Beauty will rage within me until the day I die.

Hazim Kamaledin

Beauty will rage within me until the day I die.

A gripping novel on freedom and love

Nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2016 ‘Powerful. Headstrong form and message.’ Joke van Leeuwen

Hazim Kamaledin is dead. Terrorists might have murdered him; he might have died in an American bombing. No one really knows. During the dictatorship of Saddam Hussain, Hazim, with much praise, directed the awarded film Beauty will rage within me until the day I die. In the picture, Hazim takes the mickey out of Saddam, until censorship reared its ugly head and turned the film into a corny piece of propa­ganda. In his lifetime, Hazim Kamaledin didn’t have many friends. Now that he’s deceased, though, his friends are numerous. Just now when he’s not around anymore, his family has started to argue about the location of his grave: the grave of a man who was a heretic (and left-wing, too!). Beauty will rage within me until the day I die is a wondrous novel in which Hazim Kamaledin — the author, alive and kicking — shows how fiction can transcend reality. In the world of Beauty will rage within me until the day I die, everything is returned to ashes by warfare. Everything, except for the memory of what once was humanity and the sense of humor that Hazim Kamaledin uses to describe the fate of his deceased doppelganger.

HAZIM KAMALEDIN (1954) was bom in Babylon, Iraq. In the late seventies he fled Iraq after being menaced, arrested and tortured. He also created a satiri­cal play, for which he was condemned to death. After a lot of wandering, he settled in Belgium and ended up being the artistic manager of theatre groups Woestijn ’93 and Cactusbloem. In 2014, The Arab Theatre Institute proclaimed him best theatrical author of the year.

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