حجر الكحل

Dafoe is a prophetic novel by the writer Noha Jamil Al-Hajj, which talks about the confusion of human groups in light of a major catastrophe, and the lack of those groups when the terrible disaster with all its repercussions becomes apparent to them, their lack of the state, which has always been a guardian and arrogant entity that dictates and guards at the same time. They are tried for the first time, and between the teeth of cruel nature, and after the state has lost the masses for many years of their hidden talents that they no longer know, and has reduced their ability to determine their destiny, and made them unfit for absolute freedom, they find themselves going in great confusion in search of safe havens Relying on themselves, carrying with them what they can carry, in an atmosphere in which the form of modern displacement is beautifully mixed with heritage displacement, as if the severe crisis has left the meaning of time, they are displaced without any assurances of any kind, without a news bulletin, without statements, and without even an apology; They are like beings who found themselves free in the barren desert after the circus car they were carrying overturned, and they became so terrified that there was no organized paragraph.
We are in front of a quiet Nubian village, whose people knew from the old mayor that they would be scattered again: we will not stay, people, the river that rises to the north has dried up, the villages have starved, the food has run out, and all the news confirms the inevitability of leaving, the last negotiations failed and the deaf dam held what was left of the water Ascending to us, Abyssinia closed its eyes and blocked it, leaving only rotten water, so why stay in the midst of this inevitable death?
After they hastily gathered their things, visited the cemeteries and prayed for their dead, and watered the cacti planted at the tombstones, this is a beautiful and not fleeting picture at all!
From the words of the old Nubian man, the reader can clearly know the crime, in which the Nile, for the Egyptians in general, is the body, through this novelistic work that has the spirit of an surrounding biblical catastrophe, and which I do not know of anyone else so far that deals with the obsession with the draining of the Nile after the Ethiopian dam ; But this bleak prophecy of ruin, stemming from Nubian geography, and wounded Nubian memory, is one of the admirable areas in the spirit of the novel: that tantalizing emotional turmoil about the Nile, the Nile here coming from years and legend, not just a meek tourist summer, he can harbor something What for those near its banks is the indispensable Nile, the beast that flooded Nubia with its houses and palms, it was ruthless when it flooded the earth, and it was ruthless when it dried up.
The second point that impresses, is that in the severity of that crisis, adherence to the original increases, and the longing for the first land increases. This same village, in which they have been staying for a long time, is not the real Nuba. The nostalgia for the sunken Nuba explodes more than the longing for a new, strange haven, and this is similar to the fundamentalist tendency of all ancient nations in the face of the successive defeats of the world.
I do not want to dwell on the beauties of brown work in which, despite the weight of it, you smell the scents of dates and basil, and hear the laughter of the boys as they play; To leave the opportunity for the reader to wander in it with his heroes without directions from me as his heroes went without directions, and he will discover how humane this work is, as much as he is a Nubian, and he can feel all the wounds in him as if they were on his back.