Like Birds In The Sky – Cecile Oumhani

Half-way between fiction and auto-fiction, Cécile Oumhani evokes the different worlds her multi-cultural family always opened for her. She is also a keen observer of life and its unexpected encounters. Walking the streets of Paris can become a sudden dive into the past. Some of the female characters in these stories yearn to write, to paint, beyond social and family constraints. Others cross new borders, mental and physical, in the turmoil of North African revolutions.

Each story in this poetic collection, fragile and evocative as the gossamer wings of a dragonfly, reads as letters from beyond, as fragments of a broken landscape that the author tries to reassemble with the powers of memory, of imagination, of dreams, offering us glimpses of long-gone or current faces and places, smells — ink, wax, Jell-O, forests, old books — unique portraits of people lost between borders, between countries, between selves, mapping the unknown that is at the heart of the familiar. — Ananda Devi

A young mother, out on an evening walk, is entranced when she hears a poem about trees, accompanied by the poignant notes of a violin; another, silently supported by her husband, finds in her dreams the inspiration to draw and paint; a German weaver’s visit lights up a North African village; a book of anonymous, handwritten translations of South Asian poetry summons up an entire multilingual literary heritage. In the intimate, luminous stories of her first collection in her mother tongue English, Francophone poet and novelist Cecile Oumhani moves between North Africa, Canada and France, but her gaze is on the small moments and fleeting incidents that illuminate the lives of her protagonists and lead them out of the trap of the present into the light of a clearer day. — Aamer Hussein