Poetry

He came early with the news:

the best of Khindif, full-grown

and young combined, is dead.

In “Good Morning, War,” my mother, who didn’t believe in her death, is the main narrator, speaking from the grave. The shock of my mother’s death, in which I also didn’t believe, and the shock of the fall of my country and its continued destruction, drove me write to hold on to our humanity, so that war victims don’t become numbers.

Raheem also wrote political and literary theory, but he believed in the role of the novel as a tool of cultural enlightenment; this was the subject of his final tweet. 

Society. Brother,

I don’t know what to make of this word,

through I cross the distance between my bedroom and the kitchen

without feeling it at all.

“I worked on the idea of fear because people in Syria — or any other country that’s under such a regime — are not only afraid of the regime, they are afraid of being afraid. It’s a condition that precedes the fear, meaning people are afraid because they are going to be afraid, and I worked from that point.”

“The novel portrays an inward view of the Syrian Civil War tragedy; the author takes the reader on a trip around Damascus, trudging down the memory lanes and presenting the psychological conflicts amid the shattered reality of place and society – marking an important addition to the Syrian Literature, with a unique use of narrative tools and vocabulary construction.”

“From above, it isn’t possible to see inside the houses, to recognize the lives of the inhabitants, their struggles over the little things and the big things, their movements getting slower and slower all the time. From above, the burnt fields and bewildered animals look more like an abstraction.”