⦉⦆ Invisible dragoman

Six Tales from the aftermath of the 1967 Defeat, by One of Palestine’s greatest writers… Now in English.

I wrote The Six-Day Sextet in the year that followed the June War and the Occupation that came in its wake. If they’d called it the Seven Days War, I would have made it a septet instead. I wanted to flip the word on its back so we, and they, could see the other face of this war’s tragedy. A prisoner, separated from his family for twenty years, wakes up one day to loud noises in the prison courtyard. Suddenly, he finds his entire family gathered there with him. After all the rupture and isolation, how is he supposed to feel about such a reunion? Can we even call it a reunion? When I gathered together the stories which I had published in Al-Jadid before the June War, it became clear that I was always preoccupied by this sense of separation and by various imaginings of reunion in whatever form they took. Separation and reunion—that is the topic of the stories I have collected in this book.

— Emile Habibi