“‘You are born once from your mother’s womb, and a second time from the belly of a 747.’ Abou Farman tells the story of migrants and of migration with the formal audacity of having lived and outlived it–being born again onto it, as it were. These are not migration stories that solicit or even generate your sympathies. No–these stories transform you into a different plane. I have always thought there is no more home from which to be exiled. Now I see why and how that same idea can be drawn in formal outlines. Abou Farman is the closest thing to Juan Goytisolo I have read in recent years–making of migration and exile not an exception but an existential condition –of being, of existence itself, of passage as presence. Uncanny.” — Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University.