The country that only asks for its children to die is a dead country. The children who knew nothing but it, and would not think of leaving it, are hunting them down individually, so that devastation will be a clear future, and so that the thought of surviving the people’s experience of major battles for the sake of freedom, justice and change, is thinking. Very simple.
* * *
Time involves a new time emerging from its womb, and lessons are shed on its path
The ancient stories and the stories that were an example for an entire generation, and we who witnessed the violent moment of crossing were the bulwark of the old time and the living scepter in the hand of the new time, and for this reason we had to be divided and filled with deep cracks. Before we triumph over a part of us, and what died within us settles at the bottom of the painful times whose madness we witnessed.
"Sophie Perrin" is a French woman who is fond of speed and hates stability. Her sadness is sudden but authentic, her desires are sudden but stem from existential anxiety, and her questions are many but they hide deep wounds.
And Hanifa Kamal, the stubborn Kurdish girl, lived a miserable childhood in Aleppo, which ended in painful torture when her father was forced to choose between two wives, and the decision was to divorce her mother and move them away to a distant village.
There is an “umbilical cord” connecting the two, which will only be revealed with “Paola,” who decides to travel from Paris to Aleppo.
In her novel, Maha Hassan takes us to the world of the Kurds in Syria, with all its rituals, customs and traditions, highlighting their suffering in a country in which they live, but which is cruel to them. It moves between two cultures: the West and the East, and in doing so it raises the question of identity, its true component, and the question of belonging and its meaning.
