Al-Aqlaf (The Speechless)

About this book

Between the alleys of forgotten huts, and the seashores witnessing the struggles of survival, Yahya is born to find himself alone before the vast sky and the cruelty of the earth. His first scream was no call for a mother or father, but an utter silence broken only by the signals of a mute grandmother feeding him with sacks of vegetables torn from the wilds and pieces of dry bread. In the novel "Al-Aqlaf," Abdullah Khalifa accompanies us on a human journey of exquisite sweetness and pain; the journey of a child growing like algae between the cracks of walls, groping for his identity in a world seeing him as a "bastard" or stranger, and searching for the meaning of words in the grandmother's silence and the noise of markets crowded with former slaves and harsh sailors. It is the epic of seeking the "self" amid the rubble, where the body becomes a stage for discovering panic and pleasure, and language turns into a knife wounding his nascent consciousness. This book is no mere tale of orphanhood and poverty, but a deep dissection of the human psyche at its utmost bareness. Can a man find salvation while not owning even a name.