In days of disaster, we do not know quickly what is happening behind closed doors, as these houses explode with their secrets after the fires of cannons and rifles subside in wars, and after the invaders leave in the wake of an invasion or the end of a pandemic, even those books written in secret do not come out until after the danger has cleared .
In contrast to this, and just as books rained down during the surviving, aborted and assassinated Arab revolutions, testimonies, novels and stories, the few months of the ongoing Corona pandemic created their writers, not only by recording facts, but also through their imaginary worlds.
Within these worlds appeared the story book "The Miscreants" by the Tunisian writer and judge Rawan Bin Ruqaya on the book House, in which the inner family worlds and their transformations appeared under the sway of the Corona pandemic.
Sports grip and knocker hammer
The presenter of the book, the former judge and lawyer, Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Lajmi, reveals that the writer, who is fond of Arabic and French literature, the judge and law researcher, was also an athlete, and one of the players of the Tunisian volleyball team.
These various seemingly intertwining identities all act as the fingers of one hand, to hold the moment and write as you hold the ball to hit the field, or grasp the hammer to hit the court table to rule.
The stories of the 16 "villains" book, whose French translation was previously published before the emergence of its Arab origin, stories of the daily living of women and men who have been consumed by loss, alienation and dispossession in the world, and have fallen into forgetting themselves as the world and the people around them have forgotten them.
Rawan bin Ruqayya tries to open windows and small windows in the walls of their homes in the quarantine imposed by the authority, to listen to their faint voices as she tries to scream in the face of oppression.
The marginalized are in quarantine
The book is preoccupied with monitoring the lives of marginalized women and men in the reality of quarantine, as the authority closes homes to people by law, and does not care what is happening inside them.
The authority does not think about the fate of those people whom it pushed into the homes, it is only concerned with protecting them from the external ghoul (the virus).
Or perhaps she is afraid of them, because the virus is spreading among them, and she pushes them to the homes to excrete the sick from them from the healthy ones, but even this forced labor General law excludes some of the marginalized, the poorest and the insane.
There are always people who give up power completely by ignoring, and within this class appears the moron "Shishtu" who runs in the street "Long live the Corona, long live the epidemic."
The book "Miscreants" is busy monitoring the lives of the marginalized in the quarantine reality in the time of the Corona pandemic (Al-Jazeera)
Shishto, the old coal seller and self-made philosopher, who lost his mind due to his emotional loss and the loss of his girlfriend who married a wealthy man, kept running in the streets with his dogs "Marx" and "Engels" exposed to all forms of violence from everyone, especially children.
When the police who monitor the implementation of the curfew arrest him, and the policeman reminds him that the curfew is imposed on all citizens, Shishto reminds him that the curfew is indeed for humans, but he is, everyone agreed that he is a "Shishtu dog", so the authority’s decision does not concern him. Police to his fate.
The philosopher Shishtu creates a new meaning for his reality, to continue his rebellion and resistance to the regime, and convince himself that he is finally the only person who is free, the master and the ruler.
A story in which the writer, Mechanzmat, approaches the functioning of the authority in its targeting of the herd, and its production according to the mechanism of control and punishment according to the concept of the French philosopher Foucault.
Only the imbecile and the insane can shake the throne of that authority, so the authority can only establish its influence on the wise, while it found itself today in the time of the Coronavirus in the face of the failure of its inventions, prisons and practices as a substitute for the policy of expelling lepers and insane ... outside the city and outside the walls.
This is no longer possible, as the walls are also closed, and it remains in front of them only to exclude them as they are not human.
They are the dogs of Kishtu, who wonders from the beginning of the story about the wits of the sky that make "the rain for the conscience of the world", and gives him freedom without everyone to run with Marx and Engels without anyone being exposed to him.
The phrase Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which the author published one of her stories, is true: "It is strength and freedom that make excellent men. Weakness and slavery have made nothing but the wicked."
Shishto was strong and free when he stood as a Greek hero dragging his two great dogs in the face of the police, reminding her that she had abandoned him long ago, when she allowed the whole world to call him "the dog Shishto", so she has no right today to apply to him the laws that she issued to the citizens.
Stories of battered women
Judges are the most people who are penetrated by stories. The files accumulated in the courts are lives and stories that only the judges will decipher. Therefore, we cannot ask the judge where the stories come from. Stories come to him and he does not go to them until the matter reminds us of the house of al-Mutanabi:
I sleep in my eyelids from their ions, and the people keep their pace and fight them
However, these stories, which Rawan Bin Ruqaya tells us, are special stories of quarantined people discovering themselves again, and most of Rawan's characters are women.
The most prominent topic in this group is violence against women of all kinds: physical violence, symbolic violence, verbal linguistic violence, and human rights violence ...
The fact that a judge has resorted to writing stories about the reality of Tunisian women, and the violence they are subjected to, raises a great question about the reality of that arsenal of laws that were introduced in Tunisia through its various political systems to victory for women's freedom, from the Personal Status Code with Bourguiba to the issue of full equality today.
What happens between theorizing and practice?
Is there a thick line that the laws do not pass through to implementation?
Are enacting laws sufficient to eliminate negative social phenomena such as violence against women?
Do we need stories as another way to produce that awareness of laws?
All the characters in these stories suffer from injustice caused by the violent husband, and the father who sells his daughter but also finds his food from women like mothers, as the mother in some societies turns into a peer and educator for the male, according to criteria that prepare him to practice violence against women, or prepare her daughter to accept such violence As fate and the right of the male, and here appears the paradox between being a woman subject to violence and raising a male to produce it over others.
In writing these stories, the judge did not appear as a judge, but opened the files and contented himself with tracking the fate of their heroes.
Novelist and translator Jamal Al-Jelsi, who wrote the introduction to the book, says: "The cover of the 16 short stories written by Rawan bin Ruqayya did not perform intellectual theorizing, nor psychological or social analysis ... It did not stand on a hill to oversee life and issue superior judgments, and did not enumerate the theories of jurists and humanists about the rights of women and children. Human rights conventions and international covenants. "
Rowan was content with holding giant scissors, capable of detailing a piece of human life, with small and precise strokes, a piece in which there is no adornment, judgments, or pedantic views. "
The author tries to take pictures, but they are pictures from inside homes, and perhaps this explains the cover photo, which carried a picture of a smiling woman behind her, icons of world culture from Darwish to Nietzsche.
This black-and-white image with a noisy background of poetry and philosophy is what Rawan raises in her stories through themes that seemed to be the most important issues of women, but went beyond that to other contemporary issues that are still rare in her Arabic writing.
Ecological personality
Corona has assassinated the most famous international writers who fought for the environment, and they established a new trend in fiction and cinema, which is environmental fiction and cinema, the Chilean novelist Louis Sepulveda, author of the novel "The Old Man Who Reads Love Novels", and the novel "The World at the End of the World."
Sepulveda used to always repeat: "There are many reasons that make you happy in this life, one of them is called water, another called air, and another called the sun, which always comes as a reward after rain."
In the story of Si Muhammad, the shadows of this writer and this doctrine appear when he tries to resist the desire of his wife, Monia, to build large houses with floors and to own real estate by clinging to nature, and he replies to her insistence by saying, “You know that the earth is a bony skin, Monia, and that I aspire to be buried under The orange tree, especially, should I not die at home. What do I do with two floors? Death among trees is better than death between walls that do not overlook anything that concerns me.
Even after he achieves what she wants for her, and remains on the ground floor, his wife desertes him and returns to the city, while he remains united with nature, plants and animals, and discovers that we have to be free from everything, including people, and we do not remain connected except with nature, so he describes his new life, saying "It is a life of another kind, a healthy life. The city is a basement like the bottom of a deserted well. It screams but does not hear your screams, suffocates and you feel your breathing apparatus and your imagination tied to a rock."
Si Mohamed unites more with nature, and gets to know the Bedouin Ahlam. When his wife regrets after discovering her love for him and that her life has no meaning between the walls, Si Muhammad will have died.
His old heart died, and his wife became just a ghost after being purified from all the weight of that consumer life represented by his wife Monia, but it is also the moment in which he heard of Ahlam’s death at the hands of her Bedouin husband, since even this nature is inhabited by cruel males.
Thus Rawan presents us with a different and strange fictional character from the contemporary Arab fictional and fictional imagination, while at the same time establishing her in her Arab reality when she chose her name Muhammad.
Love is the course of writing
Rawan's stories revolve around love as a central complex in which all the stories and stories intersect. Either they are failed and dramatic love stories, or they are new love stories that save the characters from death even for a while, just as the story of "Si Adel", the sixty who prepared everything to die or receive death, As the narrator says, opening his story, “Si Adel” had prepared himself for the grave as he should, wrote his will and divided his possessions with justice on his children, and sat on the balcony as a noble warrior tired of wars and invasions. He must now stand one last time and stand a brave man in front of his great life For the values of his march behind the eyelids of regret at the expiration of the pleasant life period, and he is now in his late 60's, and he must not refuse death ...
However, love surprises him in those moments when he retired from life, to release him again through the emergence of "Asma", confirming the phrase "Blaise Pascal" with which the narrator issued her story "Love has no life, no one knows when he is born."
However, this love that brought a new life was surprised by another danger, which is the Corona virus that attacked Asmaa, and brought the ball back to the court of death again.
Thus, death rises as love and violence is another common theme among most stories. The writer turns it on its philosophical, social and psychological aspects, through storytelling alone and without drowning in contemplation and analysis, leaving the reader with the freedom to interpret and philosophize.
Villains are the world of human beings and villains exposed by the Corona pandemic, villains who have taken over the lives of the heroes of the stories at far apart times. The stone was suitable for them to tell them for what they are, and discover how foolish they were throughout those years that endured them while deceiving them and stealing their lives.
Stories written by Rawan Bin Ruqayya as well as writing a strong throwing march of a volleyball player flying high over the net, or over the plot to hit the end hard and score a point.