Damascus

Khalifa was born as the fifth child of 13 siblings in a village near the city of Aleppo. In the late 1980s, he studied law and completed basic military service. By that time, however, he was already publishing poems, among others in the daily Al-Taurá, and was finishing his first prose manuscript.

He was one of the poets and writers who founded the magazine Alif, but it was banned by censorship after a few months. The Syrian public knew Khalif as an author of novels, an essayist and a screenwriter of several popular television series from the 1990s. He was nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Prose in 2008 for his prose Praise of Hate, about a Syrian woman who becomes radicalized and joins the jihadists.

According to the AFP agency, the author was a long-time critic of the ruling Baath Party, which has been in power in Syria since 1963 and to which President Bashar Assad also belongs. Nevertheless, the writer remained in his homeland even after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. “I stayed because it is my country. I was born here, I live here and I also want to die here,” he said four years ago.

In 2021, the Akropolis publishing house published Chalíf’s novel Death is Hard Work. It tells the story of three siblings who carry the body of their dead father to bury him in their native village.

Abdallatif died peacefully in a Damascus hospital. The youngest son Bulbul had previously promised to fulfill his last wish and bury him in his native village in the north of the country. Although Abdallatif was not a perfect father and Bulbul does not have the warmest relationship with his siblings, he convinces his older brother Husayn and sister Fatima to accompany him and his father’s body on the journey to al-Anabi.

Although it is only two hours from Damascus, the journey is complicated by the war. The road is full of gunmen who don’t follow any rules, kill on sight or ask for bribes. “Danger lurks everywhere, from snipers and female fighters who have taken over a piece of territory, through government soldiers and the opposition to fundamentalists with long beards who can’t even speak Arabic properly. Even such an absurd situation as the arrest of a father who has been dead for several days at a checkpoint does not raise the corners of the reader’s mouth, ” Aktuálně.cz wrote about the book, which, according to him, “allows you to experience the decay of the world, values ​​and relationships”.

For her translation of this novel last year, Arabist Jitka Jeníková received a creative award within the framework of the Josef Jungmann Award.