In My Library

If we stripped this story of the frame with which Shafiq al-Faqih has surrounded it, it would appear an ordinary story. It is the story of every day, the story of love between two, with the girl's family standing in its way, ending, usually, in the triumph of the reactionary mentality over the will to freedom and to escape from the bonds of social enslavement which make of the girl — and sometimes the young man — a slave to the wishes of parents who view their children's interest through their own thinking, their own upbringing, and their own problems, without trying to move forward with the age and with education.

The author wished not to distract the reader from the study he intended in his book, so he spared him all thought of the ending and the plot by placing them at the beginning of the book, in order to direct him wholly to following his thoughts and opinions.

In Shafiq al-Faqih there is resentment, and revolt, and perhaps despair. So his opinions come as the offspring of a problem he has lived rather than the outcome of a concentrated study.

The author is a painter, of the “super-realist” (surrealism) school. He has adorned his book — or not adorned it — with drawings in this manner, and has tried to make his story of this kind. In some of it he has succeeded.

Shafiq al-Faqih in this story calls to an absolute negativism which — but for flashes of pain and depth of thought that came to him in clearness of mind — would appear destructive.

Revolt is building. And building is a positive work.

An Uproar in a Village is a story read with some eagerness and with thought. It is the vanguard of a production which we expect to be more concentrated and more single in idea.

It is an ordinary story in an extraordinary frame. And it is, in the end, “a story I would not wish to write.”

A book by Dr. Sabri al-Qabbani

In it the author tries to establish the theory which says: “A woman is ready for conception on only five days of the month; once she knows them, she can command her own offspring...”

In treating the subject Dr. Qabbani leans upon a body of Western specialists who preceded us in these studies and in verifying their soundness or unsoundness. Among what he says:

“Among the paradoxes that pass before me — and not a month goes by without their appearing in my clinic — is a workman bowed under his children and his household and his progeny of more than ten, asking for a way to abort his family... and a rich man of luxury who came begging for a child to delight his eye and to inherit from him after him, and whose wish is never granted. Had each of the two known the time suited to conception — which does not exceed five days — the first would have shunned conception and banished it, and the second would have drawn near to it and realized in it his wish and his desire.”

To what degree, then, has Dr. Qabbani succeeded in his work?!

Memoirs of a Schoolteacher
by Rushan Badrakhan (Syria)

The memoirs of this young woman are the life story of a woman for whom the hardship of struggle was decreed; the arrow of fate struck her with a dart in the heart, and the body of society pelted her with arrows.

She bore it, in exhausting toil to earn her living, yet her proud resolve did not weaken, nor was the pride in her soul brought low.

In her description her spontaneous, generous nature runs free, and she opens out in describing the minutest observations.

In “Memoirs of a Schoolteacher” the author goes deep into the telling of truths and the sorrows of events under the pressure of people's curiosity and human greed; we revolt with her against injustice and grow hard with her against treachery.

She stands firm despite the distances of her wanderings; from life's lessons and trials she carries wounds, and between her ribs this suffering heart bleeds, until it rebels and she takes refuge in confession.

And in this confession is a story of a love that possessed her while she was still a bud opening to life. And what was whispered to her — the ruse of an envious woman who planted doubt in her love and drove it deep — was a painful sting to her pride.

She fled she knew not where, with no helper in this adventure but resolve and will, and in her soul a serenity of childlike purity.

Yes, she has portrayed society with the truth of its disfigured face, where noble morals and ideal humanity are lost save in a slight few, who remain a stray number among the greedy, malicious-jawed mass.

There is no denying that in “Memoirs of a Schoolteacher” there is a valuable lesson in human morals, an unflagging strength in the bearing of events, and a profit to be gained.