Out of Time
Out of Time
Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam
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In June of 1967, after watching the shape of her country suddenly change for the second time, with hundreds of thousands more Palestinians expelled from their homes, Samira Azzam destroyed the novel she had been working on. Its title must have seemed particularly tragic in the wake of ’67: Sinai Without Borders. Two months later, at the age of 39, Azzam went on a road trip with friends. They were outside of al-Ramtha, Syria, when she suffered a heart attack and died.
We had Samira Azzam (1927–1967) for far too few years, and we never got to read what she would do with a novel. Still, she did leave us with five vivid short-story collections, as well as reviews, articles, translations, and countless hours of broadcast radio. Yet after her death, her work fell into a half-shadow, in which she was acknowledged as great, but not quite canonized. In a 2018 article on the Palestinian short story, the critic Faisal Darraj says it “Azzam has not yet received the accolades she deserves.”
This translated collection -- full of her vivid snapshots of life in Palestine and Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century -- is a start at giving Samira Azzam a few of the accolades she deserves.
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Short stories are not my preferred type of fiction, so as a reader I feel I am not often able to do them justice. I therefore expected to dip in and out of this slim volume over a longer period. Instead I found myself drawn into one after another over a single afternoon, and had to stop there in order to absorb what I'd read before contunuing (next day).
Palestinian writer Samira Azzam's stories, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman, are written in a simple style that makes them appear, at first glance, almost dreamily impressionistic. But there is no literary detachment, no self-amused whimsy. The characters flow from a pen inked with the blood of a painfully compassionate heart. The incidents are told in a vivid, honest, direct manner; several keep playing on repeat in my mind as I write this. The conclusion of The Passenger took my breath away with its gently humorous, emotional truth about being an empathetic human being. Another Year, which resonated on a personal level although my situation bears absolutely no resemblance to that of refugee families forcibly parted from each other, brings a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes even now. This collection, Out of Time, is a heartopener, my favourite type of book.