Recently published by Nofal - Antoine's House, the novella "Sadf" by the Syrian writer Fadi Azzam takes the reader to a limbo where the living intertwine with the dead, memory collides with emptiness, and life sticks to the past as time hardens. The author invents a language that allows the narrator to cross to the other side, where consciousness decides to shatter to bear the tragedy. This novel seems, at first glance, to deal with the known, leaving those who enter it entangled in learning the “language of insomnia” to also be able to cross. It is an elegy and a satire for a country that is disintegrating; it cannot live, nor does it know how to die.
The publisher's blurb states:
Rasim Abdul Ghani awakens to a shattered body and a torn memory. There is no name to rescue him from the void, nor a past to piece together his fragmentation; he is merely a number that has just emerged from some detention center, having lost his memory. A woman cares for him, but we do not know her. He struggles to recognize his former self and discovers he was a university professor. He returns to the college, but a colleague expels him on the grounds that he is one of the traitors. One evening at home, he needs diesel and knocks on the door of his refugee neighbor. The neighbor gives him an unsigned manuscript, authored only by a "former martyr." The manuscript is written in a strange, incomprehensible language. It is the “language of insomnia” invented by the writer Fadi Azzam. It is a language from the other world, in which the author recounts what he saw there, and in which martyrs speak of their stories.
In his journey to uncover his truth, Rasim discovers that regaining memory is not necessarily a form of salvation, for sometimes forgetting is a mercy.
Fadi Azzam – a novelist and journalist from Sweida, southern Syria. He has published novels and texts translated into several languages, including "Sarmada" and "House of Hudd," both of which reached the longlist for the Arab Novel Prize. He works in cultural writing and the production of programs and documentaries. Sadf is his second novel from Nofal.
From the atmosphere of the novella "Sadf":
I will try to confess a secret that dwells within the emptiness of my small grave. In that battle in which I (was martyred, died, lost life...) – all names that hold no value now – the living try to impose upon us, sometimes to honor us and let other lives join us, and other times by stripping it from us, calling us dead or stamping us with that strange phrase: “met his fate.”