Al Bagh, By: Bushra Khalfan

Al-Bagh by Bushra Khalfan . Al-Bagh in Persian means orchard, and in Muscat it refers to fenced farms with a house in the middle. This novel, with its title and metaphors, is Omani in its finest details, taking its reader back in time to experience events and transformations in Oman's modern history, and depicting the internal conflicts and civil wars that Oman suffered during the twentieth century. A novel that tells the story of the Omani person with his strength, love and fragility, yearning for the past but seeing it from a wide angle and trying to discuss all possibilities. Through two characters (Raya) and (Rashid), they emerge from the oppression of a village to what seems to be a single destiny that binds them together with a rope so that they can cross the mud of the stage. No one can predict what might happen to them! We close our eyes for a moment and find ourselves in a place we did not choose. We close them and find ourselves in a time we do not know, or in a role we avoided. What we are today may be the opposite of what we will be tomorrow. The wheel keeps turning without us finding the opportunity to question our choices and our destinies. Rayya does not find an answer to the confusion she confronts her brother Rashid with the moment they leave their beds: “Injustice is everywhere, first and foremost.” So why did they leave? In the harsh, fast, and sudden cycle of time, Raya will know how life arranges our roles for us, and how it makes us different from what we are, how we accept today what we went against yesterday, how we are tested in what is most precious to us, and in our most beloved ones. Al-Bagh is a novel from Oman, depicting a full life of love, transformations, and confusion, filled with questions from different times, but it is also the story of every place, in which Bushra Khalfan turns the compass of possibilities and ventures into reaching a difficult answer about the action of time, how it transforms and changes us without us noticing, perhaps to the opposite, to what we rejected yesterday.