Youssef Fadel

طائر أزرق نادر يحلق معي

Hayaat alfarashat. Ediz. araba

Jonathan Smolin

A Novel

Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me

Spring, 1990. After years of searching in vain, a stranger presses a scrap of paper into Zina's pocket. It's from Aziz: the man who vanished the day after their wedding almost two decades ago. It propels Zina on a final quest for a secret desert jail in southern Morocco, where her husband crouches in despair, dreaming of his former life. Fadel pays powerful testament to a terrible period in Morocco's history, known as 'the years of cinders and lead,' and masterfully evokes the suffering inflicted on those who supported the failed coup against King Hassan II in 1972.

A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me

Alexander Elinson

Hassan ekes out a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through satirical sketches critical of Morocco's rulers. Yet, when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost.Could his estranged father, close to power as the King's private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again?With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco. He evokes a system whose brutality emanates from the top, and is felt and reproduced in the countless uneven power relations of the people living underneath.

Youssef Fadel

Books

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