My father's shrine

Author's name: Tariq Imam

“My father sent for me, and I knew that today I would die… A strange saint, in a remote desert city, hundreds of years after his death, fathers a child with one of the city’s girls. Is this one of his “miracles,” or a crime of adultery? What does a son do who grew up torn between the sanctity of his father and the filth of his mother? And what will his final journey be like when the man whose command cannot be disobeyed calls him for a mysterious mission? A miraculous novel, embraced by a fictional city. “Jabal al-Kahl,” one of the cities of “One Thousand and One Nights,” appears to have no name on the state’s maps or official records. It arose in honor of barren women who came to the saint to achieve motherhood, and vowed to remain by his side if the miracle were to happen. Thus a city arose, perhaps all of whose children are descended from one father. "My Father's Tomb" is perhaps Tariq Imam's most fantastical and myth-driven novel, a means of deepening the thorny and unspoken questions of reality: the values ​​of patriarchal society, the traps of sanctity, popular religious discourse at its heightened confrontation with its official counterpart, and the individual's wanderings in search of self. "My Father's Tomb" is a novel of Arab questioning par excellence, re-deconstructing inherited culture in a text that blends reality with fantasy, narrated by poetry.