Songs for the darkness

My grandmother Shahira, my mother died while asking: What if the locusts return again to eat our provisions and kill our children? My grandmother Yasmin suffered internal bleeding that left her a lifeless corpse after my mother’s birth. My mother Leila lived her life in stories and then disappeared when I was nineteen, like a grain of salt in the sea. And I, Oumhan, live without my son Karim. His father snatched him from my arms on his seventh birthday. This is how we women of the Dali family are: we leave, or we stay silent, or go crazy, or simply die too soon like cherry blossoms. We are before history in its feminine depth, and therefore it becomes not only more real but also more fluid and poetic. We are thus before another song, before the very depth that has become a hymn, and time that has found in pain and hope its context and meaning. Abbas Baidoun, Lebanese poet and writer. Iman Hmeidaneh, Lebanese novelist, journalist, and researcher. She taught creative writing at several universities around the world. She was selected as a member of the judging panel for the Arabic Booker Prize in 2022. Her works have been translated into several languages. Published by Dar Al Saqi, “Fifty Grams of Paradise,” which won the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel in 2016.