Nina SubinBorn in Damascus, Syria in 1968 and now living in Pittsburgh, Osama Alomar is the author of three collections of short stories and a volume of poetry. He is a regular contributor to various newspapers and journals within the Arab world.
Translated by Osama Alomar and C. J. Collins
Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below.
After a little while the comb’s owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.
From Osama Alomar, a brilliant Syrian writer living in exile in Pittsburgh, come these wonderful stories populated by personified swords and snakes and swamps, wolves and zeroes and rainbows. In The Teeth of the Comb they aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail. But they always animate new realities—and make us see our realities anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, we sit up a little straighter and a little wiser.
Osama Alomar, in his poetic fictions, embodies the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad’s police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first English publication of Alomar’s strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion in striking imagery and effervescent language.
I read in a book the following piece of wisdom: “He who remains silent in the face of injustice is a mute Satan.” I went out into the street and saw Satan everywhere.
Articles:
Translated by Osama Alomar and C. J. Collins
Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below.
After a little while the comb’s owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.
From Osama Alomar, a brilliant Syrian writer living in exile in Pittsburgh, come these wonderful stories populated by personified swords and snakes and swamps, wolves and zeroes and rainbows. In The Teeth of the Comb they aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail. But they always animate new realities—and make us see our realities anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, we sit up a little straighter and a little wiser.
Alomar’s work speaks to the power that words can have when they’re constrained, be it by style or by necessity… a master of the form.
Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s deceptively slight short stories have teeth and bite. In spare, accessible prose, one encounters the painful and bitter poetry of exile running like a blood-red thread through this slim but dense collection.
Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories are shrewd and full of intelligence.
In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here in Chicago, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company.
In Alomar’s stories, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.
[His stories] convey a raw combination of beauty and resignation, as if the two were created to reside under the same roof, hope and hurt at one …. Alomar is a man of small but universally affecting insights.
The stories’ distinctive flavour comes from Alomar’s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters.…The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second.
