However difficult were the days after the January 2011 revolution, the fact remains that the people, who had lost hope for change, woke up from a long repose, and that despair of change disappeared forever.
The good and the bad in the people were exposed, and there was a need for proper solutions for the future.
The people gave huge sacrifices. How can we compensate the valuable blood of the martyrs that fell? And what about the material losses? Have the intellectuals and the artists lived up to their responsibility vis-a-vis those sacrifices?
Definitely not.
I know that four years is a short time, but it is definitely enough to prepare the ground and throw the seeds for promising and bright ideas that move hearts and sow hope. I dream of new windows that bring in fresh air.
I can see that dream in Alaa Khaled’s poetry, his novel “Mild Pain,” his books “Lines of Weakness,” “The Absent Party” and “Faces from Alexandria,” and his “Magazine of Places” that recites the events of the revolution, a matter of debate in Alexandria and elsewhere until now.
Khaled is an artist uncontaminated by the dark years. He pays for the publishing of his works from his own pocket, without blaming the incumbent state institutions.
I consider his book “Under the Sun of another Memory” an important cultural value. Although I have always been unable to appreciate prose poetry, I found his very beautiful and original:
Grief travels from place to place
In all travel it takes a new color
And the prose poem he wrote in Los Angeles when they were taking a picture of him while he was looking at a statue of Marilyn Monroe:
I was thinking that my picture
Will travel to many places
Without caption or features
Or even a simple reference to the country I came from
Like the unknown soldier memorial
And his “Daily Training” poem:
He sits everyday
On the edge of the tomb
Training himself to imagine
The hereafter
And his poem “From Afar:”
Somewhere inside myself
There was a Nile flowing
And peasants sitting with me in the evening
And his poems in “Good Night” that silently lament his mother:
We were approaching death
Very fast
Only the angels were ahead of us
Your absence
Left a taste in my throat that I did not know before
The taste of orphanhood
Like in soft stubbles
Your death ignited fire
I no longer remember the long years
I am no longer your son in death
We have become friends
That leaned their heads
Form fatigue
A year has passed
And I still stand at the door of your room
Listening to
Stuttering breath
After death there is another life
Good night
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
