The International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced today, Monday, its short list of novels nominated to win its 14th session. The list included the novels "Notebooks of Warraq" by Jalal Barjas, "Longing for the Neighbor" by Habib Al Salmi, "File 42 by Abdel Majid Sabata" and "Ain Hammurabi" by Abdel Latif Ould Abd Allah, "Coming to Dar Al Akaber" by Amira Ghneim, and "Tattoo of the Bird" by Donia Mikhael.
Each of the six shortlisted candidates will receive $ 10,000, and the prize winner will receive an additional $ 50,000.
The award-winning novel will be announced on May 25 this year.
The short list was announced on the award's official Facebook page, where the head of the jury, Shawky Bazih, revealed the nominated novels in the presence of the award's coordinator Fleur Montanaro.
A press conference was also held after the announcement, in which Shawqi Bazih, Flor Montanaro, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Award, Yasser Suleiman, and members of the jury participated in it.
Notebooks Warraq
The Jordanian writer Jalal Barjas had previously expressed his happiness at the arrival of his novel "Notebooks of Warraq" for the long list, and he told Al-Jazeera Net that this access "is a victory for my readers who believed in my word, and read my novel during the previous period from which people suffered from what the Corona virus left our lives, as They faced the harsh isolation with the pleasure of reading, and it became possible for them to move beyond everything imposed by the pandemic, just as it became for me to resort to writing in defense of my humanity. "
The novel tells the story of "Warraq", a reclusive intellectual and avid reader of novels, who loses his family and home, and becomes homeless, like the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes;
A number of events happen to him that make him the talk of the Arab street at a time when the new social media has become its most important component.
The Jordanian writer Jalal Barjas wrote poetry, story and literature of the place before heading to write the novel (Al-Jazeera)
Al-Warraq wears the characters he reads about in novels, and he acts through them, but as a result of isolation, loneliness, homelessness, and the cruelty he faced in a noisy world, his condition worsens and his schizophrenia is completed, so he lives a conflict between two voices within him: one incited to commit a number of crimes in the face of a reality that did not It gives him his right to live, and the second stands with his face, leaning on a deep cognitive predicate.
In addition to this trend, the novel reveals who will triumph over the other, and how the stories are intertwined with each other to lead to a main saying in the novel that “fear will inevitably lead to ruin.” It also raises a number of questions, the most important of which are: To what extent an individual can shape his life in isolation from what is around him. Effects?
And when can the second personality within a person go out into the open, and the person turns into a monster?
File 42
The novel "The File 42", by Moroccan writer and translator Abdelmajid Sebata, re-digs the case of "poisoned oils," a forgotten tragedy that belongs to post-independence Morocco.
Although the events of the novel take place in 2002, its protagonists take the reader to an important historical stage the day after the Americans evacuated the military bases in the cities of Quneitra, Nouaceur, Ibn Suleiman and Sidi Yahya al-Gharb in 1959.
Novelist Abdel-Majid Sebata said in a previous report on Al-Jazeera Net that "File 42" is not a historical novel, but rather its plot "is closer to the literary investigation that quotes from the police novel its exciting elements, but differs from it by its events that take place between libraries and publishing houses, and its heroes are novelists, publishers, agents and academic researchers. And passionate readers, their dialogues are hardly devoid of mentioning titles of timeless literary works, and extensive conversations about the usefulness of literature and the extent of its contact with reality, or even its ability to replace it.
The reader follows the journey of a famous American writer named "Christine Macmillan" to Morocco, in search of ideas outside the box.
Christine decided to return to an era when her father spent a soldier in one of the military bases in Morocco in the fifties of the last century, and to write a novel that explodes from a space and time far from the norm.
The writer believed that her father’s life was far from adventures and secrets, and there was no single detail on which to build a solid fictional edifice, but following some leads led her to discover her father’s past, and with it a human tragedy that changed the lives of thousands of Moroccans.
And Christine discovered that her father was involved - days before the American forces evacuated their bases in Morocco - in the issue of poisoned oils that rocked Morocco after independence, a human tragedy whose victims still suffer to this day from the consequences of the greed of those seeking quick wealth.
This case dates back to 1959, when strange symptoms appeared among thousands of Moroccan citizens in different cities, some of whom died and others were paralyzed at the level of the lower limbs, and investigations showed that the types of cooking oils consumed by the victims contained a substance Tri-orto-carzyl phosphate, and its source oils Lubricating warplanes, which were bought by greedy merchants from brokers at US military bases in Morocco, mixed with vegetable oils, and sold to Moroccans at low prices.
Missing the neighbor
The novel "Longing for the Neighbor," by the Tunisian writer residing in Paris, Habib Salmi, recently published by Dar Al Adab in Beirut, lures the Arab reader into mazes, worlds and hot issues through a game of simplicity and working on small details and forgotten stories in the crowd of big cities.
Through a game of cunning and cynical seduction and an unfamiliar love story that brings together a university professor Stenia and a maid in his fifties, nothing seems to bring them together except that they are Tunisians and reside in the same architecture.
A binary story tied by two parties in a love affair, contradictory, oscillating, ambiguous, shifting and mysterious, but this bilateral story opens up to other influential personalities and important issues.
In a previous interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Al-Salmi said, "Every literary work is subject to several readings, and this reading it provides is somewhat consistent with the content of the novel. Frankly, I did not think while writing" Missing the Neighbor "about the disabled and marginalized youth that gave great lessons to the Tunisian elite, as you say. What was most important to me mainly is this exceptional and rare relationship that arises between a university professor who belongs to a luxurious social milieu and a simple maid. "
Tunisian novelist Habib Salmi considers that every new novel is a risky adventure (Al-Jazeera)
He continued, "First there is a game of temptation and seduction that develops little by little and turns into love, which is very basic in the novel, rather it is the engine of the novel. The teacher and the maid are human beings first of all, and this love that surprises them makes them discover each other."
The Tunisian writer added, "When a person lives a deep experience such as love or death or anything else important in life, he knows things that he was ignorant of about himself, about his relationship with the other, about his fragility and contradictions, and also about his strength, will, endurance and patience, and we see this in the character of Zahra. Especially in the character of Kamal. He noticed, while mixing with this apparently simple woman, matters in his personality that would not have occurred to him, most notably his weakness and his hesitations, and he was the one who imagined that he was strong and coherent by virtue of his age and his experience in life and his culture, and that he was immune to falling in love with a woman from Layer flower ".
"The novel is also a celebration in some way of these" simple "people who live among them without turning to them. Their lives are richer and deeper than we imagine, and when we know how to listen to them we learn a lot from them. They are in constant contact, hot and tragic in reality."
The novels of “Ain Hammurabi” by Abdel-Latif Ould Abdullah and “Nazarela Dar Al-Akaber” by Amira Ghneim and “The Bird's Tattoo” by Donia Mikhael (Al-Jazeera)
Various narrations
"Flying Tattoo" by Iraqi novelist and poet Dunia Mikhael, residing in the United States, tells a tragic story that was inspired by a trip during which she visited Iraq in 2016 and heard the atrocities of the Islamic State from women - especially Yazidis - who were victims of "captivity" before he could escape and see them. Their stories.
The novel mixes real events with fantasies and exotic miracles inspired by popular myths, and the novel plays on symbolic projections through which the protagonist's suffering is revealed in succession.
Also joining the list was the novel “Ain Hammurabi” by the Algerian writer and engineer Abdellatif Ould Abdallah, who presented a unique plot in which he mixed the literature of suspense and excitement with philosophy and history, and he played skillfully on many dualities and employed them in an enigmatic imagination.
As the second Tunisian novel on the short list, the work of novelist Amira Ghneim brilliantly deals with the contemporary history of Tunisia, closely related to the present, as he searches for the meanings of self and the homeland in the journey of the protagonist, author and unionist Tahar Al-Haddad (1899-1935).
Contrary to his image as an enlightened Tunisian reformer, political activist, and writer in ancient newspapers and newspapers, Ghneim re-imagines another human face of him in a story of love and adoration that binds him to his beloved to complete what historians are accustomed to narrating.