Sweetmeats: A Novel

In her Academy project, her third novel in Arabic, tentatively titled “Sweetmeats,” Chreiteh tells the story of a Syrian family living in a Lebanese border town at the cusp of the Syrian revolution. As the protests unravel into armed warfare and the family’s status in Lebanon deteriorates, one character, Nafiseh, finds a mysterious body hidden in her sister’s basement. She attempts to find out who left it there: Was it the militiamen infiltrating into the town from across the border, one of the local warring families, or did her sister drag the body into the basement by herself? When Nafiseh attempts to dispose of the body, her fate is intertwined with that of a trans migrant and an indentured domestic worker from Ethiopia. Told in an omniscient narrative voice, the novel follows the perspectives of several of its characters, probing the relationships among global migration and ecological disaster, women and violence, and mounting nationalism as it intersects with domestic violence. The city of Berlin appears in “Sweetmeats,” as a number of characters are forced to journey to Europe, first by boat and then by train. In Berlin, Chreiteh plans to research the migrant and refugee communities and to become involved in refugee empowerment programs. “Since many Syrian writers and artists have relocated to Berlin,” she writes, “it would be invaluable to build a network in the city and participate in their activities, while exploring the ways that art can build something new after uprootedness.”