Seraj Assi

Fiction / Anticolonial Politics
Nonaligned

A Palestinian novel about witnessing a massacre, and worse still, surviving it.

Resurrected in Heaven, a bewildered survivor of a massacre flashes back to harrowing events unfolding in an unnamed besieged town, a camp ravished by hunger and swollen with displaced people and starving children, where a hopeful euphoria building at a breadline culminates in a tragedy and bleak dissolution. Centered on the theme of hunger, the essence of bread, and the magic of flour in a place on the brink of mass starvation, Red Flour is essentially a love story that takes place in a breadline. “But can love blossom in a place ravished by hunger?”

Languishing under an unending siege and constant bombardment, the camp soon dwindles into a necropolis where bone-thin children wither away in the arms of hapless parents, dying a most agonizing death, before being loaded hurriedly into waiting wagons and buried in haste. And beyond starvation a flour massacre unfolds, leading to the protagonist’s cry: “Even our bread is massacred, murdered before it’s leavened.”

This is a compelling story of death and survival, of bread and roses, in a world in which humanity is at a brink.