Oman – It is common for novels in different contexts to deal with different issues, but for Jordanian novelists to focus on childhood memories and focus on them in their writings. It is a unique experience worth contemplating.
Dr. Ziad Abu Laban, the author of “Suppressed Breaths,” Muhammad Al-Amiri, the author of “The Leaf Tree,” and Dr. Muhammad Al-Qawasmeh, the author of “Voices in the Camp” and “The Thirtieth Street,” returned again – in their literary works – to their childhood memories that make a person long for a mother’s embrace. Warm and their wishes to “become children again, sitting in the bathtub and enjoying bathing rituals fragrant with the scent of their mother.” This is an issue worthy of research and scrutiny.
From these memories emerge questions seeking answers. Most notably, why do these novelists return to the past? Is it because of its beauty as it seems, or perhaps because of the ugliness of the present? That they all did not eat with golden spoons when they were young, but rather had stories of life’s hardships to varying degrees?
Do these people store a suppressed or stored cry or buried feelings that accompanied their life’s journey as scars that the appropriate moment has come to reveal?
This is what we are trying to find out in this report.
Muffled breaths
Dr. Ziad Abu Laban, the author of “Headed Breaths and Other Stories,” was distinguished by his coherent narrative and controlled his characters over the course of 119 stories, but he let them move completely freely within the sequence of events without guidance or interference. It is decorated with its realism in its suffering with life, with smooth and clear language, in a distinctive literary work that the reader cannot leave.
The heroines include 11 girls with different names, and the mother is the heroine or the main driver. He considered her the monitor of their behavior and the one who directed them as the most experienced and knowledgeable. He was content with monitoring their movements and breaking taboos in narrow spaces, as time and space are limited by the movement of his heroines.
Regarding the role of the mother, he says: “Certainly the mother is a major driver in all stories. The mother is the teacher who raises and raises a generation capable of facing life with its openness to everything that is possible and not possible. She instinctively understands the behavior of her children, and even if she experiences life and its battles, the tendency of instinct alerts her to The danger facing the child in terms of behavioral deviation due to what social media networks and the technological space make possible. In the stories of “Muffled Breaths,” it is the main driver of the events of the stories; in fact, it is the centrality of those events.”
Parents and children’s questions
Abu Laban considered that parents are clearly embarrassed when faced with their children’s questions, especially since the questions come from an innocent and bold childhood. Children are stronger at asking bold questions. This innocence is tainted when they grow up and questions become the source of their fear in confronting the culture of shame or in the face of the unseen, and due to parents’ lack of awareness. Those who are not armed with knowledge are incapable of answering their children’s questions, and sometimes they answer them with vague or fabricated answers that raise other questions in their minds and remain pending, so they grow and the questions become smaller, according to his description.
He adds, explaining: “When one of the story’s characters (Souad, the little girl) is helpless in the face of death that is slowly creeping towards her father, sneaking through the cancer that is destroying his fragile bones, she writes a letter to God to save them from hunger, and with all the innocence of childhood, she places the letter on her father’s grave so that he can deliver it to God.” Like the case of the child “Khalil” who approaches the sea water and whispers, “I want Mama,” that mother who died of Corona… These children have a great awareness of the world, an awareness that is not fake or tainted by the sins of adults.”
He concluded his speech to Al Jazeera Net by saying, “The collection’s stories remain the most daring in presenting the culture of shame among children. They came in a style that carries the aesthetics of the language with everything that the poetic language carries. They are stories that carry a new vision for the world of young children or boys, and rise up in this world haunted by fear.”
Friday bath is forced torture
With his smooth style, graceful language, and human sense in his creative output, Dr. Muhammad Al-Qawasmeh wanders the corridors of poverty and misery. In his novel “Voices in the Camp,” which was published in two parts, “Al-Nushur” and “Al-Hashr,” the mother plays an important role in constructing the novel that talks about life in the Palestinian camps and the scenes that express the misery of life and what usually happened on Fridays, when she The mother is bathing her children.
According to Al-Qawasmeh, the novel provides details of this arduous process for her and her son, whom she is bathing. Saleh, the novel’s hero, was counting a thousand accounts for this day, and trying to escape and create his own excuses in order to escape the forced torture to which he is subjected and flee into the street, but to where? His mother runs after him and brings him to the kitchen, where a lot of work is usually done, including cooking, washing, studying, and bathing.
Al-Qawasmeh believes that the image of bathing that appears indicates that a person can adapt to misery, poverty, and suffering and create joy from the simplest actions, while the manifestations of cruelty that appear in the mother’s treatment of her child during the bathing process are a reflection of the misery of life.
“The Fiber Tree”.. A recollection of memory
The novel “The Leaf Tree,” published by Fadaat Publishing, is 170 pages long, and which Muhammad Al-Amiri called “the narrative of memory.” It is an “inventory of his memory” and a group of childish passages written in poetic language that depict the life of a child as if he were writing with a camera, where the “Friday bath” was a special ritual and special torment, as his mother dealt with his body as she dealt with household copper utensils, as she heated the water on the kerosene stove and the pot. Abu Muftahin Al-Nabulsi soap: “Something sharp and rough was dragging my back… I was trying to escape… it was like a prisoner under the weight of a loofah.” The loofah is from the loofah tree that is planted in front of the house as if it belonged to his family, but it is not eaten.
The novel also documents – according to Al-Amiri – the memories of a child who experienced student riots and events in the region, with a narrative decorated with everyday images, such as fetching water with his grandmother, and records his relationships with his childhood companions and neighbors who are the heroes of the “leaf tree,” and depicts what he called the thrill of the waterfall, village weddings, and circumcision parties, which Al-Amiri described as An execution party for a revolutionary who does not fear execution.
Childhood and bird coloring
Speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, Al-Amiri says, “Childhood is a supply or a reservoir of delicious memories that one relies on in narratives, poetry, and pristine things that have not yet been contaminated. I firmly believe that a child’s memory is an undistorted camera that possesses a stark power that cannot be forgotten.”
He said that in his childhood, he experienced “events and memories, including strange ones, such as coloring birds. My brother Ali and I used to catch birds, color them, and release them. Each of us knew our birds, and they would soon return with different colors to stand on the grape tree (Dalia).”
He continues: “At the age of five, I also experienced the Battle of Karama, where the Zionist entity’s army was bombarding us with missiles and bombs in the northern Jordan Valley because they were bases for the Palestinian guerrillas, and we were forced to leave to the town of Al-Sarih, near the city of Irbid, the bride of the north.”
He continues to recount his memories: “In the north of the Kingdom, I saw the well for the first time. This word did not exist in my town, Qlayaat, where there are springs and waterfalls. My first time inside the well was the most terrifying sight because its bottom was a black mirror. I began to feel new traditions that were different.” Exactly about the northern Jordan Valley… Since my childhood was agricultural, I was associated with the river and the waterfall falling from the “Ziqlab” dam, as if it were white soap foam with which we often bathed on the weekends.”
I still smell childhood
He says: “Until this moment, I go down to the northern valley to meet my mother, and when she hugs me, despite this age, I smell the scent of childhood milk, and that little child in her arms, and I always try to provoke her memory to talk to me about these paradoxes and say, ‘I saw you before you were born,’ and this story occupies me until this moment, and more and more.” While I was pregnant with you, I described you to my neighbors with great accuracy and a strand of hair that differed from the color of my hair. I saw you standing on the dome of the shrine of Saad bin Abi Waqqas and reading from a large book. And when you gave birth to me, the characteristics were the same. So my father slaughtered an “aqeeqah” and dressed the shrine with a green cloth, so the villagers rushed and took Pieces of cloth, such as bracelets and necklaces, as a sign of blessing.”
He added: “This incident raises many questions in my memory about the mother’s relationship with her fetus. It is an image that science has not yet revealed. It is possible for the mother to feel his movements, but my mother knew what I looked like before she saw me.”
“I would like to say that the villages have realistic magical memories that have not yet been properly written. For example, my grandmother was an expert in hunting owls. She cut off his feathers and put them in kohl. Then she lined the owl’s eyes with kohl, put a necklace of small beads on its neck, muttered something I did not understand, and sent it flying toward The sun in order to ward off its evil, because in the Arab tradition this bird is a sign of bad luck.”
Mother is a homeland
On a related level, critic and poet Rashid Issa believes that mother is outside the meaning of women. “She is your homeland that does not ask for a passport or taxes. It asks you for residency so that it can enjoy giving you tenderness and love. It is the only being that gives you the joy of its heart and does not expect gratitude or a response from you.”
Issa explained to Al Jazeera Net, saying: “Therefore, writers in various countries of the world dealt with the theme of the mother in a sacred way, separate from worldly desires, and perhaps the phenomenon of invoking childhood in literature is the greatest evidence of the son’s eternal “attachment” to his mother, as motherhood means freedom that is not equivalent to freedom.”
He added: “When the diaspora played with the late Mahmoud Darwish, he cried out with the beating of his wounded heart: I long for my mother’s bread, my mother’s touch, and my mother’s coffee. It is the longing for emotional and nutritional security. Likewise, in most Arab and international novels, we find the phenomenon of pain due to being away from the mother, as she is the primary source of reassurance, and anything else is questionable.” “It is deceiving.”
He added: “We yearn for childish space-time out of fear of death and resentment of the troubles of adulthood and awareness… We want to remain children, shunned for play, dreams, and ignorance. The mother’s embrace is the one whose absolute loyalty we are assured of, so we aspire to it as we grow older.”
Rashid Issa described the mother as a paradise in the middle of the desert of disappointed hopes, and said, “Even the greatest sultan, when overcome by worries, remembers his mother’s embrace.”
