Youssef Rakha — The Dissenters - with Eman Quotah

Certain as I've never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.Amna, Nimo, Mouna--these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a "pious mama" donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister--who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years--in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644453193?ic_referral=dOU6-E-o2D92pOyJOraiEgc7VFoxBzqn1enrKJ_2D9IwM3gB4fTKt1mNdxlXynGEiyM97z0uXikLIJZI8B_wH2jv2e4iPO9Q4S62vIJT0cfh7fpO9OCcM0GQdWfbtQH_JYjPdgYoussef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.Rakha is in conversation with Eman Quotah, the author of Bride of the Sea, winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her next book, a folklore inspired horror novel, is forthcoming in the US and the UK in fall 2025. She serves on the board of RAWI, an organization that supports writers of Southwest Asian and North African heritage.