Songs for Darkness

A novel that captures the collective pain of a nation through the stories of four Lebanese women.

Only songs are able to comfort the soul in its darkness—but can anyone hear them?

Iman Humaydan’s saga recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment.

Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away from her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion.

These women’s legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honoring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently preserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice—and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times.