Between Two Rivers, short stories in publishing by Samah Hakawati

Samah Hakawati has finished writing her collection of short stories entitled Between Two Rivers, which was supported in the fourth edition of Laboratory of Arts. The compilation will be published in collaboration with the Mamdouh Adwan House for Publishing and Distribution.

On her project, Samah writes:

“It has been a year since I arrived in Germany. My second exile has been heavy on me, I haven’t written a single word and every day I faced the fear of returning to writing, because everything that has happened is bigger than words. Yet a faith was growing inside of me, a faith that only stories are capable of building. A smaller homeland which we carry in our pocket, and tell our children about. For those who were born outside of this homeland, only tales are able to create an alive imaginary homeland in their minds. Their displacement is featured in their faces, tongues, and identities without being able to see any of its trails.

Stability has come back to my life only partially, and in my failed attempt to search for this total stability I discovered that a lot of women live in the same condition daily, they are here, and they are also there, and between here and there lies an ongoing river in the heart and soul.

In 2016, I wanted to apply for the grant of Laboratory of Arts by Ettijahat Independent Culture and the Goethe Institute, but I did not have any electronic tool that helped me to communicate or apply, because I lost all my belongings in my trip through to sea. I had no phone, no laptop, and no home, no writing table. I wrote everything in my head, and I waited until 2017 to apply, and those are the texts I wrote.

Between Two Rivers are stories which narrates the lives of women who lived between two rivers, between Syria and countries of asylum, the stories are concerned with the little details in those two lives, without aiming to compare, but it aims to paint a picture on the identity’s experience, asylum, waiting, and all that war has left in these women’s lives from disappointment, loss, escape, and love.

The text "Between Two Rivers" is an attempt to overcome the scene of the Great War, the frost of the border creeping a river of ice between the shoulders, in small details, in which the voice rises: "Yes, I lived between two rivers, but which one them lived in me?"

The stories are not concerned with the time of the events or with the name of the characters, as if they are flashes from at a time, and experiences involving many women, behind rivers. Some of them carried these rivers between their shoulders, some of them crossed it, or stood near it and just waited. It is not important who the woman there is, as much as finding herself in a story, so she smiles.

Samah Hakawati

Samah Hakawati was born in Hama, Syria in 1984. She has a master's degree with an excellent review on her master studies in Criticism and Comparative Studies: The Impact of Global Monetary Trends in the Critique of George Tarabishi.

She is now a PhD student in comparative literature in Germany, an Editor of Arabic Language at the Hermon Center for Contemporary Studies, and Dar Maysaloon for Publishing and Distribution. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal "Qalamoun".

She has published a number of short stories, scientific research and critical articles in several Arab newspapers and magazines.