Amal Al-Saeedi
My friend talks to me about “literature in people’s daily lives.” She tells me that people in Chile quote Pablo Neruda all the time, despite their different educational levels, and that when you watch old Syrian soap operas, you can clearly see the relationship between us and the Arab heritage, but How obvious this is in today's world. It is an urgent question in what may seem like a world that cannot stop panting for a moment and turn to a story or a poem. My friend continues to say that what caught her attention in the incident of Hurricane Shaheen, which struck the Sultanate last October, is a quote that was widely circulated from the novel Al-Bag by the Omani writer Bushra Khalfan, “Oh, we connect Raba’a, O Wadi Raba’a paralyzes us” following the donation that took place in all parts of Oman for the areas affected by the storm Cyclone.
I think about this differently than trying to observe only these interrelated relationships with literature in our daily lives, but about how to replace it and what patterns we seem to need more than before. Let us consider one example. I turned around, my reader friend. Do you see anyone who is comfortable with his work? Doesn't it seem that we are almost going crazy in the places where we work, and that we are more likely to realize Kafka's cockroach in his novel The Transformation: “Gregor Samsa woke up from his disturbing dreams, one morning, to find himself in his bed transformed into a giant insect” fleeing from the company in which he works for long hours Under the command of an authoritarian and merciless administration, so that when they start looking for him, he would like to prove to them that what prevented him from committing to work was that he had become a giant insect and could not get out of bed, not because he neglected work of his own will. We must, then, in the “iconic” case of Kafka, reproduce our dealings with him, not as alienated and gloomy, but rather look deeply into his prophecy about the new slavery of work, comically in his desire not to remedy the disaster that suddenly befell him in his transformation into an insect, but rather his desperate desire More in justifying himself to his subordinates at work.
Another example is our constant search for sources of distraction. It is said that the gloom of the night is caused by the fact that for a few moments we confront ourselves without the noise of the outside world, although most of us spend the last part of the night before going to sleep flipping through our mobile phone, either by watching clips It is our last attempt to expel all causes of tension and surrender to a state of hypnotic repetition that afflicts us in repeating something that we do not need to get tired of thinking about. We suffer from abnormal wandering, and the times when we can focus have become exceptional. As soon as you open your book, after two pages you will want to monitor your phone alerts, and so on. Perhaps in this case we need to replace experimental literature that engages the reader in the reading process, closer to interactive literature. I strayed for a moment while reading, I had to go back from the beginning, and I specifically suggest reading the German writer Zibald.
Zibald not only puts us into a mode of concentration test, but also creates a state of slowing down time, already ruined, in reconsidering this ruin, and building something from the dust of what was shattered as we pass through what we call “human civilization.” Even our losses can form a receptive world To live in it, and listen to it. By the way, Zibald, in the times between his academic lectures in the universities where he taught, was looking for abandoned places and taking pictures of them. He was obsessed with this, and you can feel the energy of this margin in what he writes, far from abundance, far from even the magnitude of things, and their luster, turning around. For things that are dim, buried, and very distracting. And after he grasps with both hands these matte things, he puts them in a context that leads to the unity of existence, not the “unity of existence” as presented by the knowledgeable in its romanticism, but rather a unity that proves to us the connection of everything with everything else, and about the secret threads that we will not succeed as long as we run in confession In it, the threads of the effect of a butterfly that causes a hurricane in another part of the world, the fire of the Khedive opera in Egypt, and the pallor under Kafka's eyes while he spends his last days in the sanatorium suffering from tuberculosis.
Max Norman, at the end of last month, November 2021, made a new attempt to write a portrait of Zibald, and he began by referring to him as a life writer. It is worth noting that when Zibald was asked to classify the literary genre in which he writes, he called it “a book of indefinite prose,” weaving his worlds out of the chaos of history and writing his biography. Isn't he then a writer of life? Zibald, according to Norman, is characterized by stubbornness to put the elements of his story together, as he is forced to cross borders through archives of all kinds all the time, chasing the turmoil of the twentieth century in painful remembrance. Zibald has developed an anti-authority attitude since his adolescence. He is said to have been the first in his city to wear jeans. He has always been unhappy. What happened in Germany has broken him. He has moved away from home and reinvented himself as Max. The Third Reich still floats in the halls.” Zibald accompanies us in a state similar to a slip in which intimacy evaporates into suspicion, and recurring coincidences emerge on the surface of his writing, as patterns and dates recur, and no matter how different the images with which he supports his prose, they create folds in space and time at the same time. And in this same repetition we discover the fragility of meaning and the way history and biography are constructed—and discarded—through our thirst for coherence.
It doesn't matter if we will be comfortable with what we read about Zibald's works and his characters. People rarely feel comfortable looking at the intersection between Zibald's personalities and members of his readers' families. But I insist, through this article, on invoking the value of stubbornness, as a basic direction in our attempt to slow this frenzy that we call Behind our lives. There is a lot that I want to say and I may dedicate episodes to it across this space, but as a daily event that can make a difference, my friend Sarah is in a period of her stay in one country and her husband is in another because of the pandemic. He read to her on the phone, Neruda’s poems to his beloved Matilda, which were published in Arabic with more than A translation of her, including “Twenty Love Poems and Desperate Songs,” and translated from the Spanish by Marwan Haddad, I like to imagine her listening to a passage: “I was as lonely as a tunnel. Birds avoided me / and the night penetrated me with its tyrannical invasion. / In order to save myself, I forged from you a weapon / an arrow for my bow, a stone for my sling... O my thirst, my endless longing, my perplexed path! From his favorite poem I Have a Woman's Body.
