Novel
Sabriya: Damascus Bitter Sweet
دمشق يا بسمة الحزن
Ulfat Idilbi · 1980
Synopsis
Sabriya: the teenager Salma opens the narrative at the death of her grandfather. She is attached to her aunt Sabriya, who never married and who nursed her paralysed father alone for ten years, and whose diary she discovers. In it Sabriya recounts the twenties, when Damascus rose against the French Mandate: her brother Sami drawn into the revolt, and her own secret love for Adil, a man involved in the movement, whom her family allows her neither to live nor to choose.
Context
The author was nearly seventy and had published only short stories when this first novel appeared, built on two women's voices, that of a niece and the diary of her aunt. In it she links the national struggle and that of women. The book became a widely followed television serial, then a film by Maher Kaddo produced by the Syrian state organisation in 2008. Peter Clark translated it into English under the name of its heroine, published by Quartet in 1995 and then by Interlink in 1999.
Who it is for
A novel in Arabic, of about two hundred and fifty pages in translation; the uprising is seen from inside a house, never from outside.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read and most translated work of its author, it became a success as a Syrian television serial and is often cited as a classic of Arab women's writing.