The novel "My Name is Zisfoun"... Latent violence awaits the explosion in Syria

The novel "My Name is Linden" by the Syrian novelist Sawsan Jamil Hassan was recently published by Al-Rabeeh Publications House in Cairo, and it is the sixth in its literary balance after "Khanat Al-Rih" (2018), "The Night Shirt" (2014) and "The Nabhon" (2012) and other works.

The events - which extend to 480 pages of medium pieces - take place in one of the villages of the Syrian coast, depicting for us the village's alienation from itself and the tragedy of those who lived in it during the Baath rule through its heroine "Zizfon", who finds herself haunted by fears of death and destruction that befell, so she resorts to writing notes her life.

Love matured with the revolution

While Linden wakes up from a coma that almost took her life, our heroine, who is sixty decades old, finds herself compelled, after all that time has passed, to reveal herself, interrogate her memory, and engage in an argument with her past at a time when the present has lost all meaning for her. To capture the memory before it withers and subsides.

Syrian novelist Sawsan Jamil Hassan has published 6 published novels (Al-Jazeera)

Through the temporal and spatial distances that linden travels from her brother Barhoum's house to her home in the small coastal village of Al-Maqs, she remembers the first thing she remembers of the incident of burning the shrine of "Abu Taqa".

Although people came out chanting for freedom in 2011, our heroine "chased her for more than 40 years before them," as she set fire to this place, declaring her own revolution.

Thus, from the first pages, the novelist arouses the reader’s curiosity about that incident (the burning of the shrine) to realize later that the child’s linden had undergone a test in this shrine consisting of the energy (a niche in a wall) that the girl had to cross to prove in front of a crowd of people her chastity, and there where Said escaped his dogs On the sheikh of the maqam to save linden.

Saeed was famous for his stories and tales in the village, as he is the "madman" who lives alone in a mud room isolated in the wilderness with his dogs, and despite his retirement, he taught linden to confront oppression, oppression and exploitation. The ruling regime, and in the end, it is, as the storyteller says to Al Jazeera Net, "the voice that calls for the desired change by understanding reality and dismantling it away from fanaticism and alignments of any kind."

Four decades after the incident of the burning of the shrine, and coinciding with the first cheers of the people in the squares, the two lovers (Zizfoon and Saeed) coalesce for the first time, and the shadows of love expand to blend with the rhythm of the place and the agonizing screams of his children's throats, "He drew me to him again and he says: Finally. I did not understand. Do you mean? That we met or that the people revolted, but what's the difference? We were born from the lap of pain and the throes of the revolution."

Thus, our heroine belatedly realizes her love for Said. Shortly after that meeting, he and his dogs will end up with live bullets in the wilderness. On the news of his death, linden evokes a happy spectrum, to know that she had a father more than a companion. He was more than a man, for he is identity and belonging. To earth, nature and homeland.

While Saeed’s death appears to be a tragic fate for a sane and loving person in terms of the story, it appears the end of a historical stage of the (peaceful) revolution and the beginning of another (armed) in terms of the text. Not only is the movement peaceful, as this is something that has been distorted by violence from the beginning, but the peacefulness of ideas, dialogue, sharing and acceptance of the other.”

Village spaces

The sensitivity of the writer is manifested in “My Name Is Zizfoun” in her work on the spatial space. She weaves in a graceful narrative style enchanted by the details of the spatial elements in the coastal village of “Al-Muqass”, which makes the reader as if he is one of the people of that village, living with them and sharing their social occasions, and engaging with the characters in relationships Love and parenting.

A style that Hassan sees - as she says to Al Jazeera Net - that "what the narration requires of taking care of the local environment, with all its spatial, life, social and ritual details, but rather drawing the characters that belong to it, and to what constitutes the features of life, and it is concerned with a period of time that has separated us from it for a long time. Life has changed a lot."

The narrator introduced us to the village through her talk about “Umm Jahida’s shop” (the mother of Linden) and her house, which turned into a station for people passing from the village to the Levant and back. It is possible to distinguish between the rich and the poor, "everyone works with his land and reaps the fruits of his cultivation," but it is only pages to see the great transformation that the village will witness as it moves from a life of ideal simplicity to complexity and the suffering of urbanization.

The village will take a new feature to become “those mud houses built in a more modern way, of stone, on a single floor, silent today, the silence of funerals and graves between the floor buildings that took up the place and gnawed the lemon orchards, olive and fig groves, after the city of Jableh expanded and entered this area in the urban plan.” the new".

This change was not limited to urbanization, but extended to social life in the village. After it was a monotonous life that was flawless and was not affected by anything from outside it, the injury of the father of linden came to paralysis as an announcement of the end of a time and the coming of another, in which the Baath regime will extend its control over the state to become the people. Insects with weak wings and a short lifespan, one congratulates them on his shortness" and "the atmosphere among the inhabitants becomes fraught, and the long neighbor can no longer intercede."

Through it, the storyteller tried to monitor the “attack” of modernity on the people of the village in a chaotic and ill-considered manner, coinciding with “a constant quest to abort any attempt to rise awareness and rebel against this reality. The general scene in Syria as a whole, and it was necessary to dismantle it in an attempt to understand the results we are reaping now,” the writer says to Al Jazeera Net.

tyrannical spaces

The narration appears mostly as a foundation for the subsequent scenes of destruction that will afflict society: the destruction of values, human beings, and stone. As we read on, we discover that the people of this country are the ones who will destroy their homeland, not only with its urban structure, but also with its social fabric. In light of her criticism of the ideology that incites war, we see the narrator pointing fingers Masculine figures with a bloody and tyrannical culture while the feminine in "My Name is Linden" stand mere witness to that bloody violence.

The narrator believes that these people supported by the authority "are the ones who brought the country to this state. They are corrupt and corrupt people who rely on their protected status from the authority."

Returning to the character of Zayfon, we realize, as we approach the end of the novel, the reason for her need, when she is sixty years old, to reveal it. After the tragedy of Saeed's murder and then the death of her father, she found herself abandoned in the face of her past and the domination of her brother Shaaban, and she found no solace for herself except by writing her memoirs that were burned with her house.

"The fire of my heart, the fire of my life, the fire of my dream and my remaining life, who can extinguish it?"

Questions that Zissoufoun asks herself and Mounir after she returned from the wilderness to find her house completely burned. The house was burnt down, and with it her history, memoirs, and the story that she decided to tell at an hour she felt death close to her, and the house fire, according to the novelist, is nothing but “the burning of Syria, which was robbed by the brute force and persisted on Its history, its geography, its people and its fate, but Zisfoun had told the novel, even if the notebook was burned, she told her story and gave her testimony, even if she was betrayed, but the truth must be preserved as much as we can for the sake of future generations.

Finally, the novel "My Name is Linden" seems to be an attempt to dig into the origin of the violence that erupted after decades of rule by iron and fire, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions of Syrians.