The Lighter

Description

The naive boy’s struggle between multiple ideologies: his devout mother, his cultured teacher, and his seductive relative. The novel taught me to make a firm decision instead of wandering and hesitating. But can I? In “The Lighter,” we encounter scattered events from the life of a traditional Arab family whose members are directly or indirectly exposed to experiences that reflect the essence of life and its evils. Hanna Mina’s protagonist is a shy, naive boy named Farah al-Makhzoumi, seventeen years old, who confesses from the very first page of the novel: “However, I must confess to your kind hearts that what I learned was very simple, for one reason: I was foolish. I was ignorant that all the world’s knowledge, as Professor Subhi told me, is worthless if it is not combined with experience. Experience is the touchstone, the first and last teacher. And that night, I entered my first real experience and learned my first real lesson from Farousia and from my father.” What Hanna Mina does in this novel is to explore the life of a social stratum by highlighting the reality of a middle-class family living during the French Mandate in Syria. This period had profound effects on the country’s social and political structure, one aspect of which was the strong opposition to the mandate. This opposition is embodied in the character of the father, who tries to conceal his political activities, even from his wife, Nazira. Despite this, Rizqallah al-Makhzoumi, the father, becomes a “suspicious” figure in the eyes of the foreign occupiers. Therefore, the occupiers send a woman named Farousia to monitor him and observe his dangerous activities. This leads him to fall into her trap and succumb to temptation and downfall.