Sunny days

Meral Al-Tahawi constructs a bridge between the East and West with complete knowledge and depth, depicting a highly tragic panorama of one of the fundamental questions of the migrant's life in our era. She chooses for them a geographical location that is the most suitable for this question: America. Al-Tahawi uses the psychological map of her characters, their previous social backgrounds even before reaching the land of exile, carefully selecting their daily details. To shed light on a life we did not know, and on a marginalized group that everyone, contrary to reality, thinks is the successful group. The author gives these marginalized individuals in Western society a voice, and digs deeply into questions that concern them, creating a fictional world that is their reality before the narrative turns into a cohesive story recounting their stories. Meral Al-Tahawi constructs her narrative through a cunning technique resembling the movement of memory, going back and forth, from a miserable life to a life no less miserable, with another drawing in the background of the land of dreams that has turned into a nightmare. "Bright Sun Days" embodies the question of the contemporary human regarding personal identity, and is an ideal model of the confusion of migration, but it is, above all, the vision of the outsider who rebels against the new reality, yet creates a style of adaptation to its harshness. - Ahmed Abdel Latif