Ghabish’s Waraq Al Zikrayat under scrutiny at Arab Cultural Club

Beginning the session, Mohammed Hagras introduced the writer Saleh Ghabish. She is an Emirati writer and poet, endowed with a sober pen and multi-faceted creativity. She is a member of the Emirates Writers Union, a member of the Emirates Literary Foundation, an advisor to the Cultural Office of the Supreme Council for Family Affairs, and the editorial director of Marami magazine. Among her poetry collections is “Waiting for the Sun”, “Now I Know”. She She is also the author of the novel “Ginger Smell”, and collections of children’s stories, and the novel “Papers of Memories,” recently published by the Department of Culture in Sharjah.

Hagras added that Salha Ghabish has a smooth, approachable style that suits the atmosphere of the stories she deals with, and she is a diligent writer who is busy with many social questions and human life at the present moment.

Dr. Ahmed Aqili gave a reading of the novel titled “An aesthetic critical reading of the novel: Papers of Memories. He began it by saying that when the reader flies through the spaces of the novel throughout its 130 pages, he finds that the axis that wraps the threads of this novel and brings together the icons of its mosaic is memories. However, these memories for the writer carry a deep human experience, which is what the reader feels in the deepest pages of the novel, for example, at the beginning of the novel, specifically on the seventh page: she says: (What is it that scares us about memories?) (What is the pain that you carry, and we want to shake it off?) from the memory?).

Aqili added: The novel is based on a central idea that revolves around the events of the entire novel, which is that, we humans are just memories and pictures, and that every family begins with two and will end with two or leave you alone to complete the journey of life with nothing but memories, .. how many families that started with two and then the father and mother have children and the children have children, but suddenly where is everyone? Where is the noise of the children and grandchildren?! They were separated, each in the affairs of their own lives, and this is exactly what happened in our novel. The mother (Amna), the protagonist of the novel and the main character, was left by all her family members, starting with her husband and then her children. They moved to other distant places and another life, and her husband will return to her on the wedding night of her last child. He begged her to accept his return to her after he left her for ten years, during which he married another woman and moved on to life with her, not caring about her feelings and the lives her children. And here, the deep dilemma occurs. Should she accept the return of that treacherous husband, or reject and live her life alone? It is a question that the writer did not want to solve, by making the husband stay in a part of the house for a day, alone, without seeing his wife, and the novel ends in that state.

Dr. Aqili continued, “the novel's events ranged between the present, the past, and the supposed future, and in it, techniques of retrieval and anticipation were employed to link the present and the past and establish the future, through a transparent, suggestive movement in the novel's time and place. It began with a question and also ended with a question in an open ending that places the reader in a human existential circle, driven by love and painful memories.

Dr. Aqili reviewed the seventeen chapters of the novel, analysing them chapter by chapter, examining their significance. Then, he concluded by tracing the linguistic imagery in the novel and its methods, as well as the method of employing time, place, and characters.