tips of ‘blonde hair’ | Ahmed Fadl Shabloul
Algerian critic d. Nuzha Khalfawi “A true text, in my opinion, is able to amaze its reader and draw him to the deepest point in it, and then involve him in its re-creation, regardless of any description or characterization of this text.”
Through this concept, we can process the texts of the collection “Ashkar poetry” by the writer Aida Nashed Basili, all of which belong to social and emotional texts. The writer dedicated them to her beloved husband, his heart that lives with her and his soul that resides in heaven.
And I can say that the lyrics of this group managed to pull me to the deepest point in it, and that is the end. Alive and active, revealing the potential of the text at the end of its formation, so the endings of the texts in that group arrival, active and influential endings, saying the last word after which there is no speech, for example in the first story “The Fire of Jealousy” we find a journalist writer who left the page of money and the stock market, and she hated herself. To follow news about artists, to enter the world of her lover, an artist, through the Press portal, and it seems that she succeeded in her endeavor, so they sailed into the marriage nest together. However, she could not ignore the fan messages that follow on the page of her lover, an artist, on social networks, so a fight broke out due to jealousy and she decided to apologize and take flowers to the filming location, but she hears the sigh of the buffet worker while thinking about the romantic scene with the temptation star , so the woman’s jealousy flares up again, and she leaves Rushing with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. And every time he faces the fire of his jealousy and cannot control himself, and their nights burn with accusations, and she rains insults on him for not considering her feelings and not caring about her dignity as a wife. However, her husband swears that what is being said are lies and media fabrications, and in order to distance herself from the world of art and its lies, she decides to return to the page of money and economics, but divorces her and vows never to marry. for a famous or handsome man, whatever happens.
She marries a failed merchant who wrote about his economic ambitions in a newspaper. He lives in the world of business people and follows money news. The stock market fluctuates, and her husband fluctuates with it in a catastrophic way. To forgive him, but he lives in mortal jealousy, so she found no other choice but to insist on seeking a divorce. But he refuses to come to the incredible conclusion that she gave up all rights and gained freedom by stripping, and is currently writing on a sports page.
This amazing ending makes us think about the other, based on the previous information, such as whether the heroine of the story will meet the young athlete she loves, and then become jealous of him as a football fan, and repeat the ball with each side she works through the newspaper, so if she moves to work on the accident site, will she meet the cop or criminal she or he loves? And if you go to work on a page for literature and culture, will you meet a writer or an intellectual with whom you will make love and get close to him or her and get married, then jealousy will spread between them and so on. Perhaps he is saying what Kamel Raubah Laz, the hero of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel “The Mirage,” said: “I wish I had not been created as easy prey for the fangs of jealousy.”
The world of the story puts us in front of what is known as environmental criticism, and it comes from the influence of the environment that surrounds the character on his choices, actions and behavior, although jealousy is the thoughts, feelings and actions that occur when a person thinks that he has a strong connection with someone threatened by another competing party, and in the eyes of Ibn Qutayb’s news: Abu Al-Aswed said to his daughter: “Beware of jealousy, for it is the key to divorce.” – in the story – faced with the jealousy created by the working conditions, and at the same time we ask ourselves: if you put that character in other environmental conditions, would you feel the same feelings of jealousy that you felt when you were working? on the art page and then on the economy page?
I think that she would also behave like that, because jealousy is connected with psychological factors, and with a personal understanding of life and perception of relationships with others. Regarding jealousy, there are two verses attributed to the birth of Bint Al-Mustakfi (Habiba Ibn Zaydun), in which she says:
I’m jealous of you and myself and me ** and you and your place and time
And if I were to hide you in my eyes ** until Judgment Day, I wouldn’t have enough
This is a type of pathological jealousy, which confiscates the other person’s behavior and individual behavior, making him feel that he is in the prison of love, or in the grip of another person who does not want to escape, which we also saw in the story “Fire of Jealousy” by Aida Nashed Basili.
And we are still in the world of marriage and divorce that characterized the first stories of those fictional texts in “Aškar’s Poetry”, and in the story “The Secret” the first line surprises us with the question of the author of the story: “Was I wrong when I married him? Or was I wrong when Did I ask for a divorce?” Then comes the flashback technique, or flashback, and the female character talks about the circumstances of her marriage to her professor at the university, who is fifteen years older than her. We are surprised that the husband, a university professor, refuses to have children due to the fear of an inherited disease in the family without access to effective treatment , so the woman protests because her husband didn’t tell her about that before he got engaged and married her. Would he have told me before that I won’t marry him? ” She loves him very much, but she surprised us by asking for a divorce with a very strong and impactful sentence that concludes the story with the words: Divorce me.. I also don’t want a son from a family of crazy people.
Accordingly, she accuses her husband and his family of insanity when he attributes his reluctance to marry to this “secret” he has been keeping from his wife and her family, a genetic disease that has kept his brother confined to his room for twenty year. , refusing to leave him, not even in the bathroom.
Did the woman consider it crazy, did she lack a sense of humanity when she learned from her the reason for her husband’s refusal to have children, or did she take revenge for her dignity, because the husband did not acknowledge his family’s history of illness, even though he personally avoided this fate and this disease? Was the husband, a university professor, asked not to succumb to those obsessions and nightmares that assumed that he would suffer from a genetic disease in the upcoming birth, and finally, was the woman right when she asked for a divorce?
Such questions that this short story leaves behind make the reader or recipient a participant in the production of semantics, a participant in shaping the clay and reaching the deepest point of the text, as Nuzha Khalfawi points out.
The story “The Girl of My Dreams” comes from the language of a young man, and it also revolves around the world of marriage. The film “Empty Pillow” becomes an objective equivalent of the feelings of a young man who falls in love with his girlfriend at first sight, because it is his first love, and that is a question that Ihsan Abdel Quddous tried to discuss in his novel “The Empty Pillow”.
In the story “The Girl of My Dreams”, a young man uses cute tricks to find out from the doorman the girl’s apartment in the building she entered previously, and to learn her name and the name of her father. the decisive and surprising ending comes in the fact that the girl he saw and fell in love with at first sight is a friend of his girlfriend to whom he got engaged.
The story is traditional, and its treatment was traditional, as if we were watching comic situations in an Egyptian film, as I mentioned, but the amazing ending is what saved the story from weakness, as the real girl that the young man saw in the front of the toaster appears in the end, and she was the girl of his dreams, and his fiancee’s friend was visiting her. After she bought snacks from a toaster on the way to a friend’s house, the young man thought she was a resident of that building.
One of the manifestations of the weakness of this story is unrealistic. I believe that the path to marriage or engagement does not go through such naive methods now. On the contrary, there are more serious steps than just seeing a young girl on the road that she knows nothing about, so she follows her mother to directly announce the engagement. But in any case, the open ending leaves us with several interpretations to participate as receivers in the making and shaping of his clay, including: Will the young man break off his engagement with Salwa, when he finds the girl of his true dreams, who is her friend Nahed? What is the attitude of Salwa and her family towards him after he revealed the truth to them and will Nahid agree to hang out with him after this situation, which I say is comical and naive at the same time? And will his mother consent to this tampering after repeating – after seeing Salwa – in the name of God, God willing, and her son looks at her angrily, not knowing why? And he knows in his heart that this bride is not the girl of his dreams that he saw before?
The text takes us to the deepest point, when the young man’s hand trembled as he greeted Nahida, the real girl of his dreams, presented to him by Salwa, his fiancée, who was not to blame for everything that happened.
In the story “The Promise” we also see a dramatic situation whose heroine is a girl who waited ten years for her lover who traveled abroad for work, and when he was late in returning, and she was more than thirty-five months old, she had to accept the second, and on the day of the engagement and casting in the house, the lover sent her Migrant woman has a bouquet of roses on which it is written: “The bouquet of roses is lucky because you will see it before me… Wait for me and my father tonight at seven in the evening.”
And on that expression the story ends, so that the writer leaves us to participate in perceptions and scenarios after that sudden sentence. Will she refuse those who proposed to her and come, and wait for her lover who may break his promise and not come at seven. in the evening? Will he fulfill his promise this time, after he promised her many times in the past ten years? One of the artistic paradoxes in that story is that it is the bride’s mother Shahd, not her daughter Shahd, who receives the bouquet and the paper. Let’s go back to the question: Will the mother of the bride hide this paper from her daughter, because a bird in her hand and the presence in the bride’s house is better than the groom who has not yet come?
The last sentence or conclusion of the story is what forces us to reshape the clay of the story, and try to participate and develop appropriate solutions, each according to our own experience and culture.
In the story “Blonde Hair”, which the author chose as the title of her collection as a whole, the heroine of the story did not care about the hairdresser’s advice that the golden blonde color did not suit her red complexion, but insisted on choosing it because there are origins that the hairdresser does not know , as well as the fact that her husband is secretly peeking at her. The kitchen window next to the window of their young neighbor with blonde hair, and the husband admires the blonde hair color chosen by his wife, and at first he thought she was wearing a wig, and when she told him that is that her hair, he said to her: Very beautiful, I like the color. She thought she would stop looking at their neighbor through the window.
However, the wife’s mother did not like her daughter’s new hair color, and during the visit she said to her: What kind of farce did you make of your hair? They discovered that the husband was still looking out the window in the direction of the neighbor, and their neighbor had blackened her hair.
The writer leaves us in doubt as to how the wife will please her husband, when she sees a foreigner neighbor eavesdropping who manipulates the color of her hair, so accordingly the wife resorts to adjusting the color in the hope that her husband will be satisfied. , but there is no way to please him.
The writer also leaves us anticipating what will happen between the wife and her mother after they discover that the husband is cheating on her with his looks and spying on the neighbor.
Hence the endings in this group of stories, endings open to increasingly spacious spaces, which gives them vitality, presence and effectiveness in the world of the short story.
