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A Palestinian novel about witnessing a massacre, and worse still, surviving it.
Resurrected in Heaven, a bewildered survivor of a massacre flashes back to harrowing events unfolding in an unnamed besieged town, a camp ravished by hunger and swollen with displaced people and starving children, where a hopeful euphoria building at a breadline culminates in a tragedy and bleak dissolution. Centered on the theme of hunger, the essence of bread, and the magic of flour in a place on the brink of mass starvation, Red Flour is essentially a love story that takes place in a breadline. “But can love blossom in a place ravished by hunger?”
Languishing under an unending siege and constant bombardment, the camp soon dwindles into a necropolis where bone-thin children wither away in the arms of hapless parents, dying a most agonizing death, before being loaded hurriedly into waiting wagons and buried in haste. And beyond starvation a flour massacre unfolds, leading to the protagonist’s cry: “Even our bread is massacred, murdered before it’s leavened.”
This is a compelling story of death and survival, of bread and roses, in a world in which humanity is at a brink.
“Red Flour is an open letter, timeless and eternal, whose words burn with intensity. It carries a powerful rhythm that, at every moment, feels like the quickening pulse of hearts that have reached the threshold of death, yet cling defiantly to those everyday scenes of a life deeply worth living, and therefore refuse to die.
It is the journey of the bread loaf, passed from grandmother to mother, and onto their children and grandchildren. There was always a drop of blood—the blood of Palestinians—in every bite.
It is an angry message whose fevered text and profound wounds refuses darkness despite all they endure. It ventures deep into the nature of human beings, the madness of wars, and the tyrant-killers who, in the excess of their brutality, commit the most atrocious crimes so that history may belong to them alone, the earth to them alone, and gods to them alone.
Red Flour is a visionary novel, knocking at the door of every home in this world, every heart and every soul. It is sent by people who tell us all that they refuse death, even as they watch their departing spirits drift away, and wave them farewell.”—Ibrahim Nasrallah, award winning poet and novelist, author of Time of White Horses