R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
By Quentin Perissinotto for Le Regard Libre, 11 April 2023
The Orchards of Basra is an illusory attempt to resuscitate images and bring them to life. Hishâm, an antique book dealer in Cairo, is inhabited and haunted by a dream: he sees angels picking all the jasmine in Basra. Determined to decipher the meaning of this dream, he flips through the pages of an 8th century manuscript , The Great Book of the Interpretation of Dreams , which lists this vision. He discovers there that the author predicts this vision as the slow and disastrous disappearance of all the intellectuals of …
With this poignant story, Yazbek writes about the magnificence and the cruelty of life, the destruction of worldly beauty and kindness, but also its resilience, and the elevation of the soul. Here, Yazbek goes back to one of her favorite topics: the transformation of the underprivileged rural communities of Syria, but also their unique relationship to nature and its elements.
Hisham Al Khattab is Yazid ibn Abih. At least he thinks he is. Some 13 centuries separate the two, but in the despaired mind of Hisham Al Khattab, and through the magical power of dreams, Hisham is Yazid.
The narrator, a zoo keeper, his girlfriend Nonna, and the giraffe (by far the zoo’s most popular figure), form a strange, yet happy family. This is their story, unfolding in the margins of the brutal Syrian war. Until violence can no longer be escaped.
Depicted as a story of curiosity and lust in the German press, Selamlik, autobiographic novel, tells the journey of Furat from his home in Syria, to Sweden, via Turkey. A surprising bitter-sweet homo-erotic tale.
Khaled Khalifa, in an interview with Marianne Meunier for La Croix, March 10, 2023
Originally from Aleppo, Khaled Khalifa lives in Damascus, which he never wanted to leave despite the conflict. He reads there alone, saddened to no longer be able to discuss his reading with his relatives, most of whom have left.
A million lives later, I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country, Iraq
Sinan Antoon, for The Guardian, March 19th, 2023
In early 2003, I was living in Cairo and carrying out research for my doctoral dissertation on a famous Iraqi poet who lived in my hometown, Baghdad, in the 10th century. But I was increasingly anxious about the Baghdad of the 21st century.
By Guirado for Mare Nostrum, January 3, 2023
It all starts with a dream. A haunting and poetic dream in which angels descend from heaven to pick jasmine from the gardens of Basra – present-day Basra in Iraq. This dream continually monopolizes the mind of Hishâm Khattab who, after brilliant studies in geology which did not lead to any professional opportunities, now earns his living by reselling old books.
By Richard Jacquemond, for Le Monde des Livres, February 9th, 2023
Hisham, who lives off the antique book trade, is haunted by a dream. He sees himself alive, under the name of Yazid Ibn Abihi, in Basra (or Basra, name of the second city of Iraq, located in the south of the country), at the end of the first century of the Hegira, when this city was a major intellectual and religious center of the nascent Islamic empire.
