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In her new novel, “My Father’s City”, published by “Dar Al Adab”, the writer speaks in the language of her main character, Nabil, who returns to Mudarib, “Her Father’s City”, to bury him in she. He tries to reside and discover the city where his father entered the prison, but when he left, he fled from his city to Europe, to the city of Garbia, which is the city of his mother. Alienation in the novel does not seem to be a division between two worlds or two cities, but rather a return to “here” and seeing “there” as a distant world. Nabil goes to the mudarib to stay there, but like the hero of his writing story, he sinks into the darkness of the city, as if looking there for his father and not finding him. It is the internal alienation where Nabil feels lonely and the person he seeks is himself in a world that thinks in collective logic and does not respect the individual. The novelist moves between two titles for all the chapters: “The city that does not know the sea” and “El Mudarib”. Later we discover that “the city that does not know the sea” is the story written by the protagonist of the novel Nabil.
Perhaps the meaning of “moving” between these two titles or chapters is a reflection of what it means to also live in language, which is a very real world that occurs in parallel with reality. Here is the story that Nabil writes in dialogue and discusses his true personality. What the difference is that it does not have names, but its vocabulary is metaphorical, it speaks of darkness, nightmare and water that you do not want to drink like other people.
The author here poses the dilemma of the intellectual as if he were the organic intellectual of which Gramsci spoke. He is not the intellectual who lives in the signs of his delirium and lies to himself and to the people, since this character was represented by the free woman who was presented to Nabil, and a love relationship arose between them that was not crowned by him. marriage because of the way of thinking of her divorced poet who does not think about her or her son, and refuses to allow her son to live with him. A stranger threatens to take it from her if she marries. Here two different characters are shown to understand the culture. Although Nabil also writes, writing is not an immersion in a metaphorical world separated from its reality, since Sana was free. Writing for Nabil was about laying your hand on a real wound and understanding his role as an individual.
Although Nabil does not lose hope, he discovers that he is in a city that wants to kill his soul. Before him appears the world of “here” as harsh as the world of “there.” Although the “here” persecutes you as an individual, the “there” persecutes other peoples with its racial discrimination. That is why Nabil writes about the hero of his story “The city that never knows the sea” who in the end chooses the means at his disposal to preserve his survival, which is to hide from him, and that is the real dilemma. But the writer chooses another ending for her hero, Nabil. Although Sana is killed in an honor killing her brother commits because she knows her relationship with Nabil, Nabil chooses to turn to the profiteer to get revenge on those who killed her. It seems that here the critique of reality is immersing itself in it to see it as it is. As if the mission of the writer was to discover and reveal. Getting out of trouble is the hero, but he doesn’t see escape as the answer. He proposes another return to his father’s city to get revenge, not to find out this time. It seems that the horizon of love is blocked and it is not the only salvation, it also complains about the restrictions that surround it, so that love itself becomes a victim.
The author poses the dilemma of the intellectual as if he were the organic intellectual of which Gramsci spoke.
The writer does not give his hero an aura, although he is educated and comes from another world, but at the same time he sometimes gets involved in this collective logic and takes care of it to avoid its dangers, so he is sometimes forced to say things contrary to what you believe. As for the characters, they overlap and are similar at times, so Sanaa seems to be the other face of Nabil and has been killed as the one victimized by him, and Nabil is another face of the one killed by him, his father and the hero. of the story you are writing. The whole is a victim, not the woman alone, and this is what makes masculinity an intellectual system. This intertwining of the characters reminds us that life gives us faces, we try to add special features to them in our imagination, that is why different questions are asked to make them unique, and this is what the writer did. It is a game to repeat the same things, as they happen in the city. Once the writer tells a chapter about speculators, and once about the city that does not know the sea, even if it is the same story, it is an attempt to narrate it as the hero sees it. We feel that we are in front of a mirror that is the mirror of the writer, that makes us see things from Nabil’s point of view as if it were another of his faces and his role in criticizing the prevailing cultural systems, as he says on his lips. from Sana: “Everyone began to repeat the shouts of the crowd with ornate words.”
“The city of my father” is a novel about internal alienation in a world that does not like the difference, so the individual cannot dissolve or propose to flee, so that he remains stagnant analyzing and seeing things and at the same time time do not lose hope.
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