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New Writing from the Arab World

Zaher Omareen

Jumaan Short

Jill Waters

New Writing from the Arab World: A Bedtime Story for Eid

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06/11/2015

A Bedtime Story for Eid

BBC Radio 4 - New Writing from the Arab World, A Bedtime Story for EidSearch BBC

By Syrian writer Zaher Omareen. A mother explains terrible events of the 1980s to her son.

By Syrian writer Zaher Omareen. A young boy returns home from a visit to the cemetery, and his mother begins to tell him some of the shared memories of their community.

A series bringing attention to contemporary short fiction from the Arab World. In A Bedtime Story for Eid, the Syrian writer Zaher Omareen draws on the collective memories of the 1982 Hama massacre, when the father of the current President Assad ordered his army to seek out and destroy any resistance in what was considered a troublesome city.

The translator, Alice Guthrie writes, "Zaher Omareen's tale takes us on a journey back to 1980s Hama, zooming in on some of the individual victims of the massacres and disappearances committed by the regime there, as told by a mother to her son. Between 10,000 and 40,000 people perished at the hands of Hafez al-Assad's forces in a 27-day massacre in 1982: such was the climate of fear that it has only ever been referred to - if at all - as The Events.

"As this story is told in the imagined voice of a Syrian mother talking to her child, pre-2011, there is much that is not spelled out ... the words 'massacre', 'arbitrary detention', or 'torture' don't appear here, but are signalled by euphemisms such as 'the Events', 'serving a sentence', or 'having medical needs'.

Other references include 'Tadmor' and the 'Palestine Branch', which are both prisons notorious for extreme torture; the 'Tadmor Events', as they're known in Syria, refers to a massacre of at least a thousand inmates inside the prison in 1980. And 'al-rush' - is a phrase derived from a firing mode on a Kalashnikov - "it's a vernacular term for a mass execution of residents marched out of their houses and shot as one in the street."

Written by Zaher Omareen
Translated by Alice Guthrie

Reader: Jumaan Short
Directed by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

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