It is a strange memory, the memory of a child whose grandmother brought her to her home on the island of Majorca, due to the death of her mother, the illness of her nanny, and her father’s busyness. The war surprised her one holiday when she was fourteen. She accurately records in her memory everything she sees, including trees, rocks, sea, air, lights, colors, events, and the echoes of war far and near at the same time, and cowardice, betrayal, and treachery. She records feelings of hatred, revenge, fear, and love, her first love that is devoid of lust due to the absence of instinct. When she becomes a woman, and she is still playing with dolls, her doll is Black Gorogo, the chimney sweep that she brought from afar, from one of Andersen’s stories. So the times mix with each other, and the present moment calls for the near and distant past moment, and the latter may be longer than the first moment because it took its place in the memory and settled, and therefore parentheses, doubles, and abundant details abound without making one feel bored. Because all of this is written in a sublime language and in the style of a first-class writer: Anna Maria Matute.
The novel “The First Memory” won the Nadal Prize in 1959, which is one of the most prestigious and prestigious literary awards in Spain.
Qaddour’s text takes inspiration from the idea of confession from the text “Death and the Virgin” by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. Without that, the text begins to build its purely Syrian story, which revolves around an old relationship that comes back to life between an officer who was expelled by the ruling regime in peacetime and brought back in war, and “Jalal,” who was tortured in one of the days of peace. Syrian security detention centers, and among a former detainee who was tortured under the hands of the former. The two meet when their destinies intertwine through Jalal's nephew, the theater director concerned with directing the play "Death and the Virgin" in which Akram plays the role of the tortured, while the character of the tortured girl is played by "Haya, Soha Nader", Omar's lover. In the orbit of these relationships, Radwan, Hamza Hamada, the officer’s bodyguard, gets lost without knowing the horrors he will face after leaving the officer’s service to participate in the massacre of the twenty-first century.
