them to build their homes, setting up buildings, systems of work, and even a school using scrap metal and carefully gathered money and materials. The mountain shields “the Outskirts from the city and the city from seeing the Outskirts.” When they sneak down into the city, they are like ghosts. Milde thinks, at one point, that if she and her compatriots are attacked on the beach, no pedestrians nearby will help them even if she calls. They sleep through the day, avoided and unbothered by tourists who don’t wish to see them, and long for “the cover of night,” which conceals them and allows them to gather materials and food.
Much like in other historic realms of oppression around the world, the average person in Karam’s unnamed society would prefer to ignore the fact of the Outskirts’s needy existence. Even acts of resistance are blind ones: to keep children from going into the dumpsters to salvage perfectly edible food, restaurants don’t take real action or call the authorities, but simply break glass into the dumpsters, hoping it creates a deterrent all on its own. The rumors cover them—an old neighbor says that “all deportees had either been killed or banned from entering the country.” Their dehumanization is also their strength: the Outskirts and its inhabitants are undocumented, but they are also unmarked, unnoticed, and allowed to have their secretive independence.
It is only once a highway encroaches their area that “the whitewashed houses with courtyards … catch the eye of the Outskirts from even very far away.” That’s when they begin to have trouble, when business owners begin to deny them service, when they risk harassment. The ironies later become rampant: Milde, who wants to force the people to see their oppression by setting their city ablaze and letting the fire stand stark and bright against a cold, dark sky, is told that she will escape execution if she agrees to be a test subject sent into a black hole. She will not return.
In her disposability, the ability of her body to be subjected to a reckless experiment without backlash, she becomes indispensable, and is able to leverage benefits for the Outskirts. She will be both decimated, blotted out from existence, and set in stone forever as the first to enter a black hole. And in agreeing to become an exile, she is able to draw attention to her people, but also ensures she may never see her home again. In a way it is the perfect metaphor for the exiled writer: sending visibility across borders and oceans, but at such a dire cost. She will not be able to bury her mother. She will not cross into the Outskirts ever again. In writing of what a community can build in darkness, and telling the story of one brave, lost soldier, Karam crafts a story that captures the positives and pitfalls of becoming visible as someone built on undefined borders and raised within a disguising mist.
The metaphor of the Mass, or black hole, is not always clear—at first, it even feels unnecessary, a side plot to the resilience of the mothers’ strength and success in building the Outskirts on the rough plateau of the mountain. But parallels make it clearer. The text says that Essa, Milde’s mother, senses the deportation “as Milde would come to sense the black hole the Mass: with her body.” The scientists tell Milde that once she passes the “event horizon” of the black hole, she will never, ever be able to come back home: “nothing can retrieve you, and it’s important that this be crystal clear to you and you’re clear about this now. You will not be coming home. You will not be buried.” At the moment of the deportation, the moment a person enters the gravity of a black hole, darkness is assured. From that point, there is no return. Essa will never go home; Milde will never go home. Karam’s Mass stands for the darkness that deportees are pulled, irrevocably, into: a darkness, a mist, that shields, protects, but that will ensure the impossibility of return to your homeland, to your traditions, to your world.
Still, Essa and the mothers built Milde’s home from nothing in just that darkness. Essa wonders at one point how a being of such courage as Milde came from within her own body, but she fails to see her own incredible bravery. The mothers built a community from mist—that on its own is a determination to create, an insistence to exist. Soldiers sent the mothers and their children into a black hole, into a border, into undocumented nonexistence, and yet they still exist. All the gravity in the world, it seems, can not erase a people or their resilience.
FICTION
Event Horizon
By Balsam Karam
Translated by Saskia Vogel
Feminist Press
Published on March 31, 2026
