Status Updates From وحدها شجرة الرمان

I cannot wake up from this endless nightmare of wakefulness. Some people go to work behind a desk on which papers are piled. Others operate machinery all day. My desk is the bench of death. The Angel of Death is working overtime, as if hoping for a promotion, perhaps to become a god. I walk down the street and look at people’s faces and think Who among them will end up on the bench next for me to wash?

I took two steps inside and went to the left where the book stacks used to stand. I felt a pang in my ribs when I saw heaps of ash everywhere. [...] I climbed back over the mound of rubble and felt the wreckage I’d been carrying inside me mount even higher, suffocating my heart.

I learned to be patient, to crawl into her heart instead of storming it impulsively.

Novels inhabit a liminal space between the real and the imaginary. The experience of translating my own novel has allowed me to return to that space and to inhabit it once again, temporarily. This time, however, the characters spoke English. Their lives (and deaths) did not change at all, but they said a few words here and there differently and left a few others unsaid.