Confusion wraps the path of novelist and poet Raafat Al-Sunusi from Upper Egypt to Iraq; through the voice of Shahin, the protagonist of his novel "Karada Mariam" named after the prominent Baghdad district now known as "the Green Zone," myriad questions break free to erupt on every page of the 249-page novel in pocket size.
The maze of the novel's narrative doesn't end with one mystery only to open another, revealing the novelist's failure to find an optimal path for his life and wonder—even in love, which is supposed to symbolize tranquility and peace. He finally decides that "love is a major destruction; behind big mistakes, there lies a great love."
The protagonist convinces himself that his tiny village and his world are open to sufferings and death over trivialities, "in our country, drought surrounds us, and troubles besiege our emotions, like all our Arabic lands."
From Poetry to Novel
Al-Sunusi represents a creative condition that extends beyond novel writing to eloquent poetry, as evidenced by the French translation of his poetry collection "Fatiha for the Book of Seals" by "É Delivery" in Paris (2020). His seven published books reflect his puzzlement toward a reality he sees as extremely harsh, worthy only of the overflowing questions that prompt him to search for a savior from his accumulating predicaments that nearly envelop all the countries he visited through his novel's protagonist.
The novelist insists on revealing the wandering of diverse characters; including Egyptian, Iraqi, Jewish, Sudanese, Belgian, among others, encompassing the spectrum of humanity. From the enduring evil in the guise of the authoritative mayor who disdains all that is beautiful, to the innocent and life-surrendering beloved Khadija, passing through Jasser, the son of the Jewish narrator similar to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" hero; Jasser is the contemporary version of Shylock who sells his friend Antonio, demanding a pound of flesh in return for an unsettled amount.
Intertwined Narration
The novel was written while the author was living abroad near the end of 2019, filled mostly with poetry since he dedicated it to "the loved ones who lived in my novels," although the writer doesn't have another published novel other than "Pomegranate Hill," released in 2017.
Love for the narrator mixes with tenderness reminiscent of the character of Khadija, who "passed like a phantom and my heart followed her, I called it and it did not listen to me, oh what a stubborn heart, insisting on fulfilling its share from a losing love," as the novel's hero says.
However, the novel doesn't stop at love but attempts to reach wisdom, stating about estrangement, "What is alienation but a grave that one enters willingly and alive and from which one is resurrected when tormented by longing and nostalgia."
In the novel, the protagonist goes to Iraq at the end of the 1990s and returns after the fall of Baghdad, letting the author's technique of retrospective narration form the foundation of the story.
The Dense Sorrows
Al-Sunusi sees the fall of Baghdad as a major divide in contemporary Arab history, letting the event devastate the kind-hearted characters in his work, revealing their fragility and their failures in facing successive challenges, especially with "the strangers who died in their estrangement and came in their caskets tightly sealed with tin foil, with the dry air of alienation in their nostrils, and a longing for their loved ones that God did not decree to be extinguished by reunion."
The writer describes everyone as "tired," even inanimate objects themselves, and says through one of his characters in Upper Egypt, "I pushed the door which then wailed loudly as if I had stabbed it with a knife," while in the known Baghdad district "close to vital facilities and presidential palaces," weariness took hold of everyone "just like Hashem's fleeting dream of gathering hearts in his grandmother's shawl only to scatter them again."
