Hajer

In the novel Hajar, Abdul Razzaq Qarnah takes the family as a nucleus through which he reveals conflicts between paternal duty, personal choice, and submission to herd culture, and moves to broader topics about freedom and control, with colonialism paving the way for independence, then to the stagnation of African socialism. It deals with lost dreams that shatter on the rocks of European racism, and the suffering and alienation of migrants, and the extraction of the concept of homeland from their being. An amazing novel, a precise and sensitive exploration of how memory consoles us and necessarily frustrates us. This novel addresses the cases of absence that gradually lead to the erosion of the spirits of all its characters in a poignant and painful manner.