A Land Unlike Dreams

Bashir Al-Baker

"From the Syrian Jazeera region, with its unique nature and mountains perched on superstition and magic like Mount Sinjar, this autobiography unfolds with a unique poetic narrative breath, attempting to revive a marginalized history of Al-Jazeera, recounting the story of the culturally absent people of that region, and shedding light on its figures such as shepherds and the extraordinary Yezidi character. In an enjoyable contrast, it moves towards cities in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and in Europe and the Arab world, observing social and cultural features in those countries.

By moving between trains, airports, and cafes, and through meetings with people and evoking portraits of political and artistic figures such as Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Darwish, the writer records his testimony on events he lived or experienced, recalling the political history of the region, and touching upon communism, Nasserism, Ba'athism, the 1967 war, and the collapse of unity between Syria and Egypt... in a comprehensive vision of this history in the sixties and seventies.
By adopting fictional narrative, and moving from the particular to the general, the novel elevates narration to documenting a cultural, social, and political history.

In this writing experience, which links autobiography and collective history, there are chapters of a traveler's story who discovered after a long journey that lands are not like dreams. They might be taller, or on the contrary, closer to nightmares.

Bashir Al-Baker – Syrian writer and poet (born in Al-Hasakah, 1956). Winner of the Arab Journalism Award (2008). Former editor-in-chief of "Al-Araby Al-Jadeed" and one of its founders, and participated in establishing "Bayt Al-Shi'r" magazine in Abu Dhabi. He has political writings and poetic works, and his poems have been translated into French, English, and Turkish."