Amine Zoui, in mourning for Algerian society

In “Mashurat al-Ikhtaf” / Dhifaf, the Algerian novelist Amin al-Zawi, “Al-Bash Kateb”, published his fourteenth novel, completely different from what we used to do in his previous works. Al-Zawi writes the novel based on the fun and play of the story, but with his own philosophical vision, the story is a way of moving on to the topics he wants to delve into. He writes his own visions in the taboo box that occupies it and holds back Arab and Maghreb society. They are narrative texts insofar as they touch the forbidden fire, but they clearly address the concerns and problems of contemporary man. Amin Al-Zawy is a novelist known for the audacity to which we are always accustomed to presenting the issues of Algerian society from his point of view, be it in his Arabic or French novels or in his articles that he writes on Arabic or French platforms. . The writer raises more questions than answers, and literature that doesn’t shake you from the inside and get you up, whether you agree with the writer or not, is not politely, but cold painkillers. The reader of the novel “Al-Bash Kateb” will be fully aware that Amin Zawawi wanted to fight against some forms of political and religious populism that have come to control Algerian society. He also speaks of a system that tried to strip the Algerian people of everything positive and destroy them psychologically and economically to serve the interests of the new oligarchy and the political mafia that works for certain parties and that never wanted the good of Algeria.

In the novel we read many passages that refer to the regime that mortgaged Algeria to a gang that practiced political oppression and ignorance, since the writer presents the mentality with which the regime deals with Algeria as if it were its own heritage. Deer! The desert gave Ghazlan to them when they saved him from the desert of terror, unity and legal pursuit.
The novel talks about the manifestations of corruption and hypocrisy and how the conditions were during the Bouteflika government until the movement that made Algeria finally shake the dust of its children, so that they come out every Tuesday and Friday waiting for the Algeria of hearts and not the Algeria of the enclaves where officials ravaged corruption.
If we want to classify the novel “Al-Bash Kateb” in terms of al-Qaa stylistic and philosophical vision, then it is framed within the so-called modernist novel, but it can also be said that it is a psychological novel that examines the reincarnation of the souls of the book of the Caliphs and Kings, beginning with Yahya bin Khaldoun, Ibnid Ammar and his endings and Abdibul Ammar. The painful and horrifying and the relationship of all this to the innuendo and concerns of Ammar Al-Nasakh (Al-Bash Kateb), one of the characters in the novel and the president’s writer.
The novel also tells the story of the character of Bob Marley, which is the nickname given to the fictional character Mahdi Akhrif, that spontaneous and sincere artist, who does not hesitate to serve others and help his neighbors. Bob Marley is the incarnation of every young Algerian persecuted for the love of life and freedom in a country that suppressed all its forms, living with his cat Santa Monica, who shared housing and the same amount with him. The writer described through Mahdi Akhrif (Bob Marley), an Algerian citizen and his tired psyche, when he was at the police station telling the agent in a confession of psychological evacuation much of his childhood, which he maintained in his old age and refused not to leave it.
“We carry some stories with us under our skin. They cannot be forgotten, or their place in memory can be ceded to other stories. No story can forget another story.” The author described, in painful words, the way Mahdi Akhrif recounted the death of his father’s cow and her crying for him, and his sister’s call for beer (spinster). In the Algerian description in particular, she is considered an insult to a girl simply because her younger sisters were married before her.
He travels with these details listed in a painful and realistic way, annoyed and heartbroken, because he is sure that this is what is really going on in society, where the individual and the university are also drowning in a number of satisfying, corrupt and past, and the novel “Al-Basha Kateb” seems sincere and bold in exposing what is happening within this society. The way the hero describes his mother is a very deep and beautiful philosophical way. An Algerian is a mother with taste and culture. She considers her mother her first lover.
The novel also tells about the character of “Edir Ozlagan”, the supposed baby who used to work during the liberation war as a flower seller for a European woman. You will bequeath her place after independence, and we will find Idir fighting against the ugliness of the civil war that Algeria lived through between 1990-2000 while also preserving the tradition of selling roses and music, close friend of Bob Marley, Mahdi Akhrif.

Combat some forms of prevailing political and religious populism

The novel also talks about coexistence through the character of Mrs. Danielle, for whom the father worked, and recalls the departure of the lawyer and feminist Giselle Halimi, whom we lost a while ago. Despite the wave of violence and assassinations that were targeted by Algerians of European descent. She decided to stay with and with those whom she defended, and her consolation was that she had maintained a solid relationship with a woman named Maryam Ban, a poet and painter, and she was her best friend and also preferred to stay in Medina. Algeria can accommodate everyone. She used to tell me that, and give me some money to donate to the imam of the neighborhood mosque who wants to change the rugs in the prayer room. ” As for the phrase that really hurt me the most, it was when the “Bash Kateb” character said it when recalling her childhood years in the village: “When I put on my glasses, I felt the absence of my father.” A phrase that made me think carefully: Is the absence a psychological state associated with visual vision, or does the fulfillment of the need make us more painful, that is, that he did not feel the absence of his father until the vision was made clear? From my simple perspective as a reader, truth and knowledge in this life do not come but pain is synonymous with them, that is, the more we learn we suffer, and the more we achieve what we want, we lose what we lost.
The novel “Al-Bash Kateb” deals with what happens in our lives through the point of view of the one who has everything and the one who has nothing. Through this, she is trying to give us a new understanding that allows us to understand that salvation is one of the pains that makes us innovate.
In the novel “Al-Bash Kateb” there are many philosophical questions presented in the form of stories and facts, without a “conceptual” or “elitist” discourse. It is a novel that writes the dangerous areas of our lives through history, through smooth narration, and Amin al-Zawy in that is similar to Ibn Tufail in “Hayy Bin Yaqzan” or Voltaire in “Kindid”. Great things, when we understand and represent them, can be spoken or presented with simplicity and surprising simplicity. The novel “Al-Bash Kateb” is one of these texts that will be immortalized in the history of Arabic narrative, with its theme, narrative method and its high language between the narrator and the poet.

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