Where the sun is born

Author's name: Al-Habib Al-Sa'ih

Like this, without any specific trigger, perhaps it was that you thought the coffee was milk. It grieved you to imagine yourself at the age of two, stumbling crying, chasing your mother, then getting up laughing through your tears because she bent down to carry you to her bosom. The anguish of a morning like this is more painful for a lost soul like yours. So why is it that when you come to remember what made you happy, entertained, and delighted, only the trials, disappointments, and failures that marred your life appear in your mind? You are aging. Your state at the end of life saddens you. It is not the sadness that afflicted you at thirty, forty, or fifty. It is the sadness after sixty, now, for the final loss, the final bereavement, and the final losses. And because it is sadness for yourself, it is the most bitter of all. The distance between you and your end has narrowed completely, and you are no longer able by any means to extend it even an inch. To die means annihilation and the end of the world for you.

Without your disturbed sleep, caused by your chronic anxiety and existential doubt that keeps eating you up, you are left with fragments of a miserable past that you chew like gum, in which your personal history makes you ashamed of the time of your life that has perforated what has remained of your memory!

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This novel is a memoir about death, the cruelty of orphanhood and the injustice of illiteracy, the scars of fear and the ordeal of displacement during wars, constant displacement to nowhere, and paths that haunt those who travel them, leaving one with chronic anxiety, existential doubt, memory loss, and failure in love. A memoir in which the individual intersects with the homeland, about defeat at the hands of the establishment, and extreme isolation within the shell of a miserable past and a shameful history.

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