A Fairy Tale: Emile Habibi’s "Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter"

Part memoir, part fairy tale, and part political commentary and history, Emile Habibi’s Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale opens on a moonless night in the summer of 1983, on a boulder off the shore of what was once al-Zeeb, a Palestinian village north of Akko. The narrator glimpses a mysterious female figure who saves him from death, and in the story that follows, he tries to discover who she is. He calls her 'Saraya,' the flesh-and-blood beloved of his childhood, the daughter his uncle Ibrahim adopted, who shares a name with a fairy tale heroine who was captured by an ogre. Host Marcela Sulak reads three excerpts from Habibi's novel on today's episode.

Text: Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter: A Palestinian Fairy Tale, by Emile Habibi. Translated by Peter Theroux. Ibis Editions, 2006.

Music: Philip Glass - Island Philip Glass - Closing Philip Glass - Metamorphosis Two