From Jan Dost’s Award-winning ‘Safe Corridor’
Safe Corridor, winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize, is now out from Dar Arab Books. Booth said of the novel, over email:
The novel is unusual in focusing on Kurdish communities during the Syrian civil war; there are very good nonfictional analyses of this facet of the war, in the context of the longer history of Syrian Kurds, but not so much fiction as far as I know. And, this narrative is told from a child’s point of view—it is tragically universal in focusing on children as witnesses to the horror of war, and victims of it. The biggest challenge was translating Kamo’s young-teenager voice; he is precocious but he is not an adult. I became very fond of this tragic, brave, insouciant character as I tried to give him voice in English.
Pale Chalk
An excerpt from Safe Corridor
By Jan Dost
Translated by Marilyn Booth
On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down. The drops hitting the tent walls sounded exactly like the noise he remembered hearing in Afrin: volleys of bullets that rained down solidly for two days before the town fell to occupation.
Lying in bed, ready for sleep and just beginning to slide into its welcome sweetness, Kamiran sensed something odd going on. A change was coming over his body. He felt his feet going rigid: that was the first sign. Next, he had a peculiar sensation: that he was losing his toes, as if they were bits of chalk breaking off and dropping with a thud onto the mattress. Almost immediately, he felt something similar—and equally odd—happening to his legs. They were stiffening; and they seemed to have fused together.
Slowly—deliciously—the feel of it crept up over his body. Thighs to buttocks and then to his penis, as though it were just another little segment of hard chalk. His belly, his chest. He felt the fingers on both hands plop heavily onto the mattress, although they didn’t make a sound. He could make sense of what was happening, he thought, only if he saw it as a horrifically frightening nightmare. And yet the boy felt no fear. He raised his head off the mattress—at least, he lifted it as much as his neck would allow, since at that very moment the stiffness had reached that far up his body.
Observing these changes to his own body engrossed him and chased his sleepiness away. He didn’t feel particularly unhappy about what seemed to be happening. Indeed, somehow, this transformation gave him a feeling of enjoyment more blissful (as far as he could remember) than any he had ever known. Yes, he was aware that it was out of the ordinary to feel such intense pleasure at what appeared to be a conversion of his very flesh into hard calcified matter. But the strongest emotion he felt was a fervent hope that what he was going through right now would not come to an end—a longing that time would stop here, that he could hold onto these moments of gratification, grasp them with his fingers (even if his fingers had fallen off, like pieces of school chalk, to disappear into his bed).
In truth, matters had begun to take this strange course earlier, when they were still moving from place to place: he and his mother Layla, who never spoke now; his little brother Alan; and his Uncle Ali the bouzouki player. The four of them had left the town of Sharraan, which was not far from the Turkish border. They were fleeing the militias, wave after wave of detachments advancing on the heels of the Turkish Army. They took shelter with another brother of his mother’s, Uncle Naasan, who lived in Afrin City and was quite a lot older. But then the divisions of the Turkish occupation forces reached Afrin and so they picked up and left again, in a great hurry. That was on the 17th of March 2018. At that time—and before that time, too—tens of thousands of civilians were on the run from the hellish Turkish bombardments. They were every bit as afraid of the militias who had allied themselves with Turkey, the ones playing their part in the wholesale strafing of the entire Afrin District. And so it ended, in blood and fire: the era of self-rule proclaimed by a Kurdish party in the north of Syria. The Turks saw that project of self-determination as an immediate and existential threat to their national security—and so could not allow it to continue.
The earliest signs of Kamiran’s metamorphosis—which would take less than a month to complete—appeared when they were | 11 | stopped near the military checkpoint outside the town of Kimar, on the way to the famous al-Ziyara Crossing. The tractor pulling them came to a dead stop. Kamiran and his family were packed into an open trailer along with several other evacuees, including a pregnant woman. Driving the tractor was Ali, whom everyone knew as Ali the Bouzouki Player, Kamiran’s uncle. It wasn’t the roadblock that stopped them. Ali stopped because that poor miserable woman went into labour suddenly, just before they reached the Crossing. It was clear that she was in a lot of pain.
On that same day, Uncle Ali discovered that the skin on his nephew’s neck was so desiccated that deep cracks had appeared. He didn’t know anything about the disease called calcinosis cutis. He didn’t know that it targets the layers of skin just below the body’s surface, nor did he know that various things can cause it, among them an excess of calcium in the blood. Neither did young Kamiran give this change any serious attention. It must be a simple ailment of sorts, such that he joked with his uncle about his scaly skin. ‘I’m worried I’m turning into a fish.’
Day by day, the patches of afflicted skin widened and lengthened. His fingers grew as stiff and dry as firewood. The skin on his legs, neck, back, and buttocks, and even his penis, dried out. What was truly odd was that despite the skin condition, he didn’t feel any pain. For that reason, the camp doctor, who worked for the Kurdish Red Crescent, didn’t concern himself much with the case. He just handed Kamiran some painkillers whose only effect was to enflame the sarcasm of the concerned uncle and his sister’s son.
By the time the dry-skin condition had more or less engulfed his body, Kamiran’s yearning to write something had grown more pressing. But there was no proper place to write, and the surroundings | 12 | were not hospitable. Instead, he began dictating his thoughts to his pale piece of chalk. He told her about everything that had happened during these years of war, across its harsh months, through its long days. He told her the secrets he had hid from his family. He gave vent to his feelings and to his fears: to everything that was apt to fill the mind of a boy on the verge of his teens living through the terrors of an insane war in a country where reason had lost its ability to steer the course of anything or anyone.
Now, as the later stage of Kamiran’s transformation was drawing to a close on this rainy night, to the staccato sound of hard raindrops, his mother—forever silent—was asleep. He could hear her breathing, and it comforted him. His brother, who had been in agony all day from the intense pain in his hands and chest caused by the burns he had gotten that morning, was turning over restlessly on his mattress, muttering and grunting. And meanwhile, his Uncle Ali, the youthful bouzouki player, was sitting with his mates in a tent somewhere out there, some distance from their own, plucking his small lute and chatting the evening away as he usually did.
On this night, the boy was alone with his trial. He was on his own as the astonishing changes made their way across his body. Alone with this harsh pleasure that buffeted him like gusts of cold wind hitting his skin, from the tips of his toes to the parting on his scalp.
Kamiran wasn’t thinking about what would happen in the next few moments—or about the fix he would be in when this small family discovered his condition. He didn’t think about his mother, who would wake up the next morning and come to lift the blanket off him, ready to give his shoulder a shake as she always did, summoning him to breakfast. He did not think about his brother Alan who might come and sit next to his head, pleading with him to undo the dressings covering his burns and put on new ones, or letting him know that the burns weren’t hurting quite so much now. He was not musing about his uncle, either—Uncle Ali, who might come into the tent at any moment, cursing the camp and Turkey and the war and the Party, as he had been doing ever since he came to live in this ill-omened place.
By now, he couldn’t even see the ghostly shapes that had lived with him, a constant presence in his mind, since before this sequence of events had run their course and turned him into a giant length of chalk, 160 centimetres long. Inside of him, so very much had changed. Now he belonged to a different world, one where time didn’t matter—or at least, time didn’t seem to be like any of the other forces of nature. At the end of the day, here he was, an inanimate object, a huge piece of chalk inert beneath the heavy blanket, listening to the sound of the endless splats of rain that the storm relentlessly hurled against the matte-white outer skin of the tent.
Excerpt from Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated by Marilyn Booth (DarArab, 2025). © DarArab for Publishing & Translation 2025. Reproduced by permission. Available from InPress Books and Amazon, as well as select bookshops.
Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan. Jan Dost has published five novels in Kurdish and eleven in Arabic (as well as four volumes of poetry). Translations of his fiction have appeared in Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Polish, Persian, and Italian. Almost all of his Arabic novels have appeared in Kurdish and vice versa. His Kurdish novel Mirnåme (2008), for instance, appeared in Turkish, and Persian; the Arabic novel ‘Ashiq al-mutarjim (2013) has appeared in Italian, Kurdish, and Turkish; the Arabic novel Bas akhdar yughadir Halab (2019) has been translated into Spanish and Kurdish. Safe Corridor is his first novel to appear in English. Jan Dost has received numerous awards: in Syria (Short Story Prize, 1992); in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Hussein Arif Award for Creativity, 2014; Mem u Zin Literature Festival Award, 2021); in Germany (Kurdish Poetry Prize, 2012); and in Austria (Sharafnama Award for Kurdish Culture, 2021). He has also translated literary works from Kurdish and Persian into Arabic, and from Arabic into Kurdish, and has participated in translation workshops as well as speaking at conferences and book fairs. Since 2000, Jan Dost has resided in Germany and is a German citizen. His most recent work in Arabic is al-Asir al-faransawi (2022).
Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. At Oxford, she held the endowed Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professorship for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, 2015-23; at Edinburgh, she held the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2009-15. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2021). She has in recent years been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; l’Institut d’études avancées, Paris; Neubauer Collegium for Society and Culture, University of Chicago; and visiting professor, l’EHESS, in addition to numerous earlier research fellowships. Safe Corridor is the twenty-first volume of Arabic fiction that Booth has rendered into English. Other recent translations include Omani author Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger; Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s Silken Gazelles; and Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost. Her translation of Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. In addition to other novels by Alharthi and Barakat, her translations include novels by Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Alia Mamdouh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Latifa al-Zayyat, Somaya Ramadan, and others, as well as a memoir by Nawal al-Saadawi and three short story collections. Her first venture into translating nineteenth-century fiction, Alis al-Bustani’s 1891 novel Sa’iba is forthcoming with Oxford World’s Classics.