Jabbour Douaihy – författare

A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War. Firefly paints a searing portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of its simple, yet perplexing, protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam's national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema, instantly fell for him and agreed to raise him as their own, as a Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents. When he is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. Unable to bear the confines of the classroom, he abandons college to explore the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place for his communist comrades, and he falls in love with Janan, the tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the city's bloody future. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam's apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs' Statue that bears witness to the city's most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he sees the corpses of the civil war's victims pile up. Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizam's adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child, Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks, can this glimmer of hope truly last?

The final work of an award-winning Lebanese novelist who died in 2021.

"Lluvia de junio" es la historia de un retorno a casa, desde América hasta el Líbano, que acaba convirtiéndose en la investigación de un crimen: Elia buscará encontrar las razones del "incidente", que es como llaman al atentado que en los años cincuenta mató a su padre y que a él lo obligó a marcharse. Pero tendrá que hacerlo a partir de recuerdos, fotografías y relatos contradictorios salidos de familias inmersas en una guerra continua. Con un manejo rico en registros e incontables voces; desde el estilo periodístico o las fichas policiales hasta el relato de su propia madre, o de algún familiar que participó en "el incidente", o de la vecina que oyó rumores sobre él, Douaihy presenta un collage de narraciones, todas ellas de una belleza excepcional, que se adentran en el "incidente", que lo muestran desde múltiples ángulos o que pasan a su lado sugiriéndolo, ampliando la incertidumbre que lo rodea. Douaihy hace gala en Lluvia de junio de un estilo contemporáneo, en ocasiones fragmentario, a veces sugiriendo más que mostrando, siendo capaz de moverse entre la delicadeza, la crudeza, la frialdad y lo pasional. Es, en definitiva, una obra que aleja definitivamente la literatura árabe de los clichés de lo exótico y la sitúa de lleno en la modernidad.