Najwa Barakat – författare

ACCLAIMED NOVEL WITH COMPELLING TREATMENT OF GENDER ROLES, AND THE EFFECTS OF CIVIL WAR Najwa Barakat’s Oh, Salaam! (Yaa Salaam!, Arabic, 1999) tells the story of three friends whose lives are transformed by their participation in the inhuman civil war of some unnamed Arab country—and by their relationship with the novel''s anti-heroine, Salaam. Two of the friends live to see the arrival of peace, but they struggle to make a life for themselves in a society that has no need for former militiamen. Meanwhile, the death of the third, Salaam’s fiancé, remains a mystery until the closing pages of the novel. Some scenes recall No Exit as the three main characters use and torment each other. In others, their cruelty and coarse behavior is reminiscent of the antisocial counterculture of Clockwork Orange. Initially repulsed, the reader is drawn to discover whether any of the characters will succeed in finding love, making it rich, or getting out of the country alive. The fast-reading plot is shocking throughout, yet it generates a compelling fascination to observe the ultimate consequences of violence and sexual exploitation. The depictions of civil war, torture, oppressive gender roles, and sexual exploitation are challenging to read, but unfortunately they remain very relevant. Oh, Salaam! has been translated into Italian and French. Both the original and the translations alike have received the praise of critics for the novel''s compelling treatment of antisocial characters, gender roles, and the effects of civil war.

Modern-day Beirut is seen through the eyes of a failed writer, the eponymous Mister N. He has left his comfortable apartment and checked himself into a hotel – he thinks. Certainly, they take good care of him there. Meanwhile, on the streets below, a grim pageant: poverty, violence and fear.How is anyone supposed to write deathless prose in such circumstances? Let alone an old man like Mister N., whose life and memories have become scattered, whose family regards him as an embarrassment, and whose next-door neighbours torment him with their noise, dinner invitations, and inconvenient suicides. Comical and tragic by turns, his misadventures climax in the arrival in what Mister N. had supposed to be his “real life” of a character from one of his early novels – a vicious militiaman. Now, does the old writer need to arm himself . . . or just seek psychiatric help?

Between the alleys of the Bourj Hammoud and Nabaa areas in Beirut, Mr. Noun wanders, training himself to box with pain, in his attempt to overcome the cruelty of his mother Soraya, the defeat of his brother Saed, and the abandonment of Nada.Will his soul be purified when he throws himself into the city, tampering with its bowels, bringing its violence and rot out into the open?In fact, who do you think this Mr. Noon is, and what pushed him to the bottom?