The Forgotten Travel of the Memory of the Algerian Revolution

Nizar Al-Farawi-Rabat

Algerian writer Abdul Wahab Issawi writes his novel "The Book of Forgotten Works" at the heart of the question of national memory, which remains a burning ember in the bet of the state and society, the country of the million martyrs.

The novel, which was awarded the Katara Prize for the Arabic novel in the category of "unpublished novels" and recently published in its publications, is writing a national political time between the war of liberation and its promises, dreams and promises and the stage of the independent state with its disappointments, illusions and forgetfulness.

As for those who forget the novel, the mind reverts to the record of their epics, and Abdel Wahab Issawi chooses - as an embodiment of them - an icon in the pain and silence of each voice. It is the body of "Abbas" that martyr who fell on the field of honor, and has been stuck until today in a deep cliff awaits a formal move to extract, and thus remove the thorn impede the path of the country called for the liberation of its future through the fulfillment of the memory.

Live epics from the time of liberation
Is a novel penetrating epic epic in the diary of the armed struggle for freedom, write the plight and glories, disintegration of the rings and restore the conduct of men, but it still remains the novel of the moment and moment excellence, the present, which attend the damage embodied in the sin of forgetfulness committed against the Knights of Freedom who were Firewood independence did not achieve its promises.

As for the writer, he said in statements to Al-Jazeera Net that the novel does not hold the present as much as it was a celebration of that stage, because it was written under the romantic look of that time.

"There may have been one issue concerning freedom, and therefore there is one enemy, and now we are the enemies of some," he said, With many qualities, perhaps the first of which is revolutionary legitimacy. "

"The body of the martyr may be the true revolutionary values ​​that he abandoned from the independence of Algeria," he says. "After more than 50 years, they still speak his name without him. Offer a successful project at the humanitarian or even economic level for the two generations that came after independence. "

The novel, which is located in 335 pages, begins with a cover of the artist Fatima Al-Naimi, in the present and the end. When Issa Farraj, the son of the town of Djelfa, receives a letter from the companion of the weapon who became minister, The body of their companion in the war of liberation, "Abbas", and ends with a conclusion filled with conflicting feelings of Jesus standing on the shelf during the start of the recovery.

Abdel Wahab Issawi is wearing a film hat. He uses Flashback techniques to create two times that do not rotate, but overlap and coexist. The portrayal of the battles and armed movements in the highlands and forests reflects a deep visual culture, so that the confrontations are documented with a living documentary dimension, with a more dramatic projection of a process of visualization of the natural space, drawing the movement of the characters and arranging the stages of encroachment.

Imagination and documentation
The author presents elements to answer this visual depth in the novel. "Simply because I used documentary films and memos about resisters who lived in the diary of this stage and without it ... Recently, these notes were printed, so I took more interest in them than the history books that dealt with the stage."

Essaoui experiences his experience in an extended narrative river, the source of which is the memory of the Algerian revolution, which, for nearly six decades, has provided generations of Algerian literature with fertile material to hold the historic event on the one hand, sometimes glorifying and criticizing the other, or to hold the gate of that past past with long-awaited dreams and promises. , A fulfillment of the blood that has come to love the homeland.

Although it is natural for this stage to be present in the texts of pioneers such as writer Yassin, Mohammed Deeb, Mouloud Faroun, Rachid Boujdra, Tahir Watar, Mouloud Maamri and Wassini El A'arj, the subject remained in the new texts of young people born after independence, such as Issawi, 34.

The continuity does not obscure the multiplicity of approaches and angles, but it generally reflects the weight of the relationship with memory in the deep structure of the Algerian state and society. The black decadence produced a dark cloud that was consciously suppressed by educated and creative elites, but it did not create an alternative memory; it was perhaps their campaign to dig deeper into the pages of the national liberation process to try to understand the tragic tragedies that led to it.

In a study entitled "The Novel and the National Memory: The Dialogue of Literature and History," Fayed Mohamed, critic of Makhlouf Amer, said that the Algerian novelist found himself "between the jaws of a past tense and the traumas of the transformed reality. By mentioning it as phases. "

This return brings to the novelist the question of the boundary between the visual and the historical, one of the most difficult questions faced by the historical novel, according to Issawi, which confirms that "the general vision of this novel is almost real in most events, or within the possibility of occurrence, Performed in the words of Milan Condera. "

It is worth mentioning that the crowning of Katara is not the first in the path of the young writer, who recently published the novel "The Spartan Diwan". He won the first prize for the novel in the Presidential Competition (2012) for his film "Cinema Jacob", and won the Asia Jabbar Prize for the novel, the highest in Algeria, the "Sierra de Muerti" (2015), and his novel "Circles and Doors" (2017).