The tradition of story writing in Arabic – the country’s third language – began with the magazine “Eritrean Modernity”, which published short stories by Abdul Qadir al-Hakim in the 1990s. After a relatively long period of time (2010), a distinguished group emerged of the storyteller Hanan Muhammad Salih, who was born in Asmara and immigrated to Saudi Arabia. The writer mixed poetry with the story in the book “Woman, a second-class human being”, which she signed at the time at the “Beirut Book Fair” and included the difficult problem of women’s rights and their being in the Arab patriarchal society with its patriarchal dominance. Her writing featured influences by the Saudi poet Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, the Egyptian writer Anis Mansour, and the Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran. Note that the first Eritrean novels written in Arabic was “Saleh or Winter’s Journey” by the militant Muhammad Saeed Nawd, which was published in Beirut in 1979 and dealt with the biography of families who moved from the north and west of the country to Sudan during the harvest season. Naud was considered one of the faces of the Eritrean revolution in the face of the Ethiopian regime, and one of the founders of the “Eritrea Liberation Front” that rose to prominence in Port Sudan in 1959. He also participated in the anti-colonial movement in Sudan, the country in which he resided between 1944 and 1956. He also edited a political book in 1971 entitled “The Story of the Italian Colonization of Eritrea”. After that, she recited the praises of Eritrean novelists such as Ahmed Omar Al-Sheikh in “Nurai,” “The Sails,” “Sorrows of Rain” and “Red Wind,” and Abu Bakr Hamid Kahal in “The Smell of Weapon,” “Birkentaya: The Land of the Wise Woman,” and “African Titanics.” And ending with the most famous Eritrean novelist today, Haji Jaber, who was crowned in 2012 the “Sharjah Prize for Artistic Creativity” for the novel category, for his novel “Samrawet”. We knew him in professional works such as “Marsa Fatima”, “Black Foam”, “Rambo Al-Habashi” and “The Spindle Game”, which allowed the Eritrean narration to reserve a place in the Arab cultural scene and be celebrated by critics, with themes that are very original and current and a language that dares to Using the country’s rich linguistic stock of local languages spoken by the population in addition to Arabic, such as Tigray, Tigrinya and Saho.
In “Far Sails,” the first thing that appears is the problems of immigration and asylum, as in the first story, “Normal Days for a Twenty-First Young Man” by Sami Al-Murad residing in France. The mother’s phantom appears on the other side of the world like a guardian angel “She sits on her worn-out prayer rug, raises her palms to the sky, rises and walks with steps the heaviest of the pyramid. She takes a small wooden mug, fills it with oil, casts her spells on it, and with her loose-skinned hands she pours oil on his head while uttering her prayers, wipes his face with blessed oil, rubs both sides of his head for him, takes off his clothes, continues to anoint his skinny body, strokes his limbs and then covers him with her white scarf. Light.” From alienation to exoticism and the philosophy of cruelty in “The Inventor of Cruelty” by Fatima Hussein, who resides in Saudi Arabia. We read, “We bulls may be born strong, but man has invented cruelty that turns strength into savagery.” And the swift transition between the real and the imagined in the “Labyrinth of Ideas” by Maryam Mansour, who also lives in Saudi Arabia.
A story interspersed with disturbing questions regarding the meaning of freedom: “They do not know that freedom is a word that does not fit into our dictionary as human beings. You reach the point where you contradict yourself in order to satisfy a side of you that the outside world accepts. We are programmed to be like this!”, or an exotic atmosphere like that which appears in The beginning of the story “Betrayal” by Alia Muhammad Salih: “There is a sentence that is repeated inside me without stopping, and it has a pungent taste like a stew of meat with burning Indian spices that my mother used to prepare. “One has to decide his life.” Tonight will be the dramatic beginning of the classic Audrey Hepburn films, where the heroine overcomes all hardships and makes her own destiny, tonight I will begin my journey towards peace away from my mother’s sparkling words: Lynn, God has blessed you with this man who prayed to God many nights to find him… Other titles such as “Shadow of the Mirage” by Ahmed Anwar, “The Loser” by Najat Shafa Musa, “Peagle of Hope” by Ahmed Shekay, “Closed Eyes” by Reem Turkay, “A Call Under the Bombing” by Yassin Azaz and other themes that are available in a large amount of The present, anxiety, diaspora and exoticism, so that, as the Moroccan writer Aisha Al-Basri says in her introduction to the ontology: “The tales of young writers are available on a regulating thread that “others’ homelands do not create happiness.”
There are many places, times, and sounds, but they meet with their belonging to postmodernism
Short and intense stories, full of their imaginations, styles, narratives, plots and characters. The stories vary, the places, times, and voices vary, and the writings vary according to different experiences and talents, but they meet mostly postmodern affiliation. Some stories are led by heroes with clear landmarks, pacing at a steady pace, and others closer to the characteristics of “the anti-hero” because of their hesitation, lack of control over themselves, and their movement in the realms of the dream, the unconscious, and the absurd, where everything is possible. The reader switches between the one who confuses reality and fantasy, the one who loses consciousness to wake up from sleep to avoid illusions, the lover of a lover who does not exist, the dead one who does not realize that she has passed away for a while, the one who hates the second absent self, the one who commits a crime to write a story, and the one who lives stories that do not It actually exists. The mingling of dreams and illusions with reality plunges most of the stories into a fun exotic surreal atmosphere. They are promising youthful creations, and the storytellers have acquired the techniques of plotting, sculpting characters, holding narrative threads, employing dialogue, and a game of suspense and excitement, beginnings that carry in their sails a number of elegant pens, with their linguistic richness and art of storytelling, that will revive hopes for the future, and enrich Arab Eritrean literature. To meet in the vision with Hajji Jaber, who seems confident that he will find the satisfactory answer to the starting question: “Now I may find an opportunity to diversify in my answers as I enumerate the names of Eritrean creators, hoping that this question will no longer be needed, and the names will become bright and known to all. This necessarily places a lot of burden on the young writers here to carry on. This book is only the beginning, or so it should.”
