Sea Prayer

Memories are subjective testimony. As the narrator struggles to document and process the contrasting memories he and his son share, the failures of memory cannot be ignored. Because the narrator is unable to share his memories fully, he is isolated from sharing his grief.

When the story starts, the narrator focuses on full compositions of the landscape paired with specific details from his childhood home outside of Homs. The greenery and bold brushstrokes are vivid without being realistic. The shadows and outlines provide the impression or the feeling of the space without committing to concrete details. The text follows this same pattern by focusing on unseen and unnamed family members, only providing descriptions for the domestic memories that surround the farmhouse. It conveys senses without being clear. For example, the narrator remembers the “bleating of your grandmother’s goat” (9), which translates well into imagining this place but not for learning about the people. More senses are invoked throughout the story. The narrator wishes that Marwan could remember for himself “the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh / and the evening walks we took / with your mother / around Clock Tower Square” (17). More emphasis is placed on the physical location than on details unique to the narrator’s family. By hiding loss behind a wish to remember, the narrator’s attempts to recreate the experience fall short of specific detail.

The narrator focuses on getting Marwan to experience the memory rather than preserving the memory for posterity when he details an event that Marwan has forgotten. Marwan being too young to remember his trip to the countryside causes the narrator to feel regret. Rather than being wistful or angry about the way the past was happier than the present, the narrator focuses on memory. It is not grief that the farmhouse is gone or that Homs has changed—it is Marwan’s lack of memory that pains him. The narrator wishes for Marwan to be older so that “you wouldn’t have forgotten the farmhouse, / the soot of its stone walls, / the creek where your uncles and I built / a thousand boyhood dams” (13). While the narrator prays for safety, he wishes for Marwan to remember. As the story illustrates moments when Marwan is capable of remembering, more negative space is used. While the faces can be seen in more detail, the figures are more often a part of their environment, matching them in color or texture. This suggests a failure to accurately portray the events the narrator previously described.

The failure of memory to accurately transport Marwan back into the past separates the two main characters of the book. The father and Marwan are in the same physical space, but they are experiencing a very different loss. As the narrator avoids direct mention of death and the particulars of their loss, such as Marwan’s mother, the author hides this context from the reader. Because so much is placed into subtext, Hosseini makes it difficult to follow the details of the story, and the book itself hence explores the failures of memory to recreate an experience fully. The narrator is isolated in his grief over a life his son cannot remember.