The Guardian of the Lost City

“In an unprecedented interview with the Guardian of the Lost City, he says: I was thinking about the burden placed on the shoulders of my peers, the guardians of capitals and major cities like Cairo, Damascus, Rabat, Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, New Delhi, and Beijing… more than I was thinking about myself…
Between the lost city as a reality and the utopia as a dream, Saeed, the hero of the novel “The Guardian of the Lost City” by Palestinian novelist and poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, stumbles into a maze of loss. He represents a state of disbelief that affects an entire generation, searching for meaning in his life and the fulfillment of his dreams, in a relentless attempt to restore a lost balance in the real world. In this novel, Ibrahim Nasrallah presents a fictional trial of the Arab political system, discussing the significance of the actual, material absence of people—that is, as real, active individuals in the calculations of politicians—and the symbolic absence it represents. He poses troubling and fateful questions that remain the primary concern of the Arab citizen, despite the passage of sixteen years. Since the novel was first published, the distance between the ruler and the ruled, and the distance between destiny and the subject, is still fading in our Arab existential struggle; because man is only lost in lost cities, and cannot exist individually in the shadow of the greatest absence… Did Ibrahim Nasrallah mean to say that the circle is still closed on us, and that there is no eye of a needle through which the individual in his Arab version can slip, or jump over, even in light of the ongoing Arab revolutions, which seem to herald an Arab Autumn at the very least? There is no doubt that Ibrahim Nasrallah, in every work he presents to us, raises fateful and existential issues specific to the Arab person, in which he launches from reality to the imaginary, and leaves the reader the opportunity to project this imagination onto reality and its facts. If “Saeed,” the hero of the novel, discovers that his city is empty of its inhabitants, as if it has turned into a ghost town, is it the fate of our Arab cities today to turn into ghosts? Here, the novelist seems to whet the reader’s appetite to collaborate with the text’s producer in constructing meaning, thereby capturing the profound artistic pleasure of the text, one that enables him to carve out rich and abundant interpretive paths. This means we are faced with a work that requires a special reading and a model reader.