Faisal Abbas 
The novel is said through a quiet language, realistic, scarce, metaphor
Between the diodes of the homeland and the alienation, youth and aging, resistance and surrender, essence and scales, the fate of the characters of the novel “Flying ink”, issued by the “Books Khan” house by the writer Azza Rashad, especially her female personalities. Four women, each of them begins with the letter Nun, is carefully made by chance, as it is “Nun Al -Niswa”, which raises many questions; How does the language affect the formation of a woman’s image? Is it an expression of the presence of a woman or just a linguistic classification?
Here is a symbolic indication that the suffering does not concern the blessing, Najwa, Nadine and Nesma, the heroes of the stories, the “Fur Group” as they call themselves, but every woman who is trapped in her homeland with the restrictions of the “molds” imposed by social systems; Conditions, customs, ignorance, poverty, traditions, and when most of them began to escape to a new home, each of them carried her old with her, three of the four women who traveled to the major cities of the times: America, France, London, and the latter remained in Egypt, trying to collect their diaspora on the phone in the “Messenger of Messenger”.
Three them are gone, to live in the luminous West, the most enlightened, but souls do not compose alienation and if they are given security and freedom, so they return to discuss the books of memory, in an attempt to restore extreme feelings, which rebuild memories according to the cruel present. Was the past ideal until we try to retrieve it? Or is it the reality that we are not to adapt to, so we set us into other stages of our lives, or is it the nature of the period of aging that tends to what psychologists call a “review of life” in order to evaluate and find meaning to what we have passed through through our different age stages?
Verses that present themselves through a dramatic scene, not via introductory cards
Psychologist Friedrich Barrlett says that we may see the past as an ideal to escape what we live in the present, while Freud believes that there are those who remain stuck in previous stages of their psychological development, which drives their minds to repeat thinking about memories. We only remember the occasions that left emotional effects in our conscience, negative or positive, more than other regular details.
The novel is said through a quiet language, realistic, scarce, al -Majaz, with a diming rhythm, a balance between eloquent and colloquially derived from daily and common life and folklore (they thought it was pregnant with five and five. They turn the world and put it, not for older people … a man in the world and a man in the Hereafter).
It is a language that identifies with the personalities and its convergence environments, sometimes it is a subject of reputation and descriptive, which is characterized by a simple artistic imaging, and a somewhat complex narrative building, depends on the multiplicity and different distance of the narrator from the personality within the same voice; In some places, you read scenes that are listed with the conscience of the speaker, the addressee, and the absent together, and in a very narrow narrative space, to achieve a special emotional effect. However, this artistic option needed more focused coordination in some places so that the phrases did not overlap and the meaning mixed. The method also adopted the technique of free collapse, which sometimes turned into a curator, that mental layer that precedes the perception or complete awareness, to tell the character from this level what is being implemented within it without the ability to equate or hide.
Is it an expression of a woman’s presence or just a linguistic classification?
The events intersect and intertwine, between five different voices, four women dating to meet in the city of Alexandria – the city of childhood and youth – to restore their memories, and the voice of Naji, the son of the woman who decided to search for her childhood friendships. The novel begins its events with a short chapter, narrated by the grace of the forty -year -old, who lost its cat three days ago, so that this would be an indication of its unity, despite being married and has a young son, but (when will we benefit a husband or a son?! This initiation becomes the reader’s trap, to follow the effects of what happened before the end, too.
But a blessing does not continue to tell, as we were surprised in the next chapter that she is hidden and that her son Naji – who appears to have survived his parents ’complex to live alone – will take over and discover his mother again through her laptop files, the device that opens without“ password ”like his mother’s life and experiences. It turns out that he could read his mother’s personality and dismantle her codes only if he tried, but he was immune to the attempt, preferring him to isolate him from the generation of his parents who live in the ancient millionaires and tragedy. Rather, he also discovers a dark aspect in his father’s personality, that writer who lives for himself, connected to any commitment that limits his freedom, so he reads his father’s speeches that his mother keeps, but she is letters he wrote to another woman!
Nagy’s voice, the only masculine voice within the novel, appears as a declaration that permeates the long chapters of the rest of the narrators, Najwa, Nadine, Nesma and grace. Despite the different generations, but it shares the feeling of alienation, loneliness and the desire to migrate (to start my life by traveling, reassuring that my presence is like not, does not differentiate with anyone).
Each character presents herself through a special dramatic scene, and not through explicit introductory cards that the writer spreads here and there. Information that is thrown into it in a narrative context without inserting, and without a feeling of the reader that he was tearing! For example, we do not know that Abd al -Rahman – Najwa’s husband – was born in Michigan, in a progressive Western society that supports freedom, except in the context of comparing his reaction to the relationship of his Muslim daughter in David as if he was born in one of the countries of the reactionary East! We do not know its Palestinian origins except when an old box is opened before us over the office, and pictures of scattered around the room between them the grandfather digs a water pump in the village of Ain Ghazal, before the Jewish “Yusuf” forced them to displacement … and other details that belong to each character separately.
And through a sharp emotional arc, the characters change from one side to the opposite party, but it changed preceding the time of the novel. It took place before the start of the narration itself, that we all know them in their new image, after their harsh journey settled. Najwa, who dreams that she is killing her daughter, with harsh childhood in the confines of Jeddah, full of tales, and a father married a week after the mother’s death, the strong, talented girl with revolutionary tendencies, collides and clashes with a reality that she rejects and rejects it, so she decides to escape away to start again, but the beginning is troubled, and alienation when she gives something that takes things, so until you reach a station “Access”; A family formation station that marries and gives birth to her Muslim daughter Noura, who is fined in David and her love becomes her stabbing. It is another Nun as an extension of the daughters of her gender.
Like Najwa, Nadine finds herself in the city of Al -Nour, Paris, accompanied by her husband and her children, but through an Arab oil country. She is the researcher of freedom and love, the lover of singing, she lives in Paris, in the spirit of Alexandria’s girl, after she brought her her country of origin as her son says to her. Its sons deprived France, which they were born and lived because she did not get rid of what she left behind.
Suzan Levber, another deceased woman on the sidelines of the tales, Nadine is looking into the layers of memory to try to determine one moment, she could change the direction of her life, so she could not, because she is many moments, because the frustrations were many, while her greatest frustration when her husband tries to force her to return to Egypt to protect her two daughters from life in France, after he felt that he lost his son in the conflict of culture, religion and customs. Thus, he pays her to return a bankruptcy of talents, hopes and future opportunities, but only a woman (her husband will send her the price of eating and drinking monthly).
The reader lives in about seventy pages of the history of the personality, its experiences and frustrations, then the last three lines come to express a vigilance or attention with a word of rejection, but we do not know whether it is a permanent case, or will the situation be resigned to circumstances and others, as it was always?!
Nessma also searched for her salvation, by migrating to the city of fog, not through a scholarship or through a mediator country, but by exploiting one of the reasons for its suffering, it suffers from a birth defect, a genetic disease that gives it special features, and it disrupts female functions and affects its physical nature and features, so this defect becomes the same as its gate to escape to London to join a rehabilitation center with the help of one of its relatives. Exile by force compulsion away from his oldest home and his great dreams.
It is, then, is a multiple suffering. A societal siege, male and thieves from a brother seizing her inheritance, and a rare disease that detracts from her being, and the unity of the absence of her friends. She is expatriate in her homeland and besieged with the view of society that is not seen by a full woman who deserves a full marriage! In London, she gets to know another expatriate from Pakistan with fear and weakness like her, so their need is the reason for their convergence, but she soon discovers what drives her to separate and get involved in an anomaly that raises the ire of those who know her and gives her only a legitimate residence.
The novel ends, and its stories do not end, but rather remains open to endless possibilities, harsh questions, and the journey of alienation and the search for love and freedom remains in place, and another trip to search for memories, with a clear fact that we do not escape from our homeland Childhood that formed our personalities, and change does not bring a fetch, but rather plants a generation.
* A novelist from Egypt
