The novel “Forgot Overtakes Her” by Sanaa Al-Shaalan

Tampere – Finland: On the authority of the Finnish-Arab Cultural Center of Enlightenment, headed by the Iraqi writer Abbas Dakhil Hassan, the first English edition of the novel “Forgot Overtakes Her” by the writer A. Dr.. Sanaa Al-Shaalan (Bint Naima) translated by the Jordanian Academy Mushira Saleh Talafha, and it bears the title: “Oblivion Saved Her,” in 311 pages of medium-length fiction, after it has published more than one edition in the Arabic language, and it is a fertile target for studies, research, and research papers. And specialized critical meetings and seminars at the Arab and international levels, including controversial intellectual, humanitarian and societal issues.

Oblivion Saved Her/ (Oblivion overtook her) is an epic novel intersecting times and places within overlapping narrative structures. It is a homogeneous and intertwined mixture of a novel, a biography, prose texts, and supporting poetic texts, and it is narrated by more than one narrator, where there is a knowledgeable narrator who narrates from the perspective of a sequential event, along with a partial narrator, “Barbara,” who plays a narrative role for the knowledgeable narrator in this function. As for the narrator The hero “Al-Dahhak” and the heroine narrator “Bahaa” take turns playing the narrative within overlapping times.

It is a novel of absolute conflicts between its various elements; There is a conflict at the level of time, place, characters, and plots, and narrative techniques play their different and differentiated roles in creating the event, which is divided into times of anticipation, recall, and retrieval.

The novel is based entirely on the technique of cinematic cutting, where there is the spectacle of the event in the form of a cinematic shot, and it ignores the specification of time and place in a state of deliberate omission in order to designate them in order to generalize the human experience and distribute it to humanity as a whole, by monitoring sixty years of the life of the two heroes of the novel, “Al-Dahhak” and “Bahaa” is a time period loaded with human experiences and important Arab historical experiences, and it presents this within a narrow personal circle confined to the story of love and separation that brought together the two heroes of the story on the direct, superficial level.

While the internal structure that carries the absent meaning of the novel is a historical chronological progression for the Arab region and the Arab person within a large system of relationships and their movements.

This novel tells about the suffering of “Bahaa”, the heroine of the novel, in her difficult life in light of her poverty and orphanhood, and then presents her life’s experiences in facing the cancer that affected her brain, and began to eat away at her memory at the same time as her coincidental meeting with her lost lover, “Al-Dahhak”, who decides to stand by her side in this crisis of hers. .

The events of the novel take place within overlapping retrospective and forward-looking times, presenting us with a complete narrative fabric that includes the two heroes and their intertwined lives that reveal their human experience, as much as it reveals the collective human experience in the two poles of the Arab world and the Western world.

Regarding this English edition of the novel, the translator, Mushira Saleh Talafha, said: “I chose the novel “Forgetting Overtakes Her” to translate it into English, because I wanted to be the first to present this distinctive work of feminist Arab fiction to readers in English all over the world, because I see in this work A distinctive narrative narrative experience; it is a narrative experience that works on experimentation and modernity in narrative techniques, and it also presents a complex human experience in the life of oppressed people in contemporary worlds, especially in the Arab world, and it presents this through a comprehensive combination between the issues of contemporary human alienation and the techniques of magical realism. In addition to exploiting the privacy of novelist Sanaa Shaalan’s novel writing.”

Meanwhile, Al-Shaalan said about translating her novel into English: “I am proud of this translation, which represents an important creative partnership between me and the distinguished academic translator Mushira Saleh Talafha and the Finnish-Arab Cultural Center of Enlightenment, headed by the Iraqi writer Abbas Dakhel Hassan, which presents this narrative experience to the reader in the language.” English, and presents it to the international narrative scene, especially as it is a special narrative experience in entering nightmarish worlds that denounce the fall of society and its symbols in the midst of bloody humanitarian events that oppress man, crush his existence, and exalt the values ​​of corruption and devastation.

And injustice and oppression. This novel is a cry of pain in the face of ugliness, downfall, and decline, just as it is a victory for love, goodness, and truth despite the maze of reality, its coercions, and its corruption.”

While the Iraqi literary publisher and critic Abbas Dakhla Hassan, head of the Finnish-Arab Cultural Center “Al-Tanour,” said about the translation of the novel: “This is a new experience for the Al-Tanour Center in translating contemporary Arabic literature into English in order to present the Arab creator and his creativity to the reader in the English language. It is a novel whose translation we are proud to publish.” To English

In a first edition of this, after we had the honor of issuing it in the Arabic language in its second edition in 2021, it is a novel of love and crushing fates, alienation, deprivation, and the victims of declared and hidden wars and revelations, and the narrator contains all the subjective and objective factors of success, and the important thing artistically is that it represented a new form. Within the trend of the new narrator in the current Arab novel scene, she needs multiple readings, and I am certain that she will receive her creative deserve from readers and those interested in the Arab narrator.”