From Sleep Unbound

By: Andrée Chedid and Sharon Spencer

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Synopsis: From Sleep Unbound takes its readers directly into the heart of the woman's world. Samya is the product of a contemporary middle-Eastern upbringing with its harsh and brutal customs, particularly concerning women, whose earthly existences serve certain specific purposes: to serve man and to bear children. Her husband, unfeeling, detached, uninterested, does not even notice the beauty which radiates from her face: large brown eyes, smooth olive skin, jet black hair, slim features. Daily, Samya feels her life eroding, slowly crumbling, slipping, dematerializing into oblivion. Sensations of uselessness reduce her to a state of psychological penury, of fragmentation. Then, anger and resentment, even hatred intrude, resulting perhaps out of sheer dismay at her own passivity. Her sister-in-law, Rachida, whom her husband depends upon so implicitly and explicitly to run the cotton farm, arrives. Rancor swells. Jealousy. As Samya pursues her story, defoliating her feelings, exposing her fulgurating pain like a raw nerve, images are marked with burnt umber, gray, black, darkened configurations. The atmosphere is suffused with feelings swelling with rapture and sensuality, also with bouts of rage and outrage.