“Am I your son, father?” .. The writer Muhammad Barada succumbs to the charm of the short story

Submitting to the charm of the short story, contemplating life after adulthood, and experimentation are present in the latest literary works of the prominent novelist and critic Mohamed Barrada, a collection of short stories published by Al-Fanak Publishing House entitled: “Am I Your Son, Father?”

At the beginning of his new stories, Barrada, one of the most prominent pioneers of critical studies at the Moroccan University, writes in a text entitled “The Short Story: That Distinctive Moment”: “With experience and long contemplation, I find myself convinced that the short story gains its legitimacy and the justifications for its existence from its capture of that distinctive moment that passes through… The space of existence is lost, confused, and ambiguous, looking forward to someone who will embrace it and lure it to formulate it in a form and language that rises to grasping the privacy of (the distinct moment) that illuminates what surrounds it, without going overboard with tautology, rhetoric, and words that are nothing more than an echo of what (was said before).” .

In the story “Indian Summer,” there is a dialogue about belonging to the impossible world, the material world, the reasonable, rebellious fantasies, nihilism, and absurdity.

In “Visitation” there are scenes from the life of a retiree who lost his lifelong companion, and was cut off from the outside world, until she visited him and said: “No, I don’t want the pilgrim of love to go like this.” Only God knows what is in the heart, but it is forbidden to bury your head while you are alive (…) I and my dead brother are still living through you and you see with your eyes and drink my cup from your cup (…) I still want to live as long as you live.”

As for “The Joy of Rain,” it contains a lot of collective life, a difference in the motivation for the rain, stemming from a difference in perceptions of the world and its interpretations, a drought that extended to people’s lives and their features, and discussions about “the empty and the empty.” Because “if we remain silent, we will forget the waste, and we will not listen to the words of the radio… and what is the talk?”, and a revelation of the reason for the actual cessation of rain.

In “Memory of Stone,” the testimony of an artist, who missed his appointment with the audience, about the trap of choices: the determination that must remain strong throughout life. His testimony also bears witness to the questions of writing personal history, and the position of the individual human being in an accelerating world that transcends him and his type.

In the story “A Playful Girl,” the reader finds Barada experimenting; A story with one starting point and one complex, but with multiple possible endings. He proposes the endings he proposes, along with the situations and lessons that accompany them.

This literary experiment is an extension of a life in which a person has many choices. When he settles on one of them, he may be preyed upon by doubt, regret, and sorrow over what could have been, which steals the pleasure of what is and what is achieved, and it is, to a large extent, the subject of the story “Yesterday Night.”

Old age does not necessarily mean certainty and anchoring on the shore of tranquility. Rather, it may be the starting point for comprehensive questions, from which everything that a person has lived and what he has not lived, what he believed in and what he did not believe in, those who accompanied him and those who were absent from him, is not safe from them. It is a topic that has been raised in works. A recent novel by Muhammad Barada, including “A Different Death.” It is not only doubt that torments, but also certainty! how? One of the characters in the story (“You have a crisis of faith,” said the dream interpreter) responds: “Of course, certainty is tormenting because whoever seeks shade from it is plagued by doubts about his certainty.”

A vision of writing also provides a habitat for arranging thought and spirit: “When I am confused and lose my compass in the face of thorny questions that throw me into the abyss of doubt and bewilderment, I have become accustomed to resorting to my red pen and a sheaf of white papers, and immersing myself in drawings that have no head or tail, before writing words that help me.” To put an end to the internal boiling, and make me rely on a vision that dispels doubts.”

As for the story whose title the collection bears, “Am I Your Son, Father?”, it surrounds the idea of ​​the missing father, an old man over seventy. An idea that has not been affected by more than half a century of “daring to venture into living bare-chested,” to seep in anxiety and questions about roots, identity, the mystery of the world, and what comes after.

In this story, the story of a generation that carried the banner of estrangement after independence: “When I reached adolescence, and immersed myself in reading poems, stories, and novels, I found myself in a parallel world that dragged me towards the chaos of feelings and atmospheres entwined with dreams, desires, and challenging questions. My goal is no longer limited to enthusiasm for liberating the homeland, but it also includes the innermost desires and ambition to enter a stage that rejects ancient traditions and breaks the guardianship of foreigners.”

But the audacity to live in another way does not negate the multiplication of fragility in the absence of a father, with all the meaning of this word, and the person faces “a world that is changing so rapidly that, despite its achievements, it entails losses and disasters,” an absence that has not… At this stage of life, there is nostalgia or sorrow for Talal’s orphanhood. Rather, it is invoked as a “symbol and value,” and an attempt to answer the urgent question of identity, belonging, and its plausibility.

This hunger for a father, summoned by a son decades older than him, after a lifetime of departure, is tied up in the story by Barada, with open-ended questions that contain an answer: “Should I name it out of fear that the end of my life is approaching, and that I will leave this world without saying all the hopes and dreams that my memory and guts have stored, of which I have only achieved A little bit? Or does the sudden longing for you, my father, go back to what one of the wise men said, when he was asked about the function of the “dead father” in relation to his offspring, and he replied, saying: “The dead father is fit for us to pin the mistakes of the world upon him; Other than that, I don’t find anything suitable for dead fathers.”