Wilderness of Fever

Author: Ibrahim Nasrallah

With your tired eyes, you were observing the movement of darkness. Was it the movement of darkness, or the movement of light? Mysterious, soft, moving specks of blackness. You could distinguish in it, perhaps you could perceive something moving within it, something resembling clarity, but it wasn't light. It resembled light but wasn't daytime. It resembled daytime but wasn't the sun. You pulled the cover tightly around your body, your chest, your feet. As for your head, it was outside the warm space in the infinite ocean of the unknown. Life in your eyes, and the chambers of blood burning in your forehead, and the sea flowing beneath your clothes, small gentle waves, after the earthquakes in your bones and cells had subsided, you remembered Fatima. You almost thought you had known her in a land other than this one, and that the abaya that had fallen from her head and shoulders that day was this long night that stood between you and her, perhaps it was the night. With your trembling hand, which grew colder when you took it out from under the covers, you tried to grasp the edge of the night and cast the darkness away, but your hands returned empty, their joints almost solidifying like ice, and breaking." In his narratives, Ibrahim Nasrallah creates a terrifying imaginary geography that obliterates history, identity, and time, just as it obliterates the duality of reality and illusion or dream. There, a person does not possess a personal history or a distinct identity; indeed, and tragically, they don't even possess their own death. In this nightmare novel, language explodes, fragmented, tense, audacious, piercing through the pages like burning spears in a world where heroism, in the classical sense, is still possible.