When an Arab woman writes about the unspoken, or about the female, or about what is impermissible in the eyes of our societies, she gives us a number of secrets that men, in my opinion, cannot comprehend, and therefore we find ourselves facing texts that reflect the tensions and dreams of the female with many aesthetics. Honesty and mastery of the events that you touch upon. In this field, a novel has recently been published under the title: “The Higher Horizon” by the Saudi writer Fatima Abdel Hamid, on the publications of Miscliani. In which I touched on the reality of the child Suleiman, whose mother married him to Nabila, who is ten years older than him, and he was only thirteen years old. As if this mother's act reflects a preoccupation with the child's marriage to a wife who has a set of characteristics and messages, the beloved mother, the friend, the sister. It is a novel that, in its outward appearance, seems easy to read, but the content of its chapters ranges between the past and the present, between the life of Suleiman the child who plays with his fellow children and has fun with them, not caring about life, and the mother's tyrannical decision to prevent him from enjoying, in one way or another, his childhood. This marriage results in the formation of a family of three children. He lives a life that neither his wife is comfortable with, because he is unable to bear the burdens of marriage, and therefore, she is not completely satisfied with it, so she lives with a set of differences and questions. Time passes without success in putting an end to this marriage, as the wife lived divided between the demands of the mother, the children, and the suffocating social context. This is what the creator presents to us, forming the chapters of her novel between wit and depth at the same time, as if she is asking, or waiting for us, to question ourselves and to question the relationship that unites us with the only being that all humans reject, the Angel of Death.
Nabila dies in an accident and leaves Suleiman alone. He relied on his wife at first to manage his household affairs, along with his children. “His mother leaves him, then his wife, so there is nothing left of them but their shadows that order him not to forget the open balcony door.” (From the novel) But he does not take through grandfather their commandments, because he began to discover himself little by little, as long as he is in his house. One day, he forgot the balcony door open, which allowed him to get to know his neighbor through their balcony, where he began to get close to her, and to exchange words with her on the topic of cooking, so that this meeting turned into a daily appointment, and turned into a sense of the human self that was not crowned in it, to find Love in the form of a gentle shadow on the opposite balcony. However, death, which gave Solomon a new opportunity to build the houses of sulfur that he had been deprived of since his youth, is the one who tells us his story of demolishing them one after the other, from his higher horizon, mocking man and his perseverance in a life that is, in fact, play and amusement.
«The value of this work lies in its celebration of the simple human details, the daily details that a person lives in and shapes his features and his humanity far from universal concepts, and the narrator in it, who is death, is nothing but a camera that moves between places to convey to us what happens every day. Does the reader really need the resonance of major issues or the mask of history? Is it not possible to understand an aspect of life by getting to know a lonely man on a balcony, whenever a woman leaves his life, he shines? Through this relationship, Suleiman discovers himself again, and his life becomes meaningful, although his neighbor was married, but she, too, discovered his sincerity, unity, and the nobility of his feelings. We also discover through this relationship what happened to the life of his children, and their discovery of the story of their father with his neighbor, as if the novelist activates the intertwined human relations of the development of events in the family of Suleiman, on the one hand, and in the entourage of the neighbor on the other hand. In this way, she exposes social hypocrisy, and restores women to their position and role, in that they aspire to a higher horizon that is in line with their dreams in a society that monitors all their steps, to limit the size of their desires and aspirations to continue their dream of behaving in the course of their lives as they wish, throwing aside the interference of others in their lives.
Tayeb Ould Laroussi – Paris
