A fact that Italian soldiers proved for themselves after anchoring their fleet off the coast of Tripoli. The fact played out by Sandro Compati, the hero of the novel The Sandbox, tends to add to what he learned from Drill’s war rules: “To be a soldier, a person must be free of consciousness.”
Sandro, who was “baptized in the fire of battle without losing his memory,” was a handsome young Italian from a good Christian family, whose fate wished him to be called up for military service shortly after graduation from the Press Institute in Milan. to take part in the Italian invasion of Libya. There, his soul grasped all the teachings and principles with which he had grown, and curses follow him: the curse of a war that tries to make him inhuman, the curse of unattainable love, and the curse of being an executioner. his beloved and the cause of his suffering.
“Why did my country throw me in a burning sandbox? Why do you think I’m a murderer? I was a good citizen who kept the ten commandments in the diocese of San Lorenzo, where the bishop told us in the fifth commandment that it was forbidden to kill, but I turned out to be a murderer. ” These curses and this love protected the flame of humanity within him from fading, so when he returned to Italy with a wounded heart and body, he decided to be baptized in the water of truth so that it might wash away the some of his sins. .
“He caught her face in the dark, sad, questioning and mocking with tormented tolerance, and she felt an urgent need to be alone. […], suspicious of the curse of love that killed Ricardo, and Romeo in front of him, at the same time wondering why he, once, was not brave, naked in front of him ?! Why does he have to philosophize his feelings to receive the honor of cleansing from sin ?! He may not be able to pay his debt to the woman, but he must enter into his next life faithful and impartial to the truth, for the truth is the best baptism of the soul. ”
Aisha Ibrahim, with the solid narrative structure of this novel and the imagination that you almost think of as reality, is the voice of truth not limited by events or war, the voice she chooses to hear us as against who tayo. accustomed to novels, from the lips of the invader, not from the lips of the innocent, a voice that describes us in honest language. a fact, this fact chosen to be an immortal fact in the history of mankind.
Halima, the milkmaid who fell in love with Sandro and became the main character of the novel, not only introduces the missing Libyan captives to Italian prisons, but also a nation of women whose lives have been changed by wars, a nation of young women whose dream lives have been snatched away by wars. It is the sound of weariness that is not fruitful, and the desire for nights not fulfilled.
Halimah is our voice in our war-torn country from Libya to Yemen to Syria to Palestine, wars that have ruined every possibility of hope and pain in us.
But Aisha ended her romance in the tone of hope that draws us with her to dream of a beautiful tomorrow.
Despite all the pain contained in this novel between the covers, it holds the power and beauty of the story, the flow of memory and its consequences, close to a stormy inner monologue and it doesn’t let go. before you finish reading.
Sandbox, published by Al-Mossateat Publications, is the third novel by Libyan writer Aisha Ibrahim after the War of Kusayl and Ghazala that has long been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Arabic Prose Prize and has a collection of short stories that entitled “End of the World in Tripoli”, and published articles in various newspapers and websites, and received the State Prize for the text of the play “The Emerald Village” in 1991, in addition to several awards, the most important of which is the Libyan Ministry of Culture Creativity Medal for 2020 year.
Source: Al-Akhbar
