Casa Árabe, with the cooperation of the Diplomatic Mission of Palestine in Spain, will be presenting “Time of the White Horses: The Palestinian Iliad,” by Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah.

The book’s presentation forms part of the activities held by Casa Árabe for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, declared by the United Nations and commemorated every year since 1997 on November 29. On that day in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which later came to be known as the “partition resolution”; it established the creation of a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State” in Palestine, with Jerusalem as the “corpus separatum” subject to a special international regime. Of the two states foreseen in that resolution, up to now only one has been created: Israel.

In this novel, Nasrallah recounts the multi-generational adventures of a defiant family from the village of Hadiya, near Jerusalem, spanning the collapse of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate and the Nakba in 1948. The relationship between Khaled, the main character, and Hamama, his white mare, is used as a symbol for an entire people’s struggle against the tyranny and oppression of one successive colonizer after another, and their attempts to take control of the land and his most precious asset, the mare.

Similarly, “Land of Fevers” is another novel by the author, recently published by Editorial Verbum (as “Tierra de fiebres” in Spanish), which will soon be enriching Spain’s publishing scene in this fall of 2023. In that novel, the author reflects upon closed-minded Arab societies and the status of the individual while addressing the issue of Palestinian exile. Backwardness and poverty provide fertile ground for fevers of all kinds and a terrible solitude imposed by an ancestral power.

The author will be accompanied by the translators of the two books, Moayad Sharab, a professor of Spanish language at the University of Jordan, and Victoria Khraiche, an associate professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Presented by: Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s Culture and International Relations Coordinator..

Ibrahim Nasrallah (Amman, 1954) is a poet, novelist, professor, journalist, painter and photographer. He was born in a Palestinian refugee camp near the Jordanian capital, where his parents had settled in 1948. It was there, at the age of 15, while studying at one of the United Nations schools, that he began to write poetry. His origins and the harsh circumstances of exile turned this curly-haired man with a giant smile into a great connoisseur of the Palestinian cause over the past decades. Throughout his prolific career, Nasrallah has received great praise for his literary works in both poetry and prose. However, he has also stirred controversy through some of his writings, due to his unwavering commitment to the Palestinian people. To date, he has had 14 poetry books, 22 novels and 2 books about cinema published. Time of the White Horses (2007), which critics describes as “the novel that was missing in Palestinian literature,” has been translated into English, Turkish, Italian, Danish and Farsi. With twenty-five editions, it is among the best-selling novels in contemporary Arabic literature. It was also shortlisted for the Booker International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2009), a prize that Nasrallah finally won in 2018 with his highly-acclaimed novel The Second Dog War. Professor Moayad Sharab, a tenured professor of Spanish Language at the University of Jordan, was in charge of translating the novel into Spanish.

Further information: https://en.casaarabe.es/event/%E2%80%9Ctime-of-the-white-horses%E2%80%9D-by-ibrahim-nasrallah