In his childhood, Tammuz watched a film about the life of a young boy, and through it he was surprised at how much cinema can convey human lives and their details: “There is someone far away who lives just like me!” Since that time, he became fond of films, and their heroes became friends with whom he lived. In his youth, he traveled to Dubai, to collect money and realize his dream of studying cinema, but he became immersed in the worlds of sex and money and moved away from his dream, until the revolution and then the war broke out in Syria, when he woke up from his nightmare and realized that hundreds of films were waiting for him in his homeland to wake them from their slumber.
“Between Ropes of Water” is a novel about the love of cinema, in which Rosa Yassin Hassan combines, with a unique technique, reality with films, so that we can hardly distinguish between reality and imagination, we meet characters we loved, we read phrases we heard, and we re-draw scenes we liked...
“I am suffocating and Tokyo does not sleep
The story of the book is:
I watch the city's inhabitants, programmed like robots, from the window of my narrow room, with dreams of attending those prestigious universities, those dreams that haunt us like ghosts.
Tokyoites wear the same faces, the same fake laugh.
The degree and inclination of bowing to greet one another is the same and does not increase or decrease a degree.”
In the small greenhouse that I built for my dear flowers and roses, secret conversations take place and stories are told. Each of them tells the other her legend and the stories she witnessed and heard.
I hide from them so that they do not notice my presence, and I record everything that happens between them in my notebook. It's always dawn, and I don't realize how long I've been here in this corner. The conversations and stories told by the roses were not happy at all, they were like thorns with their pain.
The notebook contains a mixture of myths, stories, and texts that Al-Basataniyya collected to share with the reader, as he talks about the dark side of unlimited happiness, about disappointments, and betrayals that never heal. About those human relationships that do not rise to the sky.
Briefly, about the definition of pain in its many faces, which are depicted with thorns running down their branches, leaving a prick, a mark on a finger that touched them, and hidden pain.
From every garden is a flower and from every garden is a thorn
Twenty-one thorns that the gardener documented in her notebook, proving that pain is a universal language that is not limited to the poor only, but transcends all social classes that humans have placed through their ignorance.
