The Epic of Concepts

Description

The fictional world that Ibrahim al-Koni constructs in his novels is undoubtedly a narrator, an intermediary between the reader and the author, but not an independent one. It is often a voice that narrates and an eye that sees and describes. Its use stems from its solid, rather than sharp, narratives. If we were to define this position in the terminology of literary critics, we would say it is outside the story, distinct from the story. In this sense, it has no existence within the story it narrates; it is the natural world, unrelated to the events, in which it does not participate. It always speaks. And even when it uses the third-person pronoun, it never deviates from it. It acts as the primary narrator, not the subject of the narrative.

Thanks to this, the most prominent aspects concerning the narrator, his vision, his function, and the nature of the story he tells become clear. It is a story not devoid of plot, a story that aspires to totality, adding to the nature of the fictional characters and subsequently to their authority within the narrative text, which has been amplified solely for their sake. All of this continues to replace the old narratives in the contemporary Arabic novel with new narratives that are not yet sufficiently available. It is considered a vast desert for narrated events and for myth, where it sees a microcosm and the author can employ it to its fullest creative potential. If we emphasize the importance of the ideological discourse, which has a metaphysical dimension and is central to Ibrahim al-Koni’s narrative, and a military dimension in the implicit defense of Tuareg culture—a political and cultural minority in the Sahara—we can say that we are witnessing what might be termed the post-event phase in contemporary Arabic fiction. Al-Koni’s novel is a post-event novel.