This is a novel that tells, with remarkable ingenuity, the same story. Beginning with the small “passageway” that the author uses to refer to the brief framing introduction at the start of the work, we enter a series of metaphorical sequences that refer back to one another. Nearly all of these revolve around a single theme: the story itself, as a new coat that we tailor to fit the measure of our memories, dreams, desires, triumphs and disappointments – a coat to replace the first one (I won’t call it the “real” one) which is represented by life as we actually live it, as we sometimes like to describe it. From this perspective, the work takes us to a place where the distinction between the ‘original’ and the story about it dissolves.
I am talking here about the novel Nar Al Markh (نار المرخ) by the Saudi writer Awad Shaher Al-Osaimi, which was published a few days ago by Dar Madrak. Awad’s literary production has varied between short stories (4 collections of short stories), novels (6 novels), and modern poetry written in the spoken dialect. His literary works have also been translated into English and French. In the midst of this diversity, one is not far from the truth when he says that the desert is a favorite theme for Awad Shaher and a main axis in his works, as he links its various manifestations with a delicate thread, and this latest novel confirms that. The question of this article is: How does the desert appear in Nar Al Markh? Where does the “remarkable ingenuity” that I mentioned in the introduction lie?
This work revolves around the story of a main character who has two names: Gharbi/Rahim, and I fully consciously mean not to separate them with a comma or a conjunction. This character roams a variety of realistic and cultural worlds, and his circumstances are correspondingly diverse, but he does not enter the fictional world, that is, “the homeland,” except through the story of another character, “Raad,” who narrates the main story via cassette tapes that he recorded for Gharbi/Rahim. From one secondary narrative to the next, strands emerge from the central story of Gharbi/Rahim and their experiences. These, in turn, find their way into the narrative world through Raad’s story and recordings. This leads to the work’s core idea: the protagonist of the story is not the one who lives it, but rather the one who “nativize” it, as this nuanced linguistic choice suggests. Consequently, while Raad is saved at the end, the fate of Gharbi is total disappearance.
Just as the story is a homeland, it sometimes turns into a grave. The desert becomes a home for the living and a home for the dead as well. Didn’t the novel describe one of its characters as: “sitting in the middle of so many stories, bewildered by them as if they were graves that he had to open and exhume what was in them”?
After the small framing passage, the novel begins with a first chapter that was very crucial in creating the cultural and artistic context for the work, it is like an introductory tour of the studio and an introduction to the artist’s philosophy in creating his works. From the beginning, sometimes as a statement and sometimes as a hint, language has played a decisive role in determining an individual’s identity and destiny. Here, “Gharbi” is also called “Rahim” according to the change in his place of residence, where a distinction is made between his state of alienation in the world of immigration and his state of stability and tranquility in the homeland, a distinction that indicates the close relationship between language and place. This relationship is confirmed and takes its literary form in the definition of Raad’s “project” as “a nativization of the story.” Writing in general becomes a home for stories scattered like desert sand, or it turns into a cultural site that provides linguistic/narrative embrace and compassion for the stranger.
This is a work, in its greatest depths, about the desert first and foremost. Its ingenuity lies in a number of points, including:
- It is a contemplative work from within, that is, it does not fall under the pressure of opposing dualities about the desert and the city, but, on the contrary, it merges their two worlds with an interesting fluidity that confirms a high degree of cultural continuity between the people of these two worlds. This is evident in the text, for instance, when Raad moves between Gharbi’s world and the Encampment of Joy and Experimentation, as well as watching YouTube videos in his father’s shop, without any experience of cultural or spiritual fragmentation between the two domains/
Based on this internal contemplation, it is a work almost devoid of ideology, a work devoted to art that does not resort to ideological stimuli to achieve the effect, and therefore historical references do not appear for themselves, rather, to provide a context for understanding whenever the need arises. In order to summarize what I am saying here, I will say that Nar Al Markh is a work that overcomes the arguments of Orientalism or anti-Orientalism by completely banishing them from his world. What is said about the desert outside Raad and Gharbi’s contemplations and outside the world of the novel does not concern the novel at all. In other words, this is a work about the desert without Orientalist preoccupations – there is no “other” in the picture to which the novel is a response. A work written solely from internal concerns.
- It is a humanitarian act. What I mean by this is that it humanizes everything that the storyteller’s eye falls on or that his memory captures from its enormous storehouse of images – the desert, sands, graves, pebbles, trees, snakes, even travel bags and airports. It struck me that this was a key technique the work employed to forge continuity between the desert and the city; for they are all spaces capable of being humanized and “nativized” when encountered by an observant eye that can capture the narratives embedded within them.
The work links the two worlds of desert and city through a process of humanization: the humanization of nature in the desert, and the humanization of objects in the urban setting. The human subject (Raad, in this case) is the foundation for this continuity, as beauty and identity emanate from the human interiority, rather than being inherent in the objects themselves.
- It is a work based on an enormous multiplicity of voices. No one person is alone in the story, but rather it is more like a narrative orchestra in which each voice has a fundamental role in creating the final tone. Starting from the first chapter, while Raad records and refers to the “mixing of voices,” we understand that we are embarking on a writing project in which sounds, times, and linguistic levels intersect, a project of enormous artistic complexity that confirms, once again, the complexity of the desert world just as the city world is.
- It combines a highly precise description of characters, objects, places, and psychological worlds of all of this (yes, even things have their psychological worlds described!), and a language with tremendous poetic energy (and on the personal side, I have recorded some of the passages for myself as actual poetic texts!). It goes without saying that combining the two matters is difficult for many.
In many passages of the novel (especially those of Raad), precise description combines with charming language with great mastery. In the chapters that follow “Pasted Downward (ملصق باتجاه الأسفل),” specifically starting from Chapter 26 (Raad in his states, within himself, passing to his heart), the linguistic sentence becomes shorter, accelerates, and becomes more condensed, as if it were equivalent to the rapid heartbeat resulting from “passing through Raad’s heart,” or as if it were equivalent to the city in its speed. Starting from this chapter, it can be said that Raad did not let a single thing pass by so casually without an accurate description, humanization of it, and transparent contemplation of his psychological worlds.
- It is a metalinguistic work par excellence. What gave this matter added artistic value was the narrator’s reference to his keen awareness of this and even his intentional practice of it within the work. This also happened with Raad when he spoke about the “nativization of the dialect” in classical Arabic, or his reference to “nahnaha” as harmful weeds. Perhaps more important is that Raad would sometimes tell the entire story in the dialect first, and then after that he would formulate it in classical Arabic, to point out that the event and its linguistic formulation are inseparable. Language is the home of stories.
This metalinguistic dimension is evident, and its deep connection to another dimension that I will mention later, which is the metanarrative dimension, outside the direct linguistic statements, and I mean in the artistic choices themselves within the work. For example, assigning two names to the main desert character (Gharbi/Rahim), one for his sojourn in the desert and one for his homelands, comes to perform the function of the objective equivalent of the writer’s perception of the relationship between oral and written narrative forms. In this vision, the desert acquires two linguistic states that are sequential in time, namely the states of the story and the novel, so that the novel becomes the natural written extension of the story after settling it in narrative traditions.
- It is essentially a metanarrative work. I mean here that questioning the meaning of the story and the meaning of the narration lies at the heart of the work. Quiet inner contemplation in the desert world is paralleled by quiet inner contemplation in the world of the story. The narrator, or Raad, or sometimes even Gharbi, provides very important observations about the nature of the story, its conditions, performance conditions, even its language, and the differences in impact that stem from differences between linguistic levels and other performance factors. This takes desert tales from the category of innate, primitive writing to the category of deep conscious work, that is, to the category of art.
Sometimes, metanarrative situations occur within small tales, just like what happened with the story of “Ishq”, when “Hathal” said to him:
- Your description of the sheep, the shadows, and the shepherd made me ask myself: Have I ever seen a tree like this tree, a shadow like this shadow, and a shepherd like this shepherd? I couldn’t find an answer.
- Why?
- Everyone gets involved in each other. Honestly, this picture is strange to me.
This leads us to ask about Awad Shaher’s novel and its stories that “blend into each other,” about its eccentricities and fantasies, and it can even be said about its magical realism that merges the real and magical worlds in a way that defies framing, and a tremendous fluidity was achieved between them, as I mentioned previously.
Sometimes we find the metanarrative moment in the narrator’s own reports as he reflects on the meaning of the story and its relation to reality:
“The journey will soon be forgotten in the abundance of stories that will be composed around it, until the stories themselves almost seem as if they were what happened, with all their details and contradictions, and not the difficult journey.”
This narrative turns into meta-literary (or meta-writing) when it reaches a climax in which the entire world becomes a writing with form and content, as stated in this passage:
“Can we accept a single content in order to speak in a compelling form? What is the value of this content when compared to many contents in many parts of the world? …Personally, I do not reject the content I grew up with, but I have to delve into a lot of content to do myself justice. To grapple with different contents is not with the intent of confronting them with my own, but to regard them as the palm tree gazes towards the distant horizons. The difference is that I seek it with my own horizon, and when I approach it, I have to be taller than I am now to improve the vision.”
We are faced with a literary work that merges the desert with the city, but more importantly, it merges the desert with man. In addition to the narrator’s ability to humanize everything in the desert, the entire desert turns into one person, Raad, who becomes a markh tree (Leptadenia pyrotechnica) that grows little by little and prepares to unleash its fire:
“Then Raad sprouted like the devouring markh in the meetings that were repeated with Gharbi in more than one place, and it also continued, like the Markh tree, to conceal the fire within him.”
Raad (or perhaps Awad?) has become “Nar Al Markh (Fire of the Markh)” because he conceals stories as the tree conceals fire. The line between man and nature disappeared, and thanks to the story, they became as one.
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