Farewell, Damascus

Ghada Samman's most recent novel, Farewell, Damascus is set in early 1960's Damascus - a city that now languishes in the grip of corruption and political oppression following the Baathist takeover in Syria. The book opens as Zain Khayyal, a university student and aspiring young writer, plots an early-morning escape from her house as her husband slumbers. Her mission: to get an illicit abortion, plans for which she's divulged to no one, and to announce that she wants out of her stifling marriage. A rebel and a trail-blazer par excellence, Zain draws down the wrath of polite society and the authorities, political and religious alike, as she challenges attitudes and practices that demean rather than dignify, and a ruling regime that sucks the life out of both oppressed and oppressor. As the plot unfolds, Zain finds her way as a student to a neighbouring country which, though it grants her the freedom, respect and appreciation she had lacked in her homeland, becomes a place of anguished exile. Armed with her accustomed humour, pathos and knack for suspense, Samman fearlessly tackles issues that roil societies across the globe to this day: the stigma that attaches to the divorced woman but not the divorced man; whether to choose a life partner for love, or for social status, prestige and material security; whether abortion is a crime or a means of forestalling needless undeserved suffering; lesbian intimacy as a declaration of freedom from male abuse and tyranny; rape as an instrument of humiliation and subjugation and unconditional acceptance as healing balm. Farewell, Damascus is both a paean to a beloved homeland and an ode to human dignity.

Ghada Samman is a Syrian novelist and poet born in 1942 in Beirut, Lebanon. She worked as journalist, broadcaster and translator; began writing fiction in the early 1960s. In order to prevent censorship, she established Ghada al-Samman Publications to publish her own works including short-story collection Your Eyes Are My Destiny (1962). She later moved to Paris after events in Beirut, wrote over 25 volumes of stories, verse, essays, drama and novels, including Beirut 1975 (1975), Beirut Nightmares (1976), The Incomplete Works of Ghada al-Samman (1978), Love in the Veins (1980), and The Square Moon: Supernatural Tales (1999); poetry includes I Declare Love on You! (1976-83) and I Testify Against the Wind (1987).Nancy Roberts is the translator of Ghada Samman's trilogy consisting of Beirut '75 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), for which she won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award, Beirut Nightmares (London: Quartet Books, 1997), and Night of the First Billion (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005). Roberts received a commendation from the judges of the 2008 Banipal Prize for her translation of Salwa Bakr's The Man from Bashmour (Cairo: AUC Press, 2007). Other literary translations include Naguib Mahfouz's The Mirage (AUC Press, 2008) and Love in the Rain (AUC Press, 2008), and Ibrahim Nasrallah's Time of White Horses (AUC Press, 2012), whose Arabic original was shortlisted for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.