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- Country of residence: Palestine
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Like every writer in the first attempt, Ruaa Al-Shish’s attempt in her novel “Wings” remains subject to the questions of the self that are always repeated; Value and existential questions, and many questions about reality and sensory input.
The novel, which was recently launched at the “Mahmoud Darwish Museum” in Ramallah, is 288 medium-sized pages and consists of 32 chapters. It received praise and a recommendation for publication from the jury of the “Young Writer” competition, on which the “Abdul Mohsen Foundation” is based. Al-Qattan” annually.
Ruaa Al-Shish, born in 1992, is a refugee from the village of Beit Attab in the Jerusalem District. She lives in Bethlehem and holds a bachelor’s degree in “Business Administration.”
Between two places and two worlds
The events of the novel take place between two worlds, one real and the other virtual. As for the realistic, its scene is located between two places: the forbidden village from which the heroine of the novel comes, and the modern city to which she immigrates in order to pursue her university education. Between these two real places lies a virtual world, into which the characters enter as spirits with wings or spots of light that represent their inner urges.
In the virtual world, there is the character of the host and the character of the monster who dialogue with the two central characters, the girl and the blind boy, who engage in what resembles a love relationship in the real world before entering the world of spirits, where the girl discovers in a dialogue good and evil and human motives towards achieving interests or achieving moral superiority. The relationship with this young man does not suit her, so she breaks it off, and goes on the path of discovering herself and her values, through her dialogue with the host, who secretly controls her fate and the fate of the blind young man.
Good and evil
The world parallel to the real one was spiritual, in which the heroes had the free choice to enter, in which the characters questioned their moral and emotional concepts, and in which the host appeared to be a harvester of souls, and who had an esoteric role in revealing the hidden sources of good and evil in their abstract concepts, without philosophical or cognitive depth based on a harmonious cognitive background.
Roaa projects many expectations onto her characters, as well as presupposed societal expectations, so she goes into dialogue with these expectations of the self, the place, the surroundings, and the psycho-societal environment. We find that Ruaa projects many expectations onto herself and adopts them in her narration. To fall into the trap of a previously prepared answer about behavior, causes and effects, mental and psychological processes, moral judgment, and absolute value judgment.
Featureless
If we look carefully at the novel’s characters, we find that they are without features, characteristics, or characteristics. No visions have drawn faces or even names for them. This is a feature we see repeated in Palestinian youth literature, especially in the West Bank. It may be due to the state of the features in which they live, and it may It is due to the abundance of influences, coming from the Internet and cinema, crowding, unemployment, and narrowness in horizon, place, and road; It becomes more difficult for this generation to feel its features or its uniqueness. This is undoubtedly reflected in the literature resulting from it. In this novel in particular, we see that more; Personalities are based on rational and dialectical action, more than anything else.
It seems that Ruaa chose an easy, combined, dramatic path, one in doctrine and one dimension, which may be a smart choice for the first attempt. Because there is no adventure or risk in it, but the free choice of the characters is noteworthy here. Perhaps we wanted to see in the crossing between the two worlds, or between the two space-times in the two worlds, an existential travail, or a transition between the state of primitive awareness of matter, and the more developed awareness of emotional value, and this is a search in which a generation of visions passes, and the visions themselves as well, in an inevitable process of searching for the self. .
Questioning
If we delve a little into the experience of visions in the novel “Wings,” we find that it goes on a path of questioning values and reality, and even questioning the material awareness of the surroundings, and here is a challenge in some conscious and cognitive contexts, even though the narrative is not devoid of stereotypical theorizing in the dialogue and dialectic of the fictional characters. In defending its moral existence; The absolute value judgment is clearly present between the lines of the novel.
The idea of creating two parallel worlds was the source of visions in many places. This imaginative dimension in the novel, and the attempt to penetrate the boundaries of nature and physics, made it much easier for her to convey her ideas and her attempts to formulate the characters’ positions and behaviors. However, the anchoring of these characters, in multiple dimensions that emerged from a complex psychological and social structure such as the one assumed by the novel, was somewhat incomplete. The behavior and debate were one-dimensional, and the dialogue contained a lot of repetition, which could have been eliminated in editing.
Unanswered condition
If we deal with the novel “Wings” as an example of young literature in Palestine, we may find it a promising and promising model. If we dealt with it with the logic of critical questioning, our praise of the novel would be greater than our blame for it, especially since it is full of elements, even if we take what is in it and match it with what is. Shared same - socially, with other similar attempts locally, to put before us many questions, about the state of confusion, ambiguity, and unanswerability facing young people.
How is Palestinian youth literature unique now? How is this generation unique in its promising and beautiful literary attempts? How is it unique, cognitively and philosophically, in its depth? How is it different from what it appears to be? How does it reveal to us the essence of the true existential crisis that Palestinian youth are going through? How does the general situation in the West Bank affect this? What is the political conflict, the economic conflict, and the conflict over the few opportunities, in this psychological-societal context and the geopolitical-economic climate?
It is the narrowness of space, horizon, time, and geography that produces this type of literature, in which we find characters without features, and all of whose theses are questions. There is no uniqueness here in this flood of sensory input, which may make a person lose his sense of details and distinctive features. That is, there is no isolation, nor a clear horizon, in this place that is “on the palm of a demon.”
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