Songs for Darkness
Songs for Darkness
Songs for Darkness
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Description
Description
A novel that captures the collective pain of a nation through the stories of four Lebanese women. Only songs are able to comfort the soul in its darkness--but can anyone hear them? Iman Humaydan's saga recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment. Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away from her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion. These women's legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honoring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently preserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice--and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times.
About the Author
About the Author
Iman Humaydan Younes is a Lebanese novelist and freelance journalist. Her first novel Baa Mithl Beit Mithl Beirut (B for Bait for Beirut) received wide international acclaim and was translated into English, French and German. Wild Mulberries is her second novel. Her third novel, Haywat Okhra (Other Lives), will be released in Beirut in 2008 by Al Massar. Many of her short stories appeared in the cultural pages of Lebanese and Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Mulhak An Nahar, As Safir, Al Hasna'a, and Sayidati. Younes studied anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She wrote Neither Here Nor There: Narratives of the Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and conducted and published studies on environmental and development issues of post-war Lebanon. Michelle Hartman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her main area of research is Modern Arabic Literature, specializing in Lebanese women's writing. She is the translator (with Maher Barakat) of Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib's acclaimed novel Just Like a River. Michelle Hartman is a literary translator and professor of Arabic literature at McGill University. She has translated more than a dozen novels from Arabic to English including three other novels by Iman Humaydan, The Weight of Paradise, Other Lives, and Wild Mulberries. Her latest translation is A Long Walk from Gaza (Interlink, 2024). She has also written on Lebanese women and the Civil War in two co-authored volumes (with Malek Abisaab), Women's War Stories: The Lebanese Civil War, Women's Labor and the Creative Arts (Syracuse UP, 2022) and What the War Left Behind: Women's Stories of Resistance and Struggle in Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2024).
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
This novel is a vibrant, historical echo of both Lebanon and women's narratives, spanning the 20th century up until the year 1982. It is written in a style that is simultaneously psychological, critical, and poetic, and it touches us directly.--Diffah Thalitha
[The novel has] an epic quality, tracing the fates of its characters both within their individual lives and the collective history to which they belong.--Al-Quds Al-Araby
Humaydan scripts an authentic narrative that transcends fixed gender binaries and delves deeply into the repression, exclusions, and marginalization in societal and cultural consciousness. The novel embraces feminine origins, the unconditional giving of Mother Nature that plays a symbolic role as a source of generosity, creation, renewal, and continuity in the face of annihilation and oblivion.--The Independent (Arabic)
Iman Humaydan tells the stories of the women in one family as a way of narrating the story of a nation. Her narrative is built on paradoxes that begin with the title itself: how can one sing to darkness, oppression, loss, and defeat? The title Songs for the Darkness is a mirror of contradictions within society, especially in Beirut, a city that sings in the depths of its own collapse and dances even as it is being bombed.--Al-Majalla
"Four generations of Lebanese women, their lives spanning the 20th century, show a different side of that war-torn nation's story ... An affecting portrait of women's lives both in cosmopolitan Beirut and in rustic mountain towns."--Kirkus Reviews
Songs for Darkness is a testament to Humayda's ability to breathe such vivid life into characters that readers feel as if they personally know them.--Literatur
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Interlink Books
Pub date:
2026-03-10
Length:
320 pages
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