Majnoon’s shifting form

Majnoon, Arabic for ‘madness’, looms over the life of Abdul Karim Sabawi, whose story is the central thread in Samah Sabawi’s 2025 Stella-shortlisted offering, Cactus Pear for My Beloved. The madness first takes form as the town lunatic, who terrorises the boy and his mother at the local well with concocted Quranic incantations. Thereafter, the majnoon casts fear from the sky, his ‘senseless and ruthless violence’ manifesting as Israeli aeroplanes that shadow Karim’s childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in Gaza, Palestine. Born in 1942, Karim witnesses Al Nakba:

the catastrophe that marked the establishment of an Israeli-Jewish state on the soil of his homeland. But while it was happening, there was no name for it … The images … flashed before his eyes … sad faces in ragged tents, homeless families in the fields, young mothers and children sleeping under the trees …