![]() “Suddenly I heard a strange voice that ripped through me. The story begins with the defining moment of the book, with Darina in agreement with her father’s wishes refusing to let religion become part of his funeral rite by turning off the cassette playing the Koran. The story is a search for freedom against the background of the terrible war in Lebanon which gave rise to the radical religious groups and a disappearance of the space for personal liberties as well as the particular violence against women institutionalised and practiced by all of the religious groups in The Lebanon. This is the second book this year which I have read treating the war in Lebanon ( Sorj Chalandon’s Quatrième Mur ). ‘The Day Nina Simone stopped Singing’ is the result of a meeting in a Paris theatre of Kacimi and “a shy young girl” Darina Al-Joundi who handed him an open letter to her father “who had dreamed of the greatest of freedoms for his daughter while she, precisely because of this freedom, would come to know the worst servility…She told (him) the story of her childhood, her wars, her drug habit, and her love affairs without any self-censorship.” This book is that story. His writings include 1962 and the autobiographic L’Orient après l’Amour. ![]() MOHAMED KACIMI is a prolific Algerian playwright and novelist. ![]()
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