“Musk Mouse”… Melody Shagmoum solves the secrets that excite minds and attract souls

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Every writer who pledges his pen to literary writing requires skill and talent, without which he writes nothing but fabricated and embellished words, crude and repetitive, without thought or imagination.

Every time I read or re-read the literature of Melody Chaghmoum, I am assured that he is a writer with creative talent and literary skill that is distinguished by the ability to invent new and original ideas in a unique style. I am assured that his novelistic writing is always preoccupied with the anxiety of existence when it recalls lives that are apparently simple, but are in depth drawn to ambiguous times that throw them into areas of anxiety that cloud the serenity of their days and nights.

The characters of Al-Melody Chaghmoum’s novels and short stories have an appearance and an interior, they live in a divided and ambiguous world, and therefore they are divided by two basic concerns: thinking about their identity in the midst of a contradictory world in which they are forced to search for the meaning of their existence and determine their place in this intertwined world; and their constant struggle with themselves to find themselves in a state of tension between desires, illusions, the oppressive social situation, and impossible hopes. To confirm this, we read with joy a rich repertoire of narratives and narrative colors in: “Things That Move”; “The Rib and the Island”, “The Idiot, the Forgotten, and Yasmine”; “The Eye of the Horse”, “The Paths of Olives”, “The Mixture Tree”, “The Beds’ Grass”, “The Women of the Al-Rundi Family”, “Elegance”, “Ariana”, “The Woman and the Boy”, “The Musk Rat”. “Remains of Mountain Figs”, “Moonlit Nights”, “The Necklace of Thousands”, “My Pierced Real”, “A Star Dances with Me”, “Zaragoza”, “Long Race Rabbits”, “Kalila and the World”.

In this regard, Miloudi Chaghmoum emphasizes the importance of conscience in composing worlds and describing conditions. The reader’s bet is to pay attention to the intellectual dimensions of this or that novel in order to understand the fragility of being in the face of the situations it experiences. Let us consider what the hero of the novel “Moonlit Nights” said, as he summarizes this trend clearly: “What does it mean that I sleep while I am asleep, I see myself sleeping while I am actually asleep…”, and let us also consider the question of the character Dalila in the novel “Kalila and Dunia”: “I know that only one question occupies me, as it occupies you: Why was I born?” Conscience, with its philosophical dimension, is a basic introduction to reading Miloudi Chaghmoum’s novelistic experience in its realistic, strange, magical, and mythological dimensions…

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To illustrate the above, I chose to present to you, my dear reader, Miloudi Chaghmoum’s novel “The Musk Rat,” whose story, like his previous novels, seeks a narrative world filled with the emotions of characters whose existential states are transformed into a narrative game that pursues desire and makes them mourn a fate that has given them nothing but tension and has brought them nothing but the worries of time.

From this, the concern of the narrator of the novel, Kamal Abdelali, a first-year teacher at Allal Al-Fassi Preparatory School, who loved his cousin Samira and wanted to marry her, not because fate itself guaranteed him and her survival from the stray bullets that enveloped the sky of Casablanca, following the famous events of 1965, and turned his mother into a torn image and a distorted metaphor: the image of the bullets scattering her intestines that flew in the air towards the yellow sun, and turned her mother into a mere amputated hand that rolled from the height of the alley to the bottom until it fell into the hot valley stream (the novel, p. 62), but because he only needed her happy face. They were growing up, and he could not find anything to compensate for his love for Samira except love itself; and to that was added the fatigue of the overwhelming nights since he learned that she had married the physics teacher when she was in the second year of high school. He asked her on her wedding day, “How are you?” She replied, “Happy.” Then she asked for a divorce while she was preparing for the baccalaureate exam in 1972. After she got the certificate, he asked her again: Shall we get married now? She replied with a mysterious smile: I am not ready now.

Between an entity that lives its life anxiously, and another that lives it with pride and a trembling spirit, the fates of Kamal and Samira intersect throughout the events of the novel. He had imagined that she would join the teachers’ college or the educational center to graduate as a teacher or professor for the first cycle, but she chose the Faculty of Medicine and left for Rabat. Three months later, she asked him to meet for an important matter. During that, she introduced him to a thirty-five-year-old man: “Benjelloun Ezz El Arab, surgeon, my husband.”

From one marriage to another, and from there to living with her lover, Mohammed the Wolf, Samira appears in the novel as a character who likes to reside on the edge of the wilderness; she does not intend to hide, although her words sometimes come directly and not coded in the face of daily idiocy or sudden slumber; and every time she finds someone who believes her: Kamal. She regains confidence because she believes, deep down, that every age has its longing and burning; we do not always bear full responsibility for ourselves, and everything that happens to us happens because we really want it, or we do not want to avoid it… (or) because we cross the world as we cross a dream, and not the other way around (the novel, p. 42).

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In the novel, Kamal Abdel Ali appears to be fluctuating between clinging to hope and teetering on the edge of youth. In order to continue standing in the face of life, he created for himself a shadow that suffers and cries, and another that takes pleasure and laughs (Novel, p. 47). He leaves his fate to chance and his passion a hope that he lost and distanced himself from. In his words, as in his silence, there is regret and shame:

“Samira, I regret everything I did to you and I am very ashamed of myself for all of this.

-What exactly did you do, Kamal?

“When I saw others lusting after your body, I began to lust after it with them, as if I were one of them. I went further by turning you into a mere body, so I allied myself with them, against you, and over time” (The Novel, p. 115).

For Kamal Abdel Ali, the alliance became synonymous with depression and fabricating tragedy. His world remained filled with anguish and heartache, tied to a childhood time when Samira was his wife in reality and in dreams; they had a home, a son and a daughter: Ahmed and Amina (the novel, p. 115). Throughout the novel’s events, Kamal wants to know his heart, to know himself. His voice in the novel is a sigh and a mere memory. When he pours out his thirst in front of Samira, he is shocked when she asks him one day: “Why do you believe so much in love as if it really exists?” (the novel, p. 49).

Does Kamal need a prophecy to answer her question and remove the rust in his soul?

maybe.

But the most extreme and harshest thing he thought about at that time was deeper and more complex: “Love may seem to be what I have been missing since childhood, and this deficiency has continued with me until now” (the novel, p. 49). Despite that, Kamal continued to refuse to risk his dreams, and at the same time refused to remain silent about what was haunting him inside him with regret, as if he was only seeking sorrow, and wanted to take revenge only for his love for Samira.

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In every relationship there is a burning. In every relationship there is a gap of the unknown. The relationship creates its own destiny and consumes it as fire consumes wood.

Therefore, the chapters of the novel “The Musk Rat” by Miloudi Chaghmoum seem like an understanding of Kamal’s relationship with Samira, and an explanation of the mystery of “non-relationship” when it only means: being devoid of emotion.

The novel begins with what could be its ending. It begins with a technique known in detective novels: introducing the crime. What crime?

At the end of the third millennium, national newspapers reported, on various pages, the following news:

“A female doctor kills her lover and then commits suicide.” As usual, the comments and interpretations multiplied and varied, especially since it was known that the killer was a specialist doctor, named Samira al-Qat, who became famous while she was still a student in the Faculty of Medicine, by the title “the wife of the great professors,” and that the victim was an obscure visual artist, named Muhammad al-Dhi’b, who lived in Paris, at the expense of women, before he became her lover and returned with her to Morocco…” (The Novel, p. 5).

Samira kills her lover and commits suicide.

An inevitable abyss of ambiguous relationships. Kamal’s heart remains open and without secrets. He remains determined to resist frustration and failure even when he wakes up from anesthesia after undergoing colon surgery; as if he is returning from death, or dying.

Delirious, dreaming, remembering…

Maybe he will find something to keep him alive, for a while…

Read “Musk Rat”… you won’t regret it!

And to another conversation.