Empty Cages by Fatma Qandil
I. The Frame: The Rusted Chocolate Tin and the Birth of Memory The narrative of Empty Cages is built upon the shifting, often unreliable sands of memory, triggered by a physical object: an old, rusted Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolate tin. The narrator, Fatma, now a woman in her sixties, finds this tin in a drawer, …