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Mama Hissa’s Mice: Saud Alsanousi’s Dystopian Warning Against Sectarianism in Kuwait
A powerful banned novel that confronts identity, memory, and division—Mama Hissa’s Mice is a haunting allegory. It captures Kuwait’s past, present, and a future teetering on the edge of civil collapse.
🎥 Scroll to the end of the article to watch the full video review from The Nook.
There are novels that whisper warnings, and there are novels that scream. Mama Hissa’s Mice howls like a wounded dog in the middle of a collapsing street, capturing the chaos and despair tearing through its pages. Saud Alsanousi’s banned-in-Kuwait tale is many things: a coming-of-age story, a political allegory, a love letter to a disappearing homeland. Above all, it’s a blistering cry of anguish for a country torn apart by sectarianism, forgetfulness, and the slow erosion of empathy. The howl isn’t just noise; it’s a poignant reminder of the fractures threatening to pull society asunder.
If you’ve read Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk, you’ll know he doesn’t do simple. He doesn’t hand you the Middle East wrapped in digestible Western tropes. No oil princes here. No billion-dollar towers. What he gives you instead is raw, scorched earth. The playgrounds of the 1980s have become the battlegrounds of 2020. A boy named Katkout, a gang of three inseparable friends—Fahd, Sadiq, and himself—and a country crumbling beneath their feet. Not with a bang but with a bitter, sectarian wheeze.
The novel unfolds in two timelines. In the “present,” it’s 2020, and Katkout is wandering the rubble of his hometown, bloodied and dazed after an explosion, searching for his friends as civil war rages around him. Flashbacks take us to his childhood in 1980s Kuwait, where optimism lingered close to dread. These tracks—past and future—move toward collision. It’s just a question of when.
And between these two timelines is Mama Hissa, Katkout’s grandmother. She's not the kind of grandmother who knits sweaters and feeds you dates. She’s a folkloric oracle, wrapped in abaya and incense smoke, both wisdom and fear, muttering dark prophecies of “mice,” “plagues,” and divine punishments. Her lyrical, superstitious voice cuts through like a cracked radio broadcast from a past no one wants to hear but must. Mama Hissa doesn’t just haunt the book—she is the book. She embodies its deepest fear: that the future is not unwritten, but already infected.
This is not an easy novel. And I don’t just mean emotionally. It’s structurally challenging. The book shifts between memoir and fiction, between war diary and fable. The lines blur. Katkout is both the narrator and the character in a book he claims to have written. It’s disorienting, and deliberately so. Nothing about post-occupation Kuwait—or the wider Arab world, for that matter—has been linear, logical, or safe. Memory, in Alsanousi’s hands, is not a sanctuary. It’s a minefield.
What makes Mama Hissa’s Mice extraordinary isn’t just its narrative ambition. It’s not only the searing prose or biting political insight. It’s the way Alsanousi draws your heart into the story and then quietly breaks it. The friendship between the boys—across sects, backgrounds, and faiths—is so pure, so desperately normal. Watching it decay under the weight of inherited hate feels like losing your own childhood. By the time Katkout and his friends are branded extremists, you’re not outraged. You’re heartbroken.
The novel doesn’t just weep for what’s been lost. It indicts. It forces us to ask the one question Mama Hissa keeps repeating like a dirge: Wain rayheen?—Where are we going? In a country that once saw itself as a cultural beacon, how did we end up here? Suspecting our neighbors. Mistrusting our teachers. Glorifying foreign saviors while burying our own heroes.
The book’s banned status in Kuwait is its own bitter badge of honor. It’s not hard to see why the censors squirmed. Alsanousi doesn’t just poke at the past—he dissects it. He scrutinizes the 1990 Iraqi invasion and the American liberation that followed. He explores the post-war identity crisis that turned Arabism into irony and nationalism into nostalgia. He calls out the newspapers that replaced Arab pride with Bush-worship, and the families that traded solidarity for sectarian suspicion. He points to governments that fed on the fear they themselves cultivated.
For all its fury, Mama Hissa’s Mice is also a profoundly human novel. The characters are not symbols—they’re people. Faulted, frightened, funny, and flawed. Whether it’s Abbas’s quiet dignity or Fahd’s fierce righteousness, these aren’t idealized martyrs or abstract ideas. They’re your classmates. Your cousins. Your inner voices in the dark.
At its core, this is a novel about choice. About whether we accept the mice in our walls. These are the quiet, gnawing resentments that fester into hatred. Or do we rise, as one, and shout: No more. In that sense, this isn’t just a Kuwaiti novel. It’s an Arab novel. A Lebanese novel. A Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian novel. It speaks across borders because the plague it warns against knows none.
If I had to save one Kuwaiti book from a literary apocalypse, it would be this one. Not because it is perfect—it isn’t. But because it is necessary. It’s a warning, yes. But also a prayer. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll choose differently next time.
Until then, kill the mice. Save the house. Save each other.