Oh Mary

The Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoun in his third novel addresses the thorny questions faced by minorities in current Iraq. Some of the Iraqi people's pains, and what they provoke in questions about the past and present, that is, between memory and the present. The novel "Ya Maryam" was published by Al-Jamal Publications as part of distinguished Arab novels along with other writings of Antoun. A brief about the novel "Ya Maryam": Two contradictory visions of two characters from an Iraqi Christian family, brought together by the country's circumstances under one roof in Baghdad. Youssef, a lonely man in old age, refuses to leave the house he built and lived in for half a century to emigrate. He remains clinging to threads of hope and memories of a happy past alive in his memory. Mahi, a young woman, whose life was torn apart by sectarian violence, which displaced her family and separated her from them, so she lives as a refugee in her homeland, and as a resident in Youssef’s house, waiting with her husband for the time to emigrate from a homeland she feels does not want her. The events of the novel take place in one day, where individual and collective memory narratives intersect with reality, and hope clashes with fate, when an event changes the lives of the two characters forever. The novel raises bold questions from its characters about a Iraq that once was, while another tries to escape from the current Iraq. Quotes from the book "Ya Maryam": All I want is to live somewhere where I am like others. To walk, go out, and come in without being pointed at or reminded that I am different. Is there an Iraqi who does not love the palm tree? I believe that those who do not love the palm do not love life or humans. How much does a human resemble a palm tree, in it there is the male and the female. The palm is not just a palm, but a whole life, intertwined with the earth beneath it and everything in it, with the sky around it and the air it breathes with all that it contains.