Collected Short Stories: 2nd Edition

No doubt the verdant mountain ranges, the mist and the cold are majestic backdrop providing much of the mystic for Hamada’s Collected Short Stories. But it is the hardy women and men, their refusal to be mere victims of nature or supposed ’progress’, their stoic, down-to-earth decency in the face of all adversity that is the beating heart of Hamada’s fiction.

Sinai’s stories are a window to a place and time long gone. The highlanders he speaks of survive but through his tales. Hamada transforms tribal myth and personal memory into lasting art.

Many of Sinai’s stories were written when he was a young man and betray the longings and passions of the young: unrequited love, the desire for intimacy that unfulfilled may result in solitude, loneliness, and the abiding melancholy underlying some of his best work.

Still, Hamada does not romanticize the native. His highlanders are neither innocent nor naïve to the ways of the world. They are the children, after all, of warriors who took heads and slaves and survived by their peculiar code.

In the later stories we can hear the grievances and aspirations of locals whose livelihoods have been upturned by lowlanders as well as by the larger colonial and global forces at play. We see their own pretenses and machinations as they navigate the new realities. The melancholy of the earlier stories replaced it seems by a knowing, satirical tone.

The contemporary reader may question certain word choices of the author, no doubt influenced by the literature and orthodoxies of his day, that sound inappropriate in our age of cultural sensitivity and ’political correctness, ’ but these too are part of the journey of Hamada’s tales from past to present, from mountain fastness to city street and academe.

In the end he sings of the nobility of forebears, the triumph of family and of a love as old as the mountains.

- Charlson Ong, Award winning writer, fictionist, scriptwriter