A visitor to Cairo recalls the lanes of Naguib Mahfouz while he is walking in the streets, which means the success of the author of “The Children of Our Alley” in linking the reader and suspending him with the spirit of the place. The space of the place (the geographical space of the narrative works) is an essential pillar in the structure of the text. Externally, or a theater on which events take place, rather it is an event maker and semantics, and is replete with symbolic dimensions in immortal works, and since not every narration is charming; Not every charmer encourages contemplation and moving from reality to the imaginary, and from the imaginary to reality. Revitalizing the space of the place is a skill, while killing it is a failure. Here we wonder about the narratives that prompted us to track the place on the ground, based on our attachment to it through attractive and seductive writing by moving from the margins to the text. And vice versa.
Yemeni novelist Wajdi al-Ahdal confirms that not all Arabic novels have done this, but the best ones have risen to this high artistic summit. Al-Ahdal explained that the element of place must dominate the novel, otherwise it will be semi-novel. He drew attention to the novels of Ibrahim Al-Koni, which presented the desert with its people, its nomads and its myths, so that souls longed for its pastures, and the great novels of Naguib Mahfouz, which took the Egyptian neighborhood as a site for its events and magical worlds. He reconciles fact and fiction, referring to the novel “The Homeless” by Jabbour Al Douaihy, which described the city of Beirut in the seventies, and the novel “Steamer Point” by Ahmed Zain, which described the city of Aden in the sixties, and other novels that were written with professionalism and maturity, so the reader’s soul longs to visit this places and inspect them, and look at what is left of them and what has disappeared. Al-Ahdal added: In general, the professional novelist tends to describe the place accurately, as if he is a geographical traveler exploring a new part of the earth, which he himself is fascinated by, and he does his best to convey what his eyes saw to the readers with sincere artistic honesty.
While the critic Fathi Abdel Samie believes that the importance of the novel does not lie in its ability to describe real places and present them in a way that incites us to visit them, however, many novels drew our attention to some places in an exciting way, because when the novelist looks artistic at the real place, he rediscovers it and creates it again. The place is from our ordinary looks, and focuses on the details and merges them with souls and bodies, adding to it light and beauty, and confirmed the presence of many realistic places that we go to and in our minds the novelist who wrote about them, and Naguib Mahfouz counted Cairo as one of the clearest indicative examples. He added: Despite all this, success remains limited. Cairo – for example – needs many souls to wash it, and we need more than Cairo, not just Mahfouz's Cairo, because many places need novelists' looks, language, and revealing worlds.
The novelist Ali al-Amir argues that the place, in itself in the novel, is much more important than time, and no less important than the event, except that – according to al-Amir – it does not constitute a space in his perception, unless the writer can completely separate the reader from his reality; To plant it in the place where the events of the novel take place, or any partial event in it, so that the reader forgets for a moment that he is reading a novel that is made of imagination; Because all his senses are completely immersed in the narrative space, he sees, hears, smells, and almost feels the bodies crowding around him. He added: What I am saying seems to be an exaggeration that is difficult to comprehend. Therefore, I will give an example that I touched myself through a call I received from a poetess who read my novel “Qaa al-Yahud.” She used to say that she did not visit Sana’a, but she did visit it through the novel, and then she asserted that the reason for my success in taking her there was because I was writing about events that I lived personally, and when I was exiled My relationship with the events and that it was made by the imagination, she said: Impossible, and focused on the scene that took place in front of the restaurant cashier, confirming that she saw me personally in the clothes of the hero, and that she lived with me all the details and atmosphere of the place, smelled the smells, crowded in the queue, heard the tone of the speakers, and lived real moments , it is difficult for the imagination to conjure it, and she did not believe that the whole scene was imagined, indicating that the place actually formed a space in the novel.
It is not easy for the spirit of the place to be present
The novelist Abdulaziz Al-Saqabi did not hide his confusion when expressing his opinion on local, Arab and international creative works, indicating that talking about the space of place in the Saudi novel requires me to be familiar with all publications or at least a large part of them, but for many reasons, the most important of which is poor distribution. His knowledge of the fictional works published in the Kingdom during the past years is limited. Al-Saqabi said: I think that introducing the name of a neighborhood, a street, a famous place, or of course the name of a city, does not fully reflect the place in reality. This affects the event, and I find this present in recent writings, which indicates that it is not easy at all for the spirit of the place to be present, and it is a challenge for every novelist, especially when he begins to write his novel. Al-Saqabi wondered: Is the space of the place in his novel realistic or imaginary? And he answers: If he was imaginary, would he have the ability to convince the reader that this place exists? He believes that it is remarkable that the place is strongly present in the titles of the Saudi novel, whether cities such as Taif, Riyadh, Buraidah, and others, or streets and neighborhoods such as Al-Karadeeb, Al-Adamah, Al-Atayef, Al-Dahu, Al-Asha Street, and others. However, he did not find anything motivating him to track down the narrator in the place he described, and he goes on to say that we need a long and intensive writing practice to reach the ability to breathe life into the place, including the desert to which we belong to some extent, because the novel and the story in the Kingdom did not reach an exploration Its depths, such as the Touareg novel by “Fikeroa”, which I read years ago with a group of novels by the writer, as he accurately described many places in the desert, and in general there are multiple spaces for places in the Kingdom, with its vast area and environmental and geographical diversity. Al-Saqabi added: In my capacity as one of the writers of novels in the Kingdom with a group of male and female writers, who live by writing (I hope so), and are keen to present different and distinctive works, and I seek an excuse for not mentioning any name, but there is a challenge because the most readable tends to works dealing with the world Imaginary jinn, leaving all spaces of space and time. And he confirms that he is not against the trend towards fantasy and fantasy, except that we need a lot to be close to our environment in order to proceed from it to a broader horizon, and for the novelist to move from the space of reality to the space of the spatial and temporal imagination. There are novels that express the space of place in the Kingdom, according to the experience and ability of each novelist. creative, but he hopes that every novelist from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will accumulate the experience; To have him or her, such as the Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante, or the Naguib Mahfouz trio, or Hamzatov, and the examples are many. He looked forward to reading in the near future more than one novel whose author could honestly express the space of the place.
Ali Al-Rubai (Al-Baha) @Al_ARobai
