Award-winning book narrates migration in five letters
Hoda Barakat's "The Night Post," which tells the story of five Arab migrants, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction amid controversy.
Five Arabs pour out their suffering in their letters in Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s poignant “The Night Post,” reflecting the plight of people displaced by war, political strife and economic conditions in the Middle East.
The novel, which has won the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), known as the "Arab Booker," is atypical. Merely 126 pages, it uses familiar, everyday language to tell compelling stories — two of the letters are between lovers; a young man writes to his mother; a sister to her brother; and a gay man to his father. The sixth letter — the final one — is written by the mailman who has delivered them all. Then the mailman dies and the letters stop — a thinly veiled reference to the silence of the world to the suffering of the displaced.
“The letters document the difficult situation the displaced find themselves in. They recount the stories of migrants in [transition], striving to reach a safe haven. All these letters are handed to the mailman," Barakat told Al-Monitor.
Born in Beirut in 1952, Hoda Barakat moved to Paris in the midst of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). She said that the move shaped her literary path. "Each of us has a starting point but at a different time and space. Everything we experience affects us,” she said.
