The stories of the authors who wrote and died like "immigrants, displaced people, or displaced exiles whose countries were broken by the days did not reach their fate."
Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat arrived in the shortlist before the jury of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced that she had won her 128-page novel for the 2019 Arab World Prize for Arabic Fiction at an official ceremony held on Tuesday evening in Abu Dhabi. .
Born in Beirut in 1952, Barakat has specialized in contemporary literature and has moved to France since the beginning of her life. She has won the $ 50,000 cash prize and translated her novel into English. The English version of the novel "The Night of the Night" United Kingdom 2020, according to the official poker prize site.
The "Night Post" was chosen by the jury as the best fiction work published between July 2017 and June 2018 and was selected from six novels on the short list of authors from Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco.
The five shortlisted candidates were honored at the ceremony: Kafi Al Zu'bi, Shahla Al Ajili, Adel Esmat, Inam Kaghi, and Mohammad Al Maizouz.
The jury of 2019 included Sharafuddin Magdolin (Chairman of the Committee), a Moroccan academic and critic specializing in aesthetics, verbal and visual studies and comparative studies, and Fawzia Abu Khaled, poet, writer, academic and researcher of Saudi Arabia on social and political issues, and Zulikha Abu Risha, poet, columnist, researcher and activist On women's issues and human rights from Jordan, Latif Zeitouni, a Lebanese academic and critic, and Zhang Hong Yi, a Chinese academic, translator and researcher.
Mail does not arrive
Barakat, who learned in the press and taught in her novel, tells five stories through five messages of different people that the reader learns through this evening message, which is echoed in letters similar to those of tormentors or confessions of the last hours of the night.
She wrote the novel in simple simple language, a language of letters written by ordinary people are the protagonists of the stories, and used the writer's style of narrative scattering, which gives an additional hint of lost and lost doubles the impact of confessions expatriate expatriates themselves.
The first section "Behind the Window" includes letters from a man to his lover, another to an absent and waiting old lover, and a third from a son to his mother telling her about the change in his condition after the prison, and a homosexual person outcasts his father and a sister's letter to her brother, , While the third section deals with the "death of the prostitute" or the story of the postman who leaves the fate of messages hanging, open and endless.
The images in the novel are carefully drawn, each story almost invariably linked to the other, and dominated the language of the classical novel, despite the little slang that is expressed in the messages that are full of complaint and shame and remorse or apathy.
The book deals with the wars of the Middle East, murder and widespread ignorance. The novel criticizes Arab governments and insults the clergy and Eastern communities. It explains how the book turned into addiction, prostitution, prostitution and even homosexuality.
The novel has been criticized by some readers for its exaggerated "vilification" of the clergy and even the religions themselves, and some critical comments have also taken what they consider to be "exaggeration in portraying sex, shame and anomalies."
Every story has another face we do not know
The winning novel looks like a mixture of pain, grief, whining, and poverty, which the writers of letters have suffered. It deals with human feelings, falls, masks, and even human atrocity that may be denied by their owners, but they are manipulated, manipulating messages and moving from person to person.
And almost certainty disappears in the events of the novel, the killer may not be a criminal and prostitute prostitute, it doubles doubt and lose with the limits and standards and even places and times.
And the protagonists of the novel, some of them lived civil wars and violent events and destruction and losses and fears and major disappointments, and resulted in the mix of complaints enveloping the scattered novel, and turn them to become other people, and write messages almost from strangers to other strangers!
Even the joy of the postman's success in handing over the letters, wasted by the loss of headlines and the destruction of the streets, "When the war is over, they will search for street names long and may give them new names according to who wins."
(2000). She also has two plays, a collection of stories and a diary. She was awarded two high honors by the French Republic and also awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for 2000. From the American University in Cairo.
In her interview with the poker prize site, Barakat said that what prompted her to formulate the novel in its final form was "the scenes of migrants fleeing their countries in death boats, and the world view of them as an unwanted mass or as a virus threatening civilization."
"This does not mean that I want Western countries to start the borders or to look at them as angels," Barkat said, "I just wanted to listen to life in the desert of this world." I hope that this story has heard so many fragile sounds that are being judged Understanding or a referendum that brought it to what it has become. "
The winning novel seems simple and straightforward, as if it were pushing the reader to write his own letter or confession, and he might write it like those lost from the book of lost letters. Who knows?