Elizabeth Obermeyer

If you didn’t know Jamal Saeed’s own story, you would naturally think his stories are heartfelt and fanciful takes on fairytales, that they draw on folklore and the beauty of the natural world for inspiration. And you would be correct, they are. But when you learn that a number of the stories in the collection were written by Saeed while he was a prisoner of conscience in Syria, the stories take on slightly different hues. They are still beautiful, of course, perhaps moreso; they still draw on magic and imagination and folklore and myth. And their themes—of escape, release, longing, love, and home—shine through even more clearly. 

Saeed lets his characters’ stories unfold through powerful storytelling and vivid imagery to evoke the beauty of the world—the sea, the people, the Syrian landscape—contrasting sharply with the stark realities of the world in which the stories are situated. He writes of the sons who are disappeared and the shattered lives of those left behind; the friends who betray, and the people who take what isn’t theirs, destroying and leaving violence and death in their wake. These stories speak the unspeakable and Saeed shows us the horrors all while using his immense power as a storyteller to also show us the light within the darkness. Perhaps even the light because of the darkness.

In the title story, a young man’s home is raided, and the destruction of a simple, loving gift from his grandfather finds him reminiscing about his early life. In another, a bird caught in a windstorm takes refuge in an older couple’s room where they attempt to care for it. When it flies back out into the night, the couple fears for its safety much as they fear for and grieve their son in prison. The ritual of making food with a friend brings some comfort to a grieving mother, and a rose tree, dug up and dying a slow death, churns up thoughts of another missing son, another family torn apart.

Throughout the collection, Saeed reminds us of the beauty and hope that remain, even when everything else feels lost. The stories flow between the real and the imagined so beautifully, letting us soar then grounding us in reality with lyrical and mesmerizing prose. And ,at the heart of it all, the importance of love and its presence in both hope and despair.

Princess Nai and Other Stories is out October 7th from ECW Press, and I highly encourage you to pre-order this beautiful collection.