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Translated from the French by Rana Asfour<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his critically acclaimed, award-winning debut novel, the French writer and journalist of Iraqi descent, Feurat Alani, explores his father’s history in order to \u201clive precariously through the memories of his remembered loved one.\u201d It is the captivating story of a child from an immigrant background, who finds his voice and discovers his identity amidst the dynamic environments of two cities, two languages, and two cultures.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cOblivion is the true shroud of the dead,\u201d opens the debut novel, quoting George Sand. The name of the author is a reference to the Euphrates River which in its lower course encompasses the region of Mesopotamia, where the writer\u2019s father, Rami, in a display of masculinity, nearly drowned \u2014 a short while before he lost his mother. <\/span>Mother, I crossed the Euphrates for you. I swam with you atop my head in hopes of drowning your wounds<\/span><\/i>, says the refrain of a popular poem in Fallujah.<\/span><\/p>\n In room 219, ensconced in a hospital in the Paris suburbs, Rami battles with cancer and partial amnesia, as he tries to recollect fragments from the early chapters of his life. The ones before the exile, about which he has always remained silent. <\/span>Did I succeed in life<\/span><\/i>? is the challenging query he presents to his son. In order to address this question, Alani will make efforts to reconstruct Rami’s memory, whereby in turn he too, will reveal all that he is aware of.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIn that hospital room, illness changed everything. It all became urgent and necessary. From then on, only the fundamental basics remained. The story of a man. The hope of a son. The transmission. Memory. That evening, I started at the beginning. I bought him a notebook. On the first page I wrote down some names, just as he had done for me long ago. The first: Euphrates.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And so, Feurat Alani became a writer. He was born in France in 1980, and initially served as a senior reporter for French media organizations in Baghdad prior to establishing his own production firm. His documentary <\/span>Iraq: the sacrificed children of Fallujah<\/span><\/i> (2011) won awards at multiple film festivals.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2019, amidst social unrest in Iraq, preceding its descent into a profound political crisis, Alani won the prestigious Albert-Londres prize, for his first graphic novel <\/span>The Perfume of Iraq<\/span><\/i> (Nova\/Arte \u00e9ditions). The jury characterized it as \u201cforeign literature\u201d due to its unique and unparalleled form: It consisted of one thousand tweets, each comprised of a paragraph containing 140 characters, all of which were posted during the summer of 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n This was soon followed by another graphic novel, <\/span>Fallujah, My Lost Campaign<\/span><\/i> (Les Escales, 2020), in which he reminisced about his childhood in a city that gained notoriety for being conquered and destroyed by the Islamic State in 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Je](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Je-me-souviens-de-Fallujah-Feurat-Alani-9782709671248.jpg\")
<\/a>Between reality and fiction<\/h4>\n