Novel
التنور... غيمة لباب البحرين
Not translated into English
Fareed Ramadan · 1994
Synopsis
The author's first novel, devoted to the Huwala, those Arabs who had lived on the Persian shore of the Gulf before returning to settle on its Arab shores. The book follows their transformations from the Persian coast to their settlement on the Arab side, in Bahrain, and asks what founds the identity of a society made up of families who came from elsewhere. It opens the great undertaking of Ramadan's work, the history of the migrations that peopled the island.
Context
The novel appeared in 1994 in the Kalimat series of the Bahrain Writers' Society, ten years after a first collection of short stories, and was reissued in Canada in 2014. The author's subsequent novels take up the same inquiry for other migrations, coming from southern Iraq, Oman, eastern Arabia, Balochistan and Africa; one of them received the Ministry of Information's first novel prize.
Who it is for
A novel in Arabic, not translated; it will interest anyone who wants to understand the diversity of origins in Bahrain.
Prizes and reception
The book opens the work of one of the Gulf's leading novelists, on the question of identities.