Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa continues in his new novel No Knives in this City’s Kitchens what he begun in his previous masterpiece, In Praise of Hatred (2006) — excavating contemporary Syrian society’s memory.

He starts from what one family has gone through in Aleppo, which he describes as the punished city, while In Praise of Hatred focused on the distortions made by death squads or the “Party Action Squads” in the psyches of its members during the events in Hama in the 1980s. The novel explores the price paid by Syrians for living parallel to the life of the ruling party for near half a century.

“U.S. Warns Egypt’s Generals Against Jeopardizing ‘Second Chance’ at Democracy.

“The armed forces remained committed to what it considered the legitimacy of the ballot box until this presumed legitimacy moved against its own purpose,” General el-Sisi said. “The Egyptian people were concerned that the tools of the state could be used against them. The armed forces had to make a choice, seeing the danger of deepened polarization.”

The general said that the military had offered Mr. Morsi the option of a referendum on whether he should stay in power, but that the deeply unpopular president had refused.

Painful as it was to see the democratic process interrupted so soon after the revolution that overthrew the longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the military’s action was necessary.”

Samar Yazbek, at Dartington’s Ways With Words: “We are going to need multiple revolutions. We have had dictators and now we have extremists. But we have the backbone to our society that means there could be a great democracy. We just have to keep fighting.”

http://www.hayfestival.com/p-5748-samar-yazbek-talks-to-jo-glanville.aspx

The symbolism is striking given that the play, which was written in 1994, in the time of Hafez El-Assad, clearly announces what we today observe on either side of the Mediterranean. One thinks of the Arab spring, but also, if one carefully listens to Wannous, one thinks of all the sexual and financial scandals which happen at the same time a little more to the North.

For the first time, an Arabic work makes its way into the repertoire of the Comédie française: Rituals of a metamorphosis, by Saadallah Wannous. In the long history of the House of Molière, which, this year, celebrates its 333rd birthday, this is an important event.