In Firewood of Sarajevo, Said Khatibi compares and contrasts the sad destinies of two countries. At one time tied by bonds of friendship and ideology, both have become embroiled in futile civil wars, descending into hell and reaching a state where pain is the only common denominator uniting people. In Algeria, as in Bosnia Herzegovina, the twentieth century had a bloody end, as people were torn apart by issues of religion and ethnicity. The novel’s protagonists, Salim and Ivana, have in common the fact that they have both fled destructive war and hatred in their countries, and gone to build a new life in Slovenia. Through them, the ugliness of conflict between brothers belonging to the same land is exposed, now brothers only in pain. Even in exile, the smell of war lingers in their nostrils and its effects are felt in their everyday lives. Algiers: Editions El-Ikhtilef 2019.
The novel depicts the life of Avicenna, or “the Great Sheikh”, the Muslim polymath whose work has had a profound influence for the last thousand years. It takes the reader on a thrilling journey from Avicenna’s birthplace in a village near the ancient Uzbek city of Bukhara, until his death in Persia after an eventful life. Although he became a vizier twice, Avicenna was detained in the remote fortress of Fardeqan, where he wrote some of his philosophical works. Cairo: Dar al-Shorouk 2019.
The novel tells the story of Said, an Iraqi immigrant working as a postman in Oslo, who falls in love with a young woman, Tuna Janssen, who is teaching Norwegian to immigrant foreigners. She helps him develop his language skills and fulfil his dream of writing stories. He even manages to get a job as a columnist in a well-known Norwegian newspaper. However, her death is a shocking and terrible blow. After that, he spends his time writing, in isolation, only meeting his neighbour, Jacob Jondal, an old man who dreams of sleeping in a cherry field. In his final days, he buys a cherry field and leaves instructions that he should be buried there, since he firmly believes that by doing so, he will become a cherry tree, according to an old legend which says that after death, people turn into something suited to the place where they were buried. If buried on a mountain, he would become a rock, if in the desert, a grain of sand, etc. After the death of his kindly neighbour, Said becomes more isolated and cuts himself off from the outside world, until he receives an urgent letter from Baghdad calling him to return there immediately. The female writer of the letter informs him that his father’s remains have been found in a mass grave, so he decides to return to Iraq. Once there, however, he is kidnapped by an armed religious militia, imprisoned in a dark cellar in the Wadi al-Salem cemetery near Najaf and condemned to death. His adventures continue with some surprising and paradoxical twists and turns of the plot. Baghdad: Dar al-Rafidain 2019.
Dheeb is taken prisoner by Ottoman soldiers at the start of the great Arab uprising of 1916 and deported to Damascus, like other citizens of Medina, western Arabia, who suffered the tyranny of its Ottoman ruler. Previously, Dheeb had been kidnapped from Mecca and sold as a slave. Now he finds himself in Damascus working in an inn owned by a woman, waiting for the Ottomans to leave the city. The novels depict an important period in the history of the Arabian Peninsula, known as “seferberlik”, or the mass deportation and forced conscription of Arabs into the Ottoman army during the First World War. Beirut: Dar Al Saqi 2019.
No-One Prayed Over Their Graves
In 1907, in the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, a flood sweeps away the pleasant life which had existed on both sides of its banks. Close friends Hanna and Zakaria are in a castle enjoying worldly pleasures and are saved. Hanna’s wife and child, and Zakaria’s son are not. Nothing is the same after the flood. Hanna enters a monastery and contemplates the meaning of life and death. These small lives are pictured against a backdrop of the wider destiny of Aleppo, a city which has endured floods, earthquakes and famines, and has absorbed deep social, political and religious changes. The novel follows these changes, threaded throughout by the dichotomy of love and death. Beirut: Hachette Antoine/Naufal 2019.
Before departing for Marseilles, fleeing German aggression in Tunis, the Jewish minority community hid all records of their history in the ground under the hamam (Turkish bath or spa) in the Al-Hara district. This mysterious, forgotten history intrigues Helen, the novel’s main protagonist. A Jewish Tunisian living in France, she embarks on a journey to discover her roots, returning to Tunis and specialising in the study of history. On the way to uncovering the hidden secret, she meets Saad, a Muslim student from Tunisia, and they fall in love. Interwoven with this story is a legend about the hamam, which tells how the floor gave way, revealing gold, and how a woman bathing there was kidnapped by an evil spirit. Through these two interwoven tales, the novel asks questions relevant to the present, touching on identity, extremism and the power of belonging to the same place (here, Tunisia), despite the ethnic and religious differences existing within it. Sine Loco: Mesaa 2019.
What About Rachel, the Jewish Lady? offers a rich panorama of Syria in the days following the defeat of the 1967 six-day war, exposing police brutality at that time and the role played by the intelligence services in facilitating the emigration of Jews from Qamishli, in north-eastern Syria, smuggling them to Turkey and Lebanon, and thence to Cyprus. From there, they made their way to Palestine and America, where many settled in Brooklyn, New York. The novel gives an insight into life in the Jewish quarter of Qamishli, occupied by Jews, Kurds and Armenians, and is framed by the story of a teenage boy’s love for a girl living in the quarter. Beirut: Arabic Institute for Research and Publishing 2019.