Zuhair Al-Hiti: Iraq’s Long Night

Iraqi novelist Zuhair Al-Hiti chooses the character of “Saffron” in his new novel “The Nest of Warmers” (Dar Al-Saqi), to ignore current Iraqi themes in a narrative plot that does not aspire to escape the crisis of the individual and society as if there was no escape from a dystopia that makes the hero get involved in the cycle of murder. Their individual destiny closely resembles the collective destiny of pillage and slaughter. And “Nest of Embers” is the third novel in the novel after “American Dust” and “Days of Dust” (2017), which entered the long list of the “International Prize for Arabic Fiction – Booker”.

The novel is presented as an image no different than that of a nation trying to stand up, but otherwise tries to present a brief description of what is happening to the Iraqi individual as an individual within the community by telling the story of Saffron, the teacher who was sent to the village of Kish in the south to teach at the “Al-Nasr Al-Mu`azar” school. . At first, Saffron feels that this is a salvation for him from the traditions of the Sabian family, but then he drowns in the coal nest he finds in the village that hides historical monuments underneath. There Saffron begins to get involved in the stories, traditions and gossip of the town, as well as in the translation of the notes of the French prospector who discovers that he was assassinated by Thabet Ibn Sheikh Jaber, who will eventually kill Saffron and implicate him in Mariya’s story. , who escaped and his specter came to him early in his entry to Kish, because he refused to cooperate with him on the notes. The French Jean-Marie Rochar. The writer does not preach any salvation here, but gives his characters the opportunity to become even more involved and to drown without will.

This happens in the nineties during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the allied attack on Iraq, but this time frame suggests that all these political events are just a part of Iraq’s long night that is similar to the events of today. . It is a choice of a time in the past, but a reference to the similarity of the narratives, as if it were a preaching that what is happening today is what happened yesterday, and that Saffron is a person today and maybe tomorrow.
The novelist develops the narrative to reach the region of criticism, where he resolves conflicts Saffron is a Sabian and was treated as an outsider in Kish. It is, therefore, the crisis of the minorities, and Saffron is also seeking his freedom, despite his relationship with Halima, who made him feel that sexual freedom in the narrow context of the town, but she only got him into bigger problems, perhaps because that must be a condition of collective consciousness that was not present in Kish. Here, the novelist realizes that his characters are not completely detained, but even the liberation demonstrations are another form of escape that will not happen without the group feeling it and deciding it, since he fixes and puts a Mary pendant on his bedroom to implicate him in the group’s languages, and for Sheik Jaber, Maria’s grandfather, to take revenge for it. And there appears in this plot the desire to criticize this liberation, which does not grant the individual salvation, but which can engulf him more in embers.
Here, we must mention the atmosphere of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, despite the great difference between them. But in this novel the relationship between the rebellious individual and power is also clear, although George Orwell builds the place in the future, but there is a relationship between Winston Smith and the older brother, where the older brother was in power watching Winston Smith, and trying to suppress and control him, despite Winston’s rebellion. So he began asking questions, discussing them, and writing them down in his journal. Here in “The Embers’ Nest”, the relationship between Saffron and Sheikh Jaber, which everyone fears, and their son Thabit, is evident, as they implicate Saffron in the story of the looting of antiquities, and Thabet Saffron kills in the end. It is the relationship, then, between the dreamer and the rebellious individual, and between the authority represented also by the family, the clan and the existing system of thought. In the two narratives, too, the duplication of the narrative of the oppressor and the narrative of the rebel and the dreamer becomes clear as if they were intertwined, so that we can see in the end that the tribal authority represented by Sheikh Jaber will conquer it.

A writer’s choices about location and ending shape his artistic vision by narrating reality.

The event of getting rid of Saffron and killing him at the end comes parallel to another type of murder, which is a mass murder represented by the Allied attack on the village and the dumping of the bodies on the roads. As if this massive death and injustice that afflicts an entire country was no less important, but as the novelist put it in the novel, in a place that precedes the final event, which is to see the corpse of the crocus in the streets. It is a double injustice for the novelist to separate them to show that they are injustices of equal importance and magnitude. As if the Arab had also turned against himself and had become an enemy of himself. So the result is killing the individual and his idea and difference.
Hence, the novelist continues his journey in the extrapolation of Iraqi reality, but through contradictory and paradoxical facts, unlike his previous novel “Dust Days” which, through the reading of seven paintings, narrates reality Iraq today, and this brings us to a question about the art of narrative construction that reflects the writer’s vision. That may precede your perceptions and analysis of what is happening. In “The Embers’ Nest,” the writer’s place choices and conversations with the characters, as well as his choice of ending, shape his artistic vision by narrating reality. A vision that chooses to engage in it to shed light on its hidden and hidden contents in a novel that also has its aesthetic.
Therefore, the novel emerges as a dystopia that emerges from the embers of the place, but encourages society to read another deeper reading, and this is a sincere and frank invitation not to hide behind a preaching language because freedom is in a better reading of what is happening and what will happen alike. As if this is what we rediscover best in the arts, and as if we seek another vision to look at the fact that what is happening inside the novel is what is happening outside but with other names and perhaps other places, so Kish it turns all of Iraq, and perhaps a miniature image of Arab life that is like. It seems that the current Arab novel does not want to escape its black thread.

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