The First Well

These are the childhood flashes that nestle in the bosom of his memory, stirring them up, opening up a continuum of events with their own dimensions in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s life journey. He recorded them on the pages of “The First Well.” What he recorded is purely personal and purely childish, and its approach focuses on the self as its attention grows, its awareness increases, its feelings deepen, and its confusion never ends. To avoid slipping into family history with its ramifications (and that is tempting), the author chose to continue exploring a single entity that grows with the passing of time in awareness, knowledge, and emotion. Its innocence lives on, clings to it, and innocence fades away. It is, of course, part of its surroundings: some of those houses, trees, valleys, and hills; some of the suns, rains, faces, and voices through which it lives, and through which it discovers values ​​and morals, and discovers beauty and ugliness, joy and misery all at once. Perhaps intentionally or unintentionally, the author sometimes made the self and the environment interchangeable, each a reflection of the other, or even a symbolic embodiment of the other. Because the world is constantly disappearing with time, this attempt was to capture it in a semblance of words, lest it ever become entombed.