The life of five Algerians deals with the time of the French campaign .. "The Spartan Court" wins the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2020

"The Spartan Diwan" novel by the young Algerian writer Abdel-Wahab Issawi won the International Prize for Arabic Novel 2020 at its 13th session. The novel tells the stories of five personalities at the beginning of the 19th century in Algeria, and their lives intersect with the Ottoman and French presence.

The jury of the award announced that the novel by the young Algerian writer won the cash prize of $ 50,000, in addition to translating his novel into English.

Mohsen al-Moussawi, head of the jury, considered that the "Spartan Diwan" is characterized by high stylistic quality and audio pluralism that allows the reader to reflect on the history of the novelist occupation of Algeria and through the history of the conflicts of the entire Mediterranean region "all with intersecting visions and different interests embodied by the novelists."

Al-Musawi added that the novel is an invitation to the reader to understand the circumstances of the occupation and how the resistance is formed in various and growing forms to confront it, praising its deep historical narrative system, and the novel that "does not inhabit the past but rather makes the reader look at the existing situation and question it."

The five characters in the novel are the journalist Dibon who accompanied the French campaign to invade Algeria but clashes with the military leaders, and Caviar, the fighting soldier, with Napoleon's army captured by the Ottomans at sea before he became the architect of the campaign against Algeria.

Among the characters of the novel are also the merchant and seasoned politician Ibn Mayar al-Jaza’iri, who switched from defending the Ottomans to the membership of the council formed by French colonialism, and clashes with Caviar who tries to demolish mosques and steal endowment funds, before ending up in exile in Istanbul, as well as Hamat al-Salawi, the rebellious rebel and seller The clown dolls who love his country too, and the young girl Duja who loves fever and waits for him and watches events without contributing to it.

A young Algerian court
The popular historical account says that the Ottoman Pasha "Die Hussein", the ruler of Algeria, threw his fan on the French consul, an incident that took the pretext of invading the French, Algeria, but history did not save us many human stories for this era, and here specifically literature fills a void what historians who left They are content with major accidents.

With an elegant multi-voice narration and personalities and the construction of an accomplished novelist with integrated elements, the young Algerian writer conveys local events in the troubled capital of Algiers between the French and the Ottomans in the era between 1815 and 1833 to a global level, where the French occupation of the Algerian capital "Mahrousa" in three sections (pre-campaign) The fleet heads to Algeria, surrender), and from the perspective of five main figures who share the place and time of the novel.

In what is considered a kind of use of the "novel within the novel" technique, the author quoted the novel's name from the book "The Spartan Diwan" which Caviar reads in the events of the novel where the narration predominates over the description, and its events that are repeated scenes and multiple angles according to the narrator sound.

And because he writes about a Sufi society par excellence, the Algerian writer used several symbols in the novel, including Dujah, whose men took possession of the body in the symbolic carnage of Algeria, which was raped by invading soldiers, and the white stork symbolizing the revolution, while his disappearance indicates the exclusion of the revolutionaries from the country's capital, and Issawi says in one of the passages The novel "Some defeats appear to be victories in the hearts that were darkened by sin, and some victories bring disappointment to their bearer."

In another clip, the author speaks on the lips of one of the characters of the novel saying, "We men are always like this. When rulers persecute us, we search for the closest woman to prove to us that we are strong, even though true prostitution is what these rulers practice on us. Every day they lie with us with taxes and royalties and we sacrifice them, even In the streets, when the Arab passes by the Turkish man, he would step down in the most extreme way, fearing the shoulders touching each other, and if it happened, his fate would be a hundred lions. "

Writer Abdel-Wahab Issawi was born in 1985 in Djelfa, Algeria. He studied and worked in engineering, and his first novel, “Cinema Jacob” won the first prize for the novel in the President’s Competition in 2012, and in 2015, he won the Asia Jabbar Award for the novel, which is the biggest prize for the novel in Algeria for a novel. Sierra de Muerte, heroes of the Spanish Communists who lost the civil war and were driven to detention camps in North Africa.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera with the chairman of the jury of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction at the end of last December, Mohsen Jassem Al-Mousawi expressed his regret that the name of the winner was leaked in the last session, stressing that the first and most important conditions in the work of the committees is his privacy.

The critic and professor of Arab and Comparative Studies at Columbia University in New York explained that the award is largely independent of the Booker Prize, but there are coordinations since inception, and pointed out that the wide presence of the historical novel on the long list of the award deserves praise, because it is imperative to review extensively the topic of the Arabic novel at this stage, highlighting History here does not mean abandoning contemporaryity.

He highlighted that the subject of the Maghreb literary renaissance is a reality, because the years of liberation from colonial dependency at the geo-political level are relatively recent compared to the Arab East and Egypt, explaining, "We are talking about decades of time separation."