Emily Daoud Nasrallah (Arabic: 廿賲賷賱賷 丿丕賵丿 賳氐乇 丕賱賱賴; n茅e Abi Rached [兀亘賷 乇丕卮丿]; 6 July 1931 鈥� 13 March 2018) was a Lebanese writer and women's rights activist.
She graduated from the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University) with an associate degree in arts in 1956. Two years later, she obtained a BA in education and literature from the American University of Beirut. She published her first novel "Birds of September" in 1962; the book was instantly acclaimed, and won three Arabic literary prizes. "Flight Against Time" was Nasrallah's first novel to be translated into English, published by the Canada-based Ragweed Press. Nasrallah became a prolific writer, publishing many novels, children's stories, and short story collections, touching on themes such as family, village life, war, emigration, and women's rights. The latter was a subject she has maintained support for throughout her life.
Radwan and Um Nabeel live in a small village, Jarat Al-Sindyan, Lebanon. Their four children all left for Canada over the past two decades, but have now booked tickets for their parents to visit them on Prince Edward Island. The flight sets of various memories for Radwan. Three of his siblings had fled to New York during WW1 and he had lost all contact with them. Radwan and Um Nabeel arrive and find their children and grandchildren living a very different life to their own. As the trip unfolds, civil war breaks out in Lebanon and the two elderly parents much choose between staying in safety with their children or returning to their roots. Sparsely written, I enjoyed the descriptions of life in Lebanon. I have vague memories from the early eighties of bombed Beirut and more recently, the explosion that damaged a large part of the city and it鈥檚 heart-breaking to consider how many lives were lost and disrupted and the cost to Lebanon as young people immigrated. The author does seem to deliberately avoid discussing the causes of the civil war and the potential allegiances with the various participants that Radwan and his family may have felt. This may be to the detriment of the overall narrative, but creates a universal Lebanese rather than a specific person in Radwan. The story speaks to some of the universal elements of the immigrant experience 鈥� alienation between those that remain and those that leave as traditions are abandoned, the importance of first generation immigrants to 鈥渇it in鈥� and show that they will contribute to their adopted country, second generation immigrants who know they don鈥檛 quite fit in either place.
non le avrebbe detto: gli alberi del vostro paese sono diversi... i nostri si rifiutano di vivere altrove.
Romanzo dalle tematiche importanti: migrazione, scontro generazionale, integrazione, guerra e memoria. Intenso, anche se lo stile non mi ha convinto fino alla fine.
[L鈥檈dizione ha fin troppi refusi per un libro che non raggiunge le 200 pagine...]
A beautiful book. Mrs Nasrallah perfectly paints the conflicts (internal and external) that accompany displacement and migration with a sense of heart and empathy. The book moves slowly but surely and interrogates the question of homeland and what it means to be and feel at home.
Very good ending, and an even better beginning. The middle however sagged and dragged. And became whining at times in it valid effort to express the abundance of feelings of emigrants and those left behind losing much family and friends through no fault of their own.
This book was originally published in Beirut in 1981. It is as relevant today as it was then. It is an excellent portrayal of the experience of Lebanese immigrants to Canada (a very different experience, it seemed to me, from that of the Lebanese who have come to the US). More than anything, though, it is the story of Radwan, an elderly Lebanese villager who chooses to return to war-torn Lebanon after visiting his grown (and very successful) children in Canada, and the disastrous consequences of this decision. The story provides the reader with a cast of engaging characters and a perhaps new insight into the immigrant experience that resonates powerfully in the present-day circumstances. At times, I was moved to tears; at other times, I found myself laughing out loud.
Such a beautiful book that catches the tone of country, home, family and identity; how this stretches and changes when some family members leave to begin elsewhere. How our hearts hold them with such intensity and how our hearts hold us to home and homeland. The translation is done in such a way as to honor the style of arabic speech, allowing an anglophone reader to appreciate a more poetic and at times halting syntax. And all the while bringing me, the reader, close to the narrator.