Description:
Winner, English PEN Award
From the late Palestinian poet Mohammad Al-As'ad comes a chronicle of the vanished village from which he was expelled, its geography, and its people.
Children of the Dew is the late poet Mohammad Al-As'ad's first venture into literature beyond poetry. Genre bending poetic prose, the work centres on the expulsion of the author and his family from Umm al-Zinat, a Palestinian Mt. Carmel village in the Haifa district, upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Moving between the author's childhood memories, the villager's stories, and the later exile to eastern Palestine and eventually southern Iraq, Children of the Dew is a haunting poetic representation in magic realist style of the Nakba, the event which continues to structure the Palestinian quest for freedom and liberation in historic Palestine and in exile today.
For readers of Mahmoud Darwish.
Review Quotes: 'Written in 1991, Children of the Dew tells a memory that is searching for itself, finding it itself; poetry, resurrecting the images and words, offers [the author] possibilities that History tried to erase' - Isabelle Avran, Le Monde Diplomatique