Who Gets to Write About Ordinary Life?

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We keep asking Sergey Davydov for a news report, but what he really wants to tell us is a love story. It would be to our advantage if we do it his way. His sophomore foray outside of theatre, Мидвест (Midwest) (Freedom Letters 2026), a work of autofiction that Davydov himself refers to as more of an art project than a novel, is an opportunity to do exactly that.

Midwest is perhaps the most remarkable of a cadre of books published this year that tell stories of queer migrant lives while resisting reduction to straightforward political manifesto, appearing alongside Franco-Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa’s Debout dans tes rêves (Standing in Your Dreams) and Afghan-Australian writer Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us. It is Davydov—and, to a lesser extent, Taïa—who will concern us here, though Sayed’s work belongs unmistakably to the same literary moment. These stories, and perhaps their writers too, make a bold demand: for the freedom to be ordinary. And in doing so, they undertake a literary rescue of our (increasingly endangered) shared humanity.

It must be acknowledged that the subject and, in the case of Davydov and Taïa, the writers are particularly well-positioned for this work. After all, who is more the twenty-first-century Other par excellence than queer migrants in an era when political conversation around the world seems dominated by anxieties about queer lives and migrants? And consequently, who is better able to hold up a mirror to a zeitgeist in which the politics of identity and grand narratives of public life have invaded the most private spaces?

Sergey Davydov has experience with this intrusion. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was on his way to becoming one of the most important playwrights of his generation in Russia. His first play, Lev Tolstoy 49, was shortlisted for the Eurasia International Playwrights Competition while he was still a university student, beginning a decade of accolades that culminated in 2020, when Republic was named a “Play of the Year” by Culmination, Russia’s national “competition of competitions” for contemporary playwriting.

Then came February 2022. Davydov came out not only against the war, but also as a gay man, an unquestionable upping of the stakes in a country where queer people are labeled by law as extremists and the country’s chief cleric justified the invasion of Ukraine by saying that the country needed to be protected from Pride parades. As official pressure mounted, Davydov was forced to flee to Germany. It was from there that he published his first novel, Springfield (Freedom Letters 2023), a queer coming-of-age novel set in Russia’s de-industrializing and decaying provinces. The book, it goes without saying, has been banned in Russia.

While Springfield was undeniably autobiographical at parts, in Midwest, Davydov does away with the pretense of a fictional avatar. The genre-defying work is technically autofiction, but it is also a kind of memoir, though certainly not in the mode of an Elizabeth Gilbert or others like her who make a commodity about of “truth telling.”  In Midwest truth is not a brand, but the foundation of a text that includes poetry and screenshots of WhatsApp conversations amid prose written in a playwright’s style: sparse, brief, and direct. The decoupage narrative guides the reader, in a broadly chronological fashion, through the past four years of the author’s life. While history and fate have provided plenty of material to mine for not only drama but ideological object lessons, Davydov stubbornly refuses.

This is precisely the point. Hatred and division, the business of political conflict, are not the organizing principles of his inner world. Love is. And his strongest desires are for connection and, quite explicitly, for an ordinary life built upon love and its bounds. In a passage mirroring that genre of social media post used to report conversations from daily life—the child who speaks too bluntly, the parent with an opinion, for instance—Jasper, Davydov’s German partner, who first appears in the second half of the book, says, in response to what begins as gentle teasing about the former’s noble family background, “Ты — моя семья” (“You are my family”). Davydov’s response: “Я всегда хотел семью” (“I’ve always wanted a family”).

But the most direct declaration of Davydov’s stubborn insistence upon a right to an unremarkable domestic life, and by extension his refusal to surrender his full humanity, comes when the German asylum system rips Davydov away from the life he has been building in Germany. He lays out in the simplest of terms what might be understood as the thesis of not just Midwest, but his larger oeuvre:

Ненавижу доказывать своё право на жизнь, на нормальную жизнь. Это приходилось делать в России, и я продолжаю это делать в Германии….А ты просто хочешь жить как нормальные люди, ты хочешь семью, мужа, домик и продолжать свою честную работу о гуманизме, в которую веришь.

I hate having to prove my right to a life—to a normal life. I had to do it in Russia, and I continue to do it in Germany… All you want is to live like normal people; you want a family, a husband, a little house, and to carry on with the honest work promoting humanism that you believe in.

It is possible—and perhaps our impulse—to read this insistence as a wholly political act: another protest in an era of protests. After all, we live in a moment when people routinely use their private lives as political weapons. From TikTok tradwife influencers to Instagram polycules to the procreative activities of White House staff, private lives, or more specifically one’s domestic desires, are routinely used to make ideological points.

Far too frequently opposition to the authoritarian’s dehumanization also makes political identity the organizing principle through which other people’s lives are understood.

But Davydov’s repeated desire for “an ordinary life” resists such a reading. For one thing, it is abundantly clear from the text that Davydov really does just want to marry the man he loves and live with him in a modest but well-appointed apartment, writing plays and novels between cooking pelmeni and doing the laundry. And while clearly not ignorant to the political barriers to fulfilling this wish, he does not see those barriers or their destruction as the point. He wants this life not because of what it represents, but because he loves this man and wants this life with him. In fact, he reprints in Midwest the letter he sent to the Danish authorities while seeking permission for an international marriage–after all marriages like his do require special permission. A political complication.

He writes in part:

 Позже мы оба поняли, что просто хотим легализовать наши отношения, нашу семейную связь, потому что мы любим друг друга, и мне с ним очень хорошо. И, кажется, он чувствует то же самое по отношению ко мне. Он называет меня по-русски «Мишка», что означает «маленький медведь». Для меня Яспер — это дом. И я думаю, это самое главное.

Later, we both realized that we simply wanted to formalize our relationship—our family bond—because we love each other, and I feel so good with him. And it seems he feels the same way about me. He calls me ‘Mishka’ in Russian, which means ‘little bear.’ For me, Jasper is home. And I think that’s the most important thing.

Compare his words to those of Savannah Stone, the viral trad influencer, who told Fox News she married her husband, Noah, because she wanted “to rebuild a nuclear family because the left and modern feminism has truly tried to destroy that.” This, if we can break the spell of the culture wars for a second, is clearly a very weird thing to say. Unlike tradwife influencers or Usha Vance, Davydov is decidedly not trying to make his life a political billboard. This is not to say that Sergey loves Jasper more or more authentically than Savannah loves Noah, but maybe? I decline to extend the comparison to the Vances, for obvious reasons.

At the very least, Davydov is much less willing than the Stones or the Vances to surrender his private affections to be fodder for political allegory–including giving in to the frequent progressive trope that because of who he is these desires make him brave. Because while, undoubtedly, Midwest offers a searing indictment of the authoritarian politics of our era, which threaten the lives and dignity of queer people, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women, it is equally a critique of the counter impulse which treats the lives of “marginalized people”—that is to say people who have had some aspect of themselves dragged into the public square for scrutiny–as de facto activists. Far too frequently opposition to the authoritarian’s dehumanization also makes political identity the organizing principle through which other people’s lives are understood.

Now, “the personal is political”—my Second-Wave feminist mother taught me that—but what is farther from liberation, from being recognized as fully human, than to have every part of ourselves co-opted by politics? If the goal of the authoritarians is to strip those they villainize of their humanity by robbing them of their individuality (in the strictest sense), should not our response to it be something other than a fun-house mirror version of the same?

A family, a husband, a home, work one believes in: none of these things should require courage. Davydov knows this, even if the circumstances of his life have repeatedly made even stating the desire for these things aloud—let alone actively pursuing them—acts of extraordinary courage. This is perhaps the cruelest irony running through Midwest. Davydov’s circumstances are extraordinary because so much of what he desires is unremarkable. To read him only as a dissident, migrant, queer writer, or political symbol—even approvingly—is therefore to risk repeating something of the original violence. Midwest asks something both simpler and more difficult of its reader: to let Davydov tell us a story without attempting to extract some universal meaning from it.

This desire to be allowed to be ordinary—to occupy a self rather than an archetype—is equally central to Abdellah Taïa’s Debout dans tes rêves. Though stylistically distinct from Davydov’s hybrid autofiction, Taïa’s novel operates on the same essential thematic space, with Taïa similarly rejecting the impulse to reduce queer migrant life—that is, his life—to sociological case study or ideological troupe.

The book’s opening scene takes place in a late afternoon in the year 2000 on a cafe terrasse in Paris’s stylish rue Blanche. Majid, Taïa’s fictional alter ego is, like his creator at the turn of the millennium, a young gay Moroccan in Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne. Majid has found work as the babysitter to Gabriel, the three-year-old son of an affluent French family. And on this afternoon, on the street, Gabriel has been reduced to tears upon learning of the death of Roxy, his aunt’s dog. Majid, as anyone would do in the face of a child pained by his first brush with death, attempts to comfort Gabriel, “Je caresse ses cheveux pour l’aider à traverser ce moment difficile. Je lui donne toute la tendresse dont je suis capable” (I stroke his hair to help him through this difficult moment. I give him all the tenderness I am capable of).

Yet to passers-by on the street, this tender moment has an ominous aura: an Arab man and a crying white child must mean something is amiss. A small vigilante mob forms, led—as such mobs frequently are—by a particularly self-righteous white woman, demanding an explanation. Who is this man? Who is this child? Does Majid have his identification in order? Should he even be in the country? Only a phone call to the boy’s mother, and her harsh rebuke of the mob’s leader, finally allows Majid and Gabriel to leave and return to the boy’s home.

The cruelty of the scene is obvious. But then again, there is a whole genre of internet video devoted to celebrating precisely this kind of interference: strangers inserting themselves into other people’s lives because an interaction looks “suspicious,” confident that their suspicion is itself evidence of their virtue, without any critical reflection on who we find suspicious. And in the context of a world that rewards such behavior, Majid can never really exist unquestioned.

Perhaps the most radical act of solidarity left to us is to stop demanding that every human story explain the world, and allow it, sometimes, simply to be a human story.

This is because the assumptions about Majid, the insistence upon reading him as a political avatar, is not confined to busybodies on the street. In one of Debout dans tes rêves most infuriating scenes, Majid’s thesis advisor tells him that he should abandon his research on Fragonard, the 18th-century French painter and printmaker, and instead, write “une thèse sur les images et l’islam, plus exactement sur l’interdiction de la représentation, et donc des images, en islam” (a thesis on images and Islam—or more precisely, on the prohibition of representation, and thus of images, in Islam). The scene is almost comical. Majid wants to write about Fragonard–a perfectly reasonable subject for a doctoral thesis. His advisor cannot imagine why or how a Moroccan will write about one of the last great painters of the ancien régime.

The suggestion that Majid abandon this work to study the prohibition against images in Islam is not only indicative of a view that confines Majid to his own natal context, but also implies a kind of duty on the part of Majid: Should not a young man from a Muslim society who has found himself in the free air of Paris spend his time trying to understand the “oppressiveness” of the culture from which he came? Though delivered from the mouth of a genteel representative of liberalism, this insistence that Majid’s intellectual life be governed by his ethnic and religious background is as much an act of violence, as dehumanizing, as the crowd on the street that formed to prevent him from comforting a child he loves.

It is here that Debout dans tes rêves and Midwest arrive at the same point. Davydov wants a husband, a home, and the freedom to write. Majid wants to comfort a crying child and write a dissertation on Fragonard. The desires themselves are almost aggressively unremarkable. What makes them politically charged is not that either man has chosen to make a political statement out of his life, but that the world around him repeatedly refuses him that most basic dignity.

Both books are acts of defiance against this type of dehumanization, which makes some of the critical responses disappointing to say the least. For example, in his overwhelmingly positive review of Midwest for Novaya Gazeta Europe, Sorin Brutus identifies Davydov’s encounter with a reactionary, homophobic Chechen roommate at a German refugee camp as a moment requiring greater political exegesis and laments Davydov’s failure to linger on it. Likewise, Jean-Philippe Cazier’s once again very positive review for Diacritk of Debout dans tes rêves can’t see past a socio-political reading of the novel, writing with no trace of guile, “Ici, même les désirs et les plaisirs sont politiques – ce qui signifie aussi que les désirs et les plaisirs, que le récit de soi, le point de vue subjectif et intime sont révélateurs du politique et du social” (Here, even desires and pleasures are political—which also means that desires and pleasures, the telling of one’s own story, and the subjective and intimate point of view are all revealing of the political and the social). An assertion that left me wondering if Cazier and I had read the same novel.

We have all been conditioned to accept and even to expect overt activism in the work of writers and artists whose personhood has been politicized. But there is an undeniable cruelty in thinking of people and their lives only as political subjects. And I cannot help but think that the particular evil of the past century and a half is precisely because we have collectively all become so invested in ideological rancor that we have lost sight of what is truly human. This is not meant in a facile “We are more alike than different” sort of way. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that we are each particular in a way that ultimately reveals the limits of any political project. And that real understanding of human beings and the world will never come from sociological or political theory. It will come only from hearing one another’s stories. This is the message of Midwest and Debout dans tes rêves. To grant another person his full humanity is therefore not merely to defend his rights or understand the forces acting upon him, but to accept that there will always be something about him that exceeds our explanations. Perhaps the most radical act of solidarity left to us is to stop demanding that every human story explain the world, and allow it, sometimes, simply to be a human story.

Sergey Davydov wants to tell us a love story. We should probably listen.