Our big house - Rabi'a Rihan

The girl who left her mother's embrace when she was small, to the point that she only recognized herself later, "Farida," daughter of the "Aqida" tribe, from whom she inherited some features in body and soul. She left with her father long ago, in the sixties of the last century; to join the big house with her grandfather "Kebour," uncles, and their children, far from her mother; to grow up within the household of her stepmother and her half-sisters. The scene’s tension, her sitting cross-legged on the back of a cart with pink cheeks, light eyes, and tousled hair from the wind, her long black dress with white polka dots, and her brown sandal from which her dry toes with visible scars peek out—scars from many collisions with stones, thorns, and the cedar of the Nabaq—are not signs of poverty, but rather indicators of her crossing the thresholds of play. A scene that still repeats in her dreams today, just as her fears recur from other dreams that never left her, a mixture of difficult questions in the baccalaureate exam, and her dilemma of not memorizing anything, and not being prepared to write and respond—especially in history and geography—making those days following those dreams just hours filled with tension, misery, and preoccupations. "Farida" and the big house with its secrets, legends, stories, and endless lustful desires, move within her and sink deeper whenever she manages to unravel the mysteries and understand her family more.