The novel “My Mother and I Know Her” by the writer and writer Ahmed Tamliya, recently published in the publications of the Arab Foundation for Studies and Publishing, is a friendly and humane novel in its vision, expression, characters, and settings. It is the first work of fiction published by the author after his first short story book, “Oh Boy” (2002), in which the beginnings of his narrative tendencies appeared. It took the form of open texts in which storytelling mixed with the freedom of everyday poetic prose.
He also published another book that represents a form of his culture in the field of film criticism. The book was titled “The Peak of the Scene” (2010). He also completed another novel titled “For Example,” which is like a resumption of the world of his first novel, its atmosphere, and its places.
The meaning of the above is that Ahmed Tamliya is a poor writer in terms of quantity, and that he tends towards a degree of diversity based on the diversity of his culture and knowledge, but the recent completion of the two novels prompts us to pay attention to the seriousness of his interest in the novel, and that perhaps he found a way for his pen and word in this vital genre.
If we add to that the diverse creative horizons in the two novels and their specificity and fertility, we look forward to the Jordanian and Arab novel gaining a new voice whose emergence was somewhat delayed, but which was born mature and possesses the elements of belonging to the novelistic consciousness, and seems capable of fulfilling the complexities of this complex literary genre. Including the potential to engage with the complexities of our lives, its ability to record aspects of the biography of the individual and the group, and to express the concerns of central groups and marginalized groups with an ability and sophistication that other literary genres may not allow.
Chapters are numbered and sequential
In terms of its structure and organization, the novel takes place in chapters organized by sequential numbers, and extends from number “1” to number “24” in the form of chapters of varying length and shortness, but what is common to all of them is the character of “Fouad”, the young university student who lives in a popular neighborhood in one of the refugee camps. Palestinians in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
In the era covered by the novel, the young man joins a company, and his daily life cycle passes between home, neighborhood, neighbors, work, and a narrow circle of friends. However, his relationship with himself and the intensity of his thinking about what surrounds him are what constitute his greatest preoccupation, and they expand the cycle of his day and reveal the hidden layers of his life. In addition, In addition, he is supported by the activity of his memory, which forms part of his hidden world, a world that the novel overlooks eloquently and capably.
The narrator, who narrates in the third person and sometimes varies in his narration methods, provides us with revealing insights into the character of “Fouad” and his community (neighbors, family, and friends). Even though the novel is not narrated directly in the words of “Fouad,” it is all indebted to his perspective and location. Therefore, it is correct to look at the knowledgeable narrator as a formula. Art for the character “Fouad” who narrates about himself in the third person at times and in the first person at other times, and the narration in the third person provides him with an aesthetic and artistic distance that enables him to examine his life and the details of his reality in a better and farther way than a speaker with a frank, biographical tone allows.
As for the time that we can consider the novel to be current, it is roughly between 1990 and 1991, that is, at the beginning of the Second Gulf War, the extension of the Palestinian Intifada, and the stage of democratic transformation in Jordan.
The novel contains echoes of these events and transformations through their reflection in the mirrors of its characters and their influence by them in various forms of interaction and influence.
The narrative memory also goes back to the event of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, which seems to be a foundational event that led to the phenomenon of asylum and to the formation of the neighborhood/camp as a different qualitative place in which man meets the elements of time and place together, and this is what the novel follows in its own way, as it strives to pursue the formation of the camp, its development, and the complexity Its formation as an influential place that bears witness to the occupation of Palestine and the displacement of its people, in addition to what is related to the social conditions, ways of living, and human relations that characterize this type of diaspora place.
The novel provides glimpses into the lives of successive Palestinian generations, starting with the generation of parents who suffered during the Nakba, and extending to the generation of children and grandchildren who grew up and were born in the camp environment. “Fouad” represents this last generation that inherited in its formation the suffering and misery of previous generations, and perhaps his anxious personality that… Her effort to reach a kind of balance and adapt to reality is the product of that experience and the product of that memory marked by migration, miserable living, and suffering various types of political and struggle experiences.
From a complementary angle, we can look at the novel as an “Ammani” novel that presents a marginalized sector in the capital, Amman, represented by the camp and the popular environment described in the novel.
We almost recognize the neighborhood – although the novel does not explicitly name it – as part of what is known as Al-Hussein Camp and the Wadi Al-Haddada neighborhood, according to its description in the novel.
The novel eloquently and intelligently illuminates the social, value-based and cultural character of this particular spatial and social environment as a mixture of intertwined threads that possess their own complexity and are located in a tense area of man’s encounter with space and time.
One of the significant glimpses in the novel is its attempt to capture some of the economic and urban transformations that occurred in the neighborhood, especially after the construction of Jordan Street and its penetration into the area at the end of the 1980s, and its impact on the neighborhoods surrounding it in many ways, which the novel presented in a spirit that is not devoid of mixing seriousness with humor, and a spirit The joke that suits the “investments” of the poor and the way they responded by transforming parts of the houses that were adjacent to the wide, lively street into grocery stores and various “commercial projects” adjacent to a main, lively street that was not previously considered by the camp and its random homes.
The character of Mansour, Fouad’s older brother, was revealed in his greed and attempt to monopolize the vital part of the house, and Fouad’s relationship with his brother ranged between accepting his behavior and nature at times and dissatisfaction with his unproductive “chivalry” at other times.
Logical causal relationships
The novel is conducted in a manner that opposes an organized plot, and distances itself from the narrative organization that usually presents interconnected events according to logical causal relationships. Instead, we find the effects of events and their stamps on the characters more than we find the event itself. Also, the events are not organized in sequential chains, but rather are attended more closely to Crumbs, fragments, and fragments that the characters recover through their impact and their remaining painful impact.
This method of disjointed plotting and breaking up the event often requires moving from the outside to the inside, from the eloquence of order to the aesthetics of chaos, and from the controls of reason and logic to the overflow of the unsuspecting soul, which are some of the characteristics of the new novel.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the long chapters and paragraphs of the novel are nothing but a kind of what is called “stream of consciousness,” which reveals the soul’s inner conversations and monologues when the outside world is constricting it and when it goes absent-mindedly, distracted, and lost from the real and the everyday, so its thoughts explode and its thoughts and fantasies flow without controls or limits. .
It follows that the novel also presents a spectrum of the character’s dreams, nightmares, and repercussions, which is another material that reveals hidden floors in the personality that may move us from appearance to essence. Rather, Fouad himself sometimes gets confused, as he does not distinguish between what is realistic and what is a dream.
Perhaps on the psychological level, the matter is closer to a form of substitution and displacement, meaning that the character uses dreams, self-talk, nightmares, and the like as tools with which he can confront reality or at least provide him with the opportunity to escape from what he does not like about it.
Cinematic techniques
The novel also relies on techniques derived from cinematic technology in cutting up scenes, and in creating transitions similar to moving from one scene to another on the principle of changing the position of the camera and the scene that surrounds it or the image it conveys, instead of the usual narrative transitions that rely on the principle of causality in tracking and developing events.
This technique contributed to giving the writer a degree of freedom in stopping events and scenes, moving from one event to another, displaying images and moving between them and the characters without difficulties or obstacles, and without exerting himself in providing the reasons and circumstances for all these moves.
This technique also called for a kind of eloquence of the image, as the spectacle requires that the written language play a pictorial role that conveys sound and image and focuses on some significant, influential details.
In such settings, we find the novel leaning towards a kind of poetic language that is not devoid of expressions and pictorial structures, which gives it more of a lyrical approach in its emotional and subjective meaning.
From this point of view, the novel includes a kind of lyrical narration, which is dominated by poetic prose language in its expression and transparency, as if it were the language of poetry and dream more than the language of rough reality. The unknown narrator expresses the character’s dreams and desires, as if he said at the beginning of the novel, “Since his body opened to a basic instinct, he He dreams of a woman in his mind, a woman he drew in his imagination and escaped with away from the eyes of others…” (p. 9).
He is preoccupied with the image of the expected, imaginary, and missing woman from his life, with a focus on the image of the desired or desired woman, so that the material and moral characteristics are mixed together. She is the woman of the dream, as he expresses it in more than one place. Her image is repeated in his dream, and this transparent, gentle language expresses it.
As the novel continues, we notice the clash of the ideal woman or the dream woman with the girls he gets to know in reality. He does not find them identical to his dreams, and finds that the closest of them is “Bahia,” the daughter of the neighborhood and neighbors, that is, the daughter of his own reality. What we are looking for may be very close, but the closeness a barrier.
Palestinian generations
“Fouad” belongs to the third generation according to the novel’s divisions into the Palestinian generations since the generation of the Nakba, and he is, in a way, the product of the stages and conditions that passed through the generation of fathers and children who were toppled by successive transformations, and here he is at the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century, despite his indifferent or unaffiliated appearance, following the events of the Gulf War. The second and the news of the Iraqi forces’ invasion of Kuwait, he follows the news, reads analyzes and engages in discussions with some of his friends, and when he meets the young woman “Sara” at the headquarters of the company whose employees he joined, he discovers that she is the daughter of one of the Palestinian families that used to live in Kuwait, and in his few conversations with her he strives to find ways The topic of the war and the lives of Palestinians in Kuwait, and the impact of the war on the Intifada and on the entire Palestinian existence.
Through Sarah, he also learns about a Palestinian class that differs in behavior and life from the class he knows in his neighborhood and camp. Palestinians are types and not one type. There are commonalities that connect them, and there are differences and differences depending on the places of expatriation and the environments of asylum, work, and living that they experienced during their diaspora journey.
His relationship with Sarah remained confused and unable to develop. Sometimes he confused her with the woman of his imagination that he had always seen in his waking fantasies and dreams, and sometimes he clashed with his alienation from her and his inability to develop a common language with her, and even the topic of war did not seem to preoccupy her as much as he did. She is preoccupied with her parents’ relationship and their attempt to adapt to their new life and the consumerist lifestyles they were accustomed to during their expatriation in Kuwait.
This relationship seems to end in a dead end, in exchange for his turning away or finally returning to his neighbor and the daughter of his neighborhood, “Bahia,” with whom the novel presented aspects of his relationship, but at a previous stage he was content to think about her in a purely physical way that he was not able to achieve, but here she appears in what It is like a dream that she opens her arms to him as an expression of the possibility of overcoming the pitfalls of this turbulent relationship as well.
These defective, confused relationships are nothing but the artistic expression of the personality’s fracture, dispersion, and rupture, and the impact that public affairs have on the individual personality, as if they were telling the reader that the torn, worn-out public context does not produce healthy, productive relationships.
Mother’s reassurance
As for the mother, who appears in the title of the novel and recurs throughout its folds and chapters, she represents a point of reassurance and light in the midst of the life that Fouad suffers from. He says about her, “Well, I love my mother very much, and I sacrifice her with my soul, and yet I let her down whenever she needs me” (p. 140).
In another paragraph, he says, “My mother, and I know her, is ready to trample her heart with her feet if she sees in this what makes us happy” (p. 141). The mother is an energy of overwhelming meaning, and Fouad’s sense of her presence throughout the novel continued to provide him with a form of fortitude, endurance, and conservatism. He has the necessary balance with his surroundings and with himself.
If we want to go beyond this, we can attribute the disturbance in his relationship with the woman to his intense attachment to the mother. It is as if he is searching for the woman/mother and does not find her far from his mother, whom he stresses that he knows and knows her worth, no matter how outwardly it appears that he has abandoned her. Perhaps the nightmare he saw in… His dream about him killing his older brother, “Mansour,” is not far from this. Mansour is an older brother, and he is also close to the mother. He may be competing with him for her heart, even though he is extremely selfish and greedy, unlike “Fouad,” who seems peaceful and indifferent to any material matters. And when “Mansour” began planning to take advantage of the side of the house adjacent to the new street and revealed his selfishness and lack of thinking about his mother and his family, the response came from “Fuad” with this nightmarish image that presents a late statement of account, but it expresses a psychological attitude towards the mother’s monopoly and towards “Mansour.” Big Brother, on the other hand, is a psychological wandering (Freudian) in its structure, outcome, and interpretation, and it has its share or share of the main character crises in the novel.
Layers of narrative
Finally, the novel “My Mother and I Know Her” by Ahmed Tamliya presents layers of intense narration that is enjoyable to receive and requires the reader’s imagination and participation. The novel points out important aspects of the vitality of the “Palestinian diaspora” experience and that its details and complexities have not yet been exhausted. It also points to crises of the psyche. Modern identity disorders, divisions, and their impact on political events and wars that broke out in the region.
The novel dealt with many details, and alluded to the hidden links between the events and policies controlled by the neo-colonial and post-colonial powers, which are represented by America’s policies and its role in the Gulf War in accordance with its interests and plans for the region and the Palestinian cause as a whole.
It is a novel with many faces and layers. It exploits the possibilities of composition that the novel genre allows. It illuminates individual behavior and analyzes collective behavior. It shows an aspect of the group’s history as presented by the memory of one individual who belongs to it. In the process, it monitors what official history cannot document and monitor, and presents all of that. In a special format and in an exciting style that combines fun and benefit.
