IPAF prize 2013,
original title: Sāq al-bāmbū
The plot of the novel oscillates between the Philippines and Kuwait at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is the first author’s work translated into Serbian, written as a novel in a novel, from the perspective of a boy of mixed Kuwaiti-Filipino descent in search of his place in society. A young Filipino girl comes to Kuwait to work as a maid in a prominent Kuwaiti family. She agrees to a sharia marriage to a landlady’s son, a student, without the knowledge of his authoritative mother, and when the bridegroom-to-be gives way before the pressure of the society, the young mother returns to the Philippines with her baby. The boy is given the Arab name Isa in Kuwait, is baptized in the Catholic Church in the Philippines and gets the name Jose, and at the age of adulthood he goes to Kuwait to fulfill the wish of his father, who in the meantime was killed in the war. Isa obtains citizenship in Kuwait, but does not find the land of dreams as his father’s homeland has been described, but a society full of prejudices, which, with rare youthful joys, showers him with humiliation and ultimately rejects him.
Translation completely equipped with footnotes, endnotes and an afterword.
Approximately 400 pages
