For expatriation from the homeland, there are endless hopes and aspirations that do not stop at its geographical borders, and these hopes do not recognize the long distances that the expatriate travels away from his homeland, imagining deep within himself that what he reaps in material and perhaps social gains can make him forget his pains or might even be an appropriate compensation and substitute for the suffering he denies within himself.

The author takes us in this painful novel to dimensions that may seem repetitive to anyone who has traveled and lived abroad, especially if that traveler comes from a deep layer belonging to the lowest strata of the earth and is far removed from the proper social dimension in the land of oil and inexhaustible mineral wealth.

The novel revolves around a child born to a Gulf father of high ambition, belonging to an upper aristocratic class, and a Filipino mother from those lower classes that time has ruthlessly betrayed, causing deformities that exacerbate these social differences, seemingly endless, showcasing the impact of deliberate social differences and racism in forming a clear fragility of societies living in such an atmosphere. What's astonishing in this novel is your belief and intuition as a reader about the tragic outcome for such marriages that are doomed to fail and disappointment, but the author brilliantly managed to take us with the novel's events to firmer and more differing chords than those generally expected tragic endings.

The novel carries within its folds much of the projections that some are shy to narrate realistically and methodically, revealing in its folds a mask on practices whose effects remain unsettling to living consciences towards acknowledging them. Contemporary realism adds a new dimension to the novel's events, as if the author is revolving us around subjects we decided not to delve into for denying their similarity before us, and exposing many sides we decided to close our eyes to deliberately with persistence and premeditation in a way that harms us before it harms the other party who is overwhelmed by the situation.

The Bamboo Stalk is a small plant from a tree with no belonging, and we have pre-determined to cut part of its stalk intentionally and without mercy, to plant it in new, unqualified soil, imagining that it has enough luck to sprout solid, strong roots capable of supporting its bonds in an environment that has not witnessed such occurrences before. Worse still is our prior estimation that this small, identity-less plant will create a past with precise details to help support its unjustifiable presence; it is even asked to carry a memory with all the details of life.

Our names, with which we had no slightest connection to their meanings or were not asked our opinion in taking them as a tool to identify us within society, might tell us some indications that point to our identity or express our belonging to a specific environment, but it becomes clear with the difference in time, place, and human nature that these names are just names that you and your fathers have named, without any authority from God."

What draws attention is the precision of the information about Kuwait, starting from the names of some places and neighborhoods, and ending with the luxurious life lived by a significant portion of the Kuwaiti people. In addition to this, there is an accurate description of the Philippines, including some inherited customs and traditions there in that remote country, far removed from Gulf society, suggesting the writer's familiarity with the finest details that make the reader feel like a visitor and tourist to these two countries.

This is my first reading of the author Saud Al-Sanousi, who, with superb skill, managed to attract me to continuous reading of the novel's pages, which neared four hundred pages in a period not exceeding six hours, over broken intervals in a single day. This confirms Jane Austen's famous saying that the better a book is written, the shorter it seems.

The novel received the Arabic Booker Prize, contrary to my recurring expectations that used to refuse reading novels that won various awards. My personal belief was that the noise and media attraction exceeded the written content, but "The Bamboo Stalk" came to reverse all those expectations.