Theme Of Bread Of Sacrifice By Liyana Badr

As the prompt describes, there are several themes prevalent in these seminal Palestinian stories. One such theme is love. unbounded love for his children than he would not be suffering from this job. The theme of love can noticeable be found in Liyana Badr’s “A Land of Rock and Thyme.” Here the narrator, Yursa, has her love most clearly expressed when her loved ones die. After the death of Yursa’s father she laments, “If only I’d been able to see him, to talk to him-one word-while he was still alive” (Bard 405). Later in the story the even more more traumatic death of her fiancée occurs and she is devastated, “the martyr’s wife lay on her bed, utterly broken, shaken by fits of weeping so intense that they took away all her strength” (Badr 415).

During Ibhrahim al-Absi’s “What Happens After Midnight,” the main character, Shaikh Hamid, is tasked as a night watchman of food rations, even though the man is old and openly unable to do the job. This demonstrates dysfunction and angst in the refugee camp as the food is robbed by its own members. Similarly, in “Bread of Sacrifice” the Palestinian’s are force out due to war with Israel leaving “dozens and dozens of boats filled with refugees” (Azzam 394). This is unsettlingly for the refugee’s who do not know what will happen next. “A Land of Rock and Thyme” takes place in exile, and the dangers are eerily highlighted, “death had become familiar: there was nobody in al-Zaatar who didn’t anticipate his own” (Badr 406). Exile in these stories represents not only highlights the history of conflict against the Palestinian people forcing them to live in exile, but also underscores how it is part of their identity. Some of these characters spend their entire lives in exile, or in the case of Yursa’s and her family generations of exile. Furthermore, exile details the hardships that go along with it- mistrust, fear for life, and disorder. However, exile in these stories do have meaningful differences, namely the cause of exile and the conflict during exile. “What Happened After Midnight” exile is caused from the war with the newly formed Israel, but interestingly the conflict that arises in the story is exploitation of the

In “What Happened After Midnight” an old man, who is knowingly incapable, watches over the food rations at night. He is exploited and the food stolen by people in the camp. This shows the lengths that hunger will push people- they will commit the unethical and abuse a man and steal to satisfy their needs. Likewise, in “Bread of Sacrifice” the refugees and the protagonist are put in a peculiar situation- whether to eat the bread stained with the blood of Ramiz’s love, or to starve. Ultimately, they dying and having Su’ad die in vain was not sensible and ate the bread. The theme of hunger can be found in Asqaliani’s piece fittingly titled “Hunger.” Sa’id labors away in his miserable job to pay for the hospitable bills, and put food on the table for his family. He lovingly rationalizes this, “The law of hungry days requires this, in order to keep the smiles on the children’s faces, for a child’s smile is a pressing matter always” (Asqalani 382). Just as this dialogue demonstrated his love for his family, it also further reveals the unpleasantly of hunger and what will drive people to do. All the stories display the lengths which people will go in order to get food and to survive-whether that is stealing, working a dismal job, or literally eating the blood of your lover. Interestingly though, all of these stories the cause of the hunger can be tied most closely to conflicts with Israel, as the conflict makes survival needs as basic