Days in Exile

About this book

A scream from behind bars, and a life born in the alleys. They say every human has his share of his name, but "Fahmy Gharib" was an exception that broke the rule; for he lived a stranger in his house, a stranger in his homeland, and even a stranger in the exile fate chose for him. This tale begins from the old alleys of Sayyida Zeinab, where "Fahmy" was born on a gloomy night, to a family full of clamor and lacking warmth; an Al-Azhari father distributing his lusts in religion's name, and a mother ground by years of deprivation until nothing remained of her but charlatans' tales and remnants of hope in a "son" who might change her bitter reality. The novel takes us on a harsh emotional journey, progressing from a rejected childhood in Cairo to Qasr Al-Aini's corridors where he studied medicine, reaching "Loman," which was no mere prison but a crematorium of dignity under "Sayed El-Shaboukshi's" whip. There, in that solitary cell, Fahmy learns the difference between "need" and "want," and tests how freedom dissolves in cups of forced castor oil. But when he thought his soul had dried, fate cast him to Sudan's far reaches, to the land of malaria and war remains, to find there what he had not found in his homeland: love. "Mai," that girl born from suffering's womb, was the last exile and the first homeland. Between the mystery wrapping "the knower's" ring and the inspiration the outcasts' steadfastness inspires, Waleed El-Dessouki weaves a human epic asking us bitterly: is exile the place we depart to unwillingly, or is it the pain we carry within us wherever we go? "Days in Exile" is no mere chronicle of the 1919 revolution or Sudan's independence, but a chronicle of the human soul when crushed, to sprout anew in a foreign land.