Longing for the Sidra branch:
The novel was woven from the writer’s imagination and its characters are not real. It was built on real places and historical events that occurred for our Arab nation in the sixties. The novel begins when the protagonist, “Tarish,” is accused of killing his cousin, and after that he flees and leaves his village and homeland that he loved for an unknown destination, and settles in He worked in the city of Dubai and lived through the period of the rise of Arab nationalism and its victories. After that, he joined the regular school to complete his education, until he met members of a resistance movement to colonialism. He embraced revolutionary thought and engaged with them in combat operations, until he was chosen to travel and join one of the Liberation Front camps soon. From the Mahri Sultanate, but God’s will wanted him to retreat and return to the soil of the homeland, to the village, and to its people.
Following the Pinochet coup, which overthrew President Salvador Allende, thousands of Chilean families emigrated to escape the new regime, including the Lucho family, who headed to Germany.
For his parents, time stopped the moment he left Chile, waiting for the moment of return, and the world was divided into two parts: the lost homeland, and the remaining countries, and like an entire generation that refuses to accept what happened, they sank into (ghettos) of sadness; Europe was offering them lungs of freedom, but it was also inflicting on them the pain of distance.
As for Lucho, Germany was a different country full of what was worth living: he had daily challenges in the street and school to live, new cultures to discover, friendships, enmities, quarrels, and the first heartbeats he had to experience; All this without forgetting his inherited duty towards his motherland.
About the obsessions of asylum, failures, dreams, and disappointments, Scarmetta leaves his teenage hero to tell his story, presenting us with a charming model of friendship, companionship, and the struggle for justice.
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