[ad_1]
The title of the novel, “Nila Zarqa”, is of great importance at the level of reading, as it is the first sign that the reader picks up and starts from in order to understand the meanings and implications to which the text refers.
“The harsh air on which the city sleeps has become with time, melodies are more cunning than people’s melodies that they kept in their depths (…) and caution has become the master of the situation in everything to the extent that moving pieces of furniture from house to house requires security approval, and may have to One has to wait a long time before getting it.”
This is how Hawass al-Radabi (the main character in the novel “Nila Zarka”) describes the world of his plundered and submerged city in a quagmire of tyranny and social oppression; Where the working people interact under the umbrella of a totalitarian political authority that has no other concern but to delude them into falsehood and shape their destinies in proportion to its interests.
The novel is located in 184 pages of medium pieces, through which Jacob sheds light on an imagined world very similar to our contemporary world with its complex details and urgent issues; Especially the social, political and economic transformations imposed on him by the Corona pandemic.
“Nila Zarqa”, directed by the Palestinian-Syrian director and novelist Fajr Yaqoub, comes after his novel “The Hours of Laziness, Diary of Asylum”, which won the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction in its seventh session in 2021.
simulated war
Nila Zarqa’s novel consists of 18 narrative units, each of which is preceded by a reporting text passage from our time by an Arab or Western thinker referring to the transformations that the world has witnessed and will witness during the Corona pandemic and after its end, or special notes by the novelist regarding these transformations.
While the narration opens in the past tense on the personality of Major Hawass al-Radabi while sitting in his cabin in the government carton factory run by “Ashraf al-Khazen”; Where he was screened to work as a night watchman after the government of the “Admiral” placed him under house arrest, as a punishment for writing a fictional work in which he ridiculed the achievements of the admiral, the highest military rank in the country.
In the carton factory, Ashraf al-Khazen seeks to transform the place into a microcosm of the totalitarian state of the admiral; This is by fabricating national epics and monitoring workers with smart cameras installed in strategic locations and corners of the factory, and by normalizing with the imagined war that he himself created to justify his repressive measures.
Scenes that remind us to a large extent of what life has become in some countries of the world after the spread of the Corona virus; Some governments have taken advantage of the pandemic to collect the data of their citizens through electronic applications under the pretext of fighting the virus, in addition to adopting smart systems for automatic facial recognition through thermal surveillance cameras, or using citizens’ data on social networking sites to measure social distance and determine their locations.
New Big Brother
Thus, Jacob excels in coding our contemporary world and reducing it to intensive functions such as the factory, which is nothing more than our world itself under the weight of the pandemic and the totalitarian measures taken by governments around the world, and Fajr Yacoub says – to Al Jazeera Net – “The totalitarianism (totalitarian) definition of this virus will It establishes the “post-Corona” stage, and it is a huge turning point in human history, and the complexity of the means of communication in it may contribute to changing human nature itself.
Although there is no apparent connection between the declarative texts that Jacob included at the beginning of his narrative units and between Al-Radabi’s story in the past and its events, the implicit and semantic link was present. Cracks and pains in the human soul; endless cracks whose impact we will live on for a long time, as if it were a mirror of a cosmic conspiracy made by hidden parties, but an in-depth reading of its consequences reveals that it was something that had to be summoned and occurred.
And Jacob adds, “It is a defining moment in human history, which the Italian director Federico Fellini called an ‘eternal chastisement process’ that the universe could not do without in its various stages of development.”
Another look at epidemiology reveals that, the only difference between this process and similar ones is the ugly face of social media as it was manifested in its treatment of the pandemic, and it seems that it is no longer possible to curb it, “and it has contributed to paving the way for blatant totalitarianism.” For the older brother, we used to feel her face in literary works that we monitored in the last century, and today we stand naked in her presence.”
Blue Nile..a flower for love and war
The title of the novel, “Nila Zarqa”, is of great importance at the level of reading, as it is the first sign that the reader picks up and starts from in order to understand the meanings and implications to which the text refers.
Blue indigo is a mountain plant from which cosmetics and moisture are emulsified. In the novel, it is the plant with which the prostitutes of the Admiral’s officers bathe on top of the mountain overlooking the factory, and it remains that way until the feigned war breaks out, and the blue indigo becomes a coating with which the windows are painted; To block the light of the places from the enemy’s flight.
Thus, the signifier “blue indigo” turns from a signifier of beauty and love to a signifier of artificially repressive censorship, and about this transformation, Jacob says, “The blue indigo is a sea of hope and hope in some of its faces, and in others it is a triangle of human terror; it is no longer just an emulsified substance from a mountain flower. Many are panting behind her, because each is panting after her according to his agenda, whether for trade or war, or even for love and performing rituals for the dead.
As is the case with the blue indigo, the character of Hawass al-Radabi transforms; From a creative writer and dreamer to a night watchman, he swallows the bitterness of his failures and feeds on what remains of his memories of love and virility, after the admiral’s government expelled him from the literary community and imprisoned him in his deserted city.
Although, throughout the narrative, Al-Radabi was a defeated and shaky character who committed sins against her family, she had accumulated several virtues and a rebellious spirit, which made her a contradictory personality. The security city electrified with iron and fire will affect everyone, but he did not want to confront this injustice, and he knows in advance that corruption has affected him and exhausted him himself.
Admiral on his throne
Returning to the events of the novel, and in an arbitrary scene, we see Ashraf Al-Khazen urging the factory workers to paint all its windows with blue indigo to the tunes of enthusiastic national anthems. Seriously contemplate the murder of al-Radabi.
For this purpose, the treasurer went to Al-Radabi’s cabin to find him lying on the ground with foam coming out of his mouth. The paramedic then confirmed that Al-Radabi’s death was the result of a stroke.
Death indicates the victory of totalitarian power over the hero of our story, while Jacob sees it as “not a victory for totalitarianism in the literal sense, but rather an engineering progression of ideas with which we quarrel as human beings. We can say that George Orwell was in his novel “1984” talking about the Soviet Union, but this The union collapsed 3 decades ago, and the novel is still alive, expressing us as human beings in every predatory era we live under its shadow.
Al-Radabi eventually died, and he and his exploits in the government carton factory were hastily recalled, and after that the life of the factory continued as it was, while the admiral remained on his throne and did not go to Qusay exile as al-Radabi wished and predicted in the first pages of the work.
[ad_2]