Tripoli

- The International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced, a few days ago, its long list for its 2023 session, and the list - which included 16 novels - included two Libyan novelist works: the first is "The Sandbox" by Aisha Ibrahim, and the second is "Qurena Eduardo's Concerto" by Najwa Bin Shatwan.

The award, whose long list included writers from 9 Arab countries, was not the first participation for each of the two Libyan novelists in it, after a first participation during which Bin Shatwan reached the short list, for her novel "The Slave Cages" in the tenth session 2017. While her citizenship was on the long list The Award, in its 12th session of 2019, for "The Gazelle War".

"200 narrators and 400 novels"

Participations that achieved positive echoes in Libya and abroad, to culminate in a Libyan novel winning the prize for the first time in the previous session (No. 16) in 2022, for “Bread at Uncle Milad’s Table” by the young storyteller and novelist Muhammad Al-Naas Al-Amr - which was prepared by Abdullah Melitan, the historian and academic who owns the book’s dictionary. And Libyan writers - a quantum leap at the hands of a group of young writers after the Arab presence of the Libyan novel was limited for decades to Ibrahim Al-Koni and the late Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Faqih.

Despite the hesitation of the name of Al-Koni, nicknamed the bounty hunter, in the international version of the award in its English language, and his arrival in the short list in 2015, and before him the young novelist Hisham Matar in 2006, who is the first Arab to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his novel “The Return”, the Arab appearance of the Libyan narrator counted him. Many a great development in the march of the Libyan novel.

"The Return" by Hisham Matar, in which he embodies his autobiography and his father's touching story (Al-Jazeera)

The historian and academic Melitan confirms to Al-Jazeera Net that the Libyan novel has achieved a qualitative and distinct leap in the last decade, even in terms of the number of published writers and novels, indicating that the novel names did not exceed 80 names, while in recent years it reached 200, they published more than 400 novels by the end. last year.

Militan notes the large increase in women's names, which exceeded 40 novelists, at a time when there were only 4 women novelists in Libya at the end of the eighties, namely Fawzia Shalabi, Sharifa Al-Qadi, Nadira Al-Awaiti, and Mardiya Al-Naas, the author of the first feminist novel in the country in 1972.

What has changed?

The director of the Libyan Center for Cultural Studies, Saleh Qadir Boh, attributes this brilliance to the novel’s attention in Libya to the hidden personalities and the lives of the less influential groups, and the transformation of these marginalized lives into more influential topics and closer to the question of great literature.

Qadir Boh adds to Al-Jazeera Net, explaining that these brilliant works ask about "Who is man, how does he live, and why does he stumble?"

And he added, "The writing moved from the historical dream and description to the analysis of the relationships between the characters and the questioning of these characters themselves."

The same goes for Militan, who says, "Few cared about the Libyan social reality in the novel, led by Khalifa Hussein Mustafa and Saleh al-Senussi. Despite the fame of al-Koni and the jurist on the Arab level, these, and Abdullah al-Ghazal is added to them, currently focused on the social aspect."

Historian and academic writer Militan considers the focus on social reality to be a factor in the success of the new Libyan novel (Al-Jazeera).

Melitan considered that the focus on social reality also explains, to a large extent, "the leap that women have made through the novel, whether by achieving prizes or not, but they are experiences that require in-depth studies because they are voices that have moved the Libyan novel to another level, compared to the generation of female pioneers, despite their importance."

The Arab Spring "Creativity Blossomed"

While the novelist Mansour Bushnaf goes that the major political transformations in Libya and the region are behind this shift, adding to Al-Jazeera Net that "perhaps one of the best things that the Arab Spring produced were some of the new voices that were bolder, more empowered, and believed in the values ​​of justice and renaissance, and in these I remain optimistic about a better future." Despite the clouds of backwardness, regression, and ugly nostalgia (nostalgia) that dominates the scene.

Bushnaf notes what he considers the anxiety, fragility, and fluidity of the Libyan entity, and the fragmentation of its successive and discontinuous narratives, which he describes as tributaries that do not flow in one stream, but are dispersed without guidance, and he adds, explaining that this fragmentation "reflected on our cultural heritage and made it distant and isolated oases in space and time, architecture and furnishing."

Writer Bushnaf: The fragmentation of the Libyan reality was reflected in the country's cultural heritage (Al-Jazeera)

The director of the Libyan Center for Cultural Studies believes that this emergence of Libyan novelist works does not negate the existence of the Libyan novel mainly and its achievements and the writers and writers who were previous producers of stories about man, his life, society and its multiple complexes. Which certainly allowed for bolder and more original writing in the literary expression of existence and the actors in it, sometimes unnecessary actors, which achieved for the writers of the Libyan novel today access to the new recipient who feels that the pure, anxious and painful writing is the form of his pain, awareness, dream and disappointment.

Kader Boh stresses the necessity of not ignoring the impact of public crises and major centers of influence, internally and externally, in putting pressure on this person’s mind and shaping some of his ways of living. Almonds and also breaking what is inside them, which means in the future the absence of symbolism in the typical sense and making way for the new, victorious symbolism of human death in his life.

The director of the Libyan Center for Cultural Studies points out the major transformations in Libya and the region, and their impact on literature and culture in general.

The director of the Libyan Center for Cultural Studies, Kader Boh, considers the major transformations in Libya and the region affected literature and culture (Al-Jazeera)

On the aspect of development in the Libyan novel, Bushnaf concludes his speech to Al-Jazeera Net by focusing on the novel "The Sandbox" specifically, which he returned to as an important shift in the Arab novel as a whole, not just the Libyan one, "by dealing with the relationship between us and the Europeans at a harsh historical moment in a different and remarkable way in vibrant images."

Bushnaf refers to the natural depiction of what was going on in Italy in preparation for the invasion of Libya, and what Aisha Ibrahim presented about the relationship with the other, "not in the way we used to before. And even the supporter, so Sandbox is one of the best Arabic novels I have read in recent years.