Democratic Palestine : 33 (ص 28)
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- Democratic Palestine : 33 (ص 28)
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subject dealt with in the Arab novel. When death stops being
the subject, it is replaced by complete or multi-dimensional
alienation which soon leads to death. The intellectual in both
The Trees and the Assassination of Marzoug and East of the
Mediterranean, by A. Munif, dies either through coercion or
being killed. Similar is the situation of the innocent hunter in
The Ends; he lives freely in the bosom of nature; as soon as the
hand of authority reaches him, he is killed by a sandstorm.
Wherever it goes, power means death. The alienation of man
leading to the brinks of lunacy is seen in The Committee by
Sunallah Ibrahim, where the police chase a man in the street
and in the workshop, even in his bed and kitchen.
In the conditions of Arab disintegration, we become familiar
with civil war, or rather Arab wars in Lebanon. We face it
directly or indirectly in the novels of Tawfiq Yousef Awwad
and Ghadeh Samman, The Mills of Beirut and Beirut
Nightmares, respectively. The total destruction of war is
presented by the Lebanese novelist, Elias Khouri, in two
works: The first is The Small Mountain which depicts the end
of a whole stage in the history of a people, when all sacred
values and ideals are undermined, when everything becomes
permissible, when man becomes the cheapest commodity in the
market of war and the industry of death. The second novel is
White Faces which depicts a dirty war not conducted by peo-
ple, but conducting them, because its continuation is necessary
for the warmongers and for each social group to extract its
privileges from killing. Defense of social privilege, guarded by
death, converts society into a jungle; it turns the ordinary civil
society into the enemy of all the arms merchants.
In the vacuum of such perdition, the forms of epidemics are
multiplied: Defeat, power, oil which spurts in the desert to
desertize the whole Arab life and carry defeat from the military
arena into the home, schools, ideologies, etc. - all are
epidemics to destroy man. The subject of oil is addressed by A.
Munif in Cities of Salt, an epic novel in four volumes, which
follows this tragic process from its very beginning to its poten-
tial future perspectives. Munif’s book is the greatest Arab
novel of the eighties and a landmark in the whole history of the
Arab novel. While the role of natural resources is logically the
realization of individual as well as social welfare, Arab oil has
intensified colonial hegemony, bolstered repression and spread
the cult of consumerism. Cities of Salt is a historical document
of the tragic marriage between the accumulated colonial
European experience and the primitive desert mentality, which
gives power and luxury to the European and only a «city of
salt» to the Arab. With the first rain, such a city melts away
because the princes of Arab wealth do not consider natural
resources as collective national property, but as private pro-
perty destined for personal luxury, characterized above all by
irrationality.
In relation to these transformations which threaten the very
national identity, the Arab novel constitutes a historical
document condemning the status quo and calling for
resistance. It is a protest against a world which crushes man,
besieges him, deprives him of his dreams and destroys his
heritage. Ibrahim Aslan defends the traditional popular
quarters in The Sad Swan. Radwa Ashour defends the unity of
the family in Warm Stone, this family which suffers from
disintegration due to repression and continuous migration in
28
search of a loaf of bread and a place that guarantees personal
dignity, if this is possible. H. Mina upholds the banner of
responsible optimism in Harvest where he proves that the mili-
tant can take hold of his destiny. We find also such a promi-
nent novelist as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra writes about the terrified
individual in his latest novel, The Other Rooms. Noteworthy is
the fact that Jabra, in his previous novels, has been haunted by
the abstract problems of life and death, perfect beauty and the
individual who builds his own heaven on earth.
The significance of the Arab novel is not only seen in its
defense of human, moral and patriotic values, but also in its
artistic structure, and its belonging to a specific society and
history. While defending the national cultural identity, the
Arab novel tries to achieve its cultural identity through
restoration of the literary-cultural heritage and coming close to
the popular culture, to folklore. In other words, it tries to build
a bridge between the literary past and present, to be a link in
the literary-cultural chain which has a history, rather than be-
ing a literary genre that is borrowed, transplanted or imported.
The features of The Arabian Nights, for example, are explicitly
or implicitly present in The Search for Walid Masoud by
Jabra, White Faces by Khouri, etc. The classical Arab culture
is Clear in the works of A. Munif, R.B. Jadra, as is the use of
the popular tale in the works of H. Mina, Emile Habibi of
Palestine and Jamal Ghaitani of Egypt, who goes even farther
and tries to make use of the religious culture, ancient Arab ar-
chitecture and the books of history. Ghaitani’s Al Zaini
Barakat, Schemes and Manifestations present a picture of his
contradictory endeavor to construct a current novel with
cultural materials of the past, leading the novelist, from time
to time, to the verge of total formalism.
In brief, while approaching the real problems of the Arab
situation, the Arab novel is driven to look for its literary
materials within this reality itself, in order to produce its
specific artistic form. Approaching reality is also reflected in
the language of the novel, creating a vivid prose, far from the
abstract rhetoric which is associated with the religious culture
and abstract nationalist ideology. Traditional culture, its
religious version in particular, considers that linguistic rhetoric
lies in the imitation of the original religious texts; it considers
the abstract book a point of reference; whereas the novel looks
for its language in its search for the everyday subject which it
depicts; it establishes an objective link between the word and
the subject it refers to. Therefore, the novel, in addition to the
press, is the essential sphere where Arabic is being developed
and rendered current. Thus, the novel is the main field where
the language is being liberated from the fetters of theology. It
is not strange that the narrow religious ideology has, from the
beginning of the century, opposed the novel, considering the
imaginary world of fiction to be a false image which distorts
reality and truth.
Basing itself on daily realities and protest against them, the
Arab novel is creating its readers who read about their pro-
blems in it and there find how they live and what they want to
say; hence the relationship of alliance and dialogue between the
novelist and the reader. It is a dialogue about the causes of the
current devastation and the means of overcoming it. At the
same time, it is an alliance between two parties rejecting the
same reality. The facts asserted in the Arab novel create the >
Democratic Palestine, June 89 - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 33
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