Tomorrow, Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., Casa Árabe is inviting Syrian writer Rima Bali, who will be speaking about her novel El girasol azul (The Blue Sunflower). The presentation is part of the activities which Casa Árabe is organising in March on the occasion of Women’s Month at Casa Árabe. Admission is free until full capacity is reached. The event will be held in Spanish.
The Blue Sunflower tells the story of how Gadi, Nada’s only son, is killed in the Syrian war. After forty years of relationship with Nabil, recently appointed minister, the protagonist of this story decides to leave the country and settle in France, where she applies for asylum and tries to overcome her grief. There she meets Eva and Marta, twin sisters from a small village in Cuenca, heroin addicts and AIDS victims, as well as Boris, a young Ukrainian refugee. This work is a story of women who survive by fighting against a male tyranny, a tale of encounters, of empathy and solidarity with the weak and with the generations to come, describing the life of the Christian minority in Syria.
This is the second novel, the first translated into Spanish, by the writer Rima Bali, who has been living in Spain since 2015 after leaving her native Aleppo. It analyses the reasons for the armed struggle, which has driven millions of people to leave the country, as well as the author’s own, while swiftly avoiding an analysis of the conflict under the parameters of confessionalism and focusing on the true political and economic nature of the interests at stake; In the same way, it tacitly and subtly shows the religious plurality of Syrian society and reveals the points of tangency between its essential values and those of Spanish society, so that both the Syrian and Spanish reader can see themselves perfectly reflected in each other.
The presentation will be attended by the author, Rima Bali, the translator of the work, Victoria Khraiche Ruiz Zorrilla, and the director of publications of Editoral Comares, Ana de Arco. Presented and moderated by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s Cultural Programmes Coordinator.
Pages: 224
Publisher: COMARES
Binding: Soft cover
ISBN: 9788413696133
RPP: 21,85 euros
