Mohamed Berrada. Fugitive Light.
Simawe, Saadi A.
Issa J. Boullata, tr. Michael Beard, foreword. Syracuse, New York.
Syracuse University Press. 2002. xi + 171 pages. $24.95. ISBN 0-8156-0749-0
A WELL-KNOWN Moroccan painter, al-Ayshuni, is the protagonist of
Mohamed Berrada's Fugitive Light, a novel that explores the urges
of artistic creation and human sexuality. At the beginning of the novel,
we find al-Ayshuni staring into the empty canvas, unable to turn his
artistic ideas into shapes, colors, and lines. In this artistic
paralysis, Fatima, a young divorced woman, introduces herself to
al-Ayshuni as an admirer of his art. Fatima becomes not only
al-Ayshuni's muse, model, and lover, she also functions for Berrada
as the impetus that actuates the narrative movement. Not only does she
make the narrative possible, she herself is seeking the story of her
mother, al-Ayshuni's sweetheart, from whom he has not heard for
some years now.
Why Fatima needs to learn the story of her mother from
al-Ayshuni's mouth is not effectively established as a credible
motive in the novel. Because Fatima's motive is missing, one is
tempted to read Fatima and Ghaylana and other women characters, whose
motivations are not transparent, as merely sexual desires of the
protagonist, al-Ayshuni. For the two women, mother and daughter, appear
and disappear in al-Ayshuni's life with no apparent narrative
logic, apart from his own desires. Even when they disappear, they really
do not disappear from the life of the protagonist: they reappear in the
form of storytelling (Ghaylana) or letters (Fatima). Interestingly, when
the two women leave al-Ayshuni, they suffer and end up becoming
prostitutes and cold-blooded manipulators, for no apparent reason.
Ultimately, when there is no al-Ayshuni, love is lost for the two women.
Significantly, the meaning of al-ayshuni as an Arabic word is derived
from aysh, which is Arabic for 'fife' or 'living.'
As the center of love, creativity, and rectitude, al-Ayshuni seems
to be the natural audience, as far as Ghaylana and Fatima are concerned,
for their confessional stories. Hence, although the narrative is told
from different perspectives, all the stories are told from
al-Ayshuni's omniscient point of view. In chapter 1, the narrator begins with a third-person, limited point of view, but after a few pages
readers become aware that the real narrator is the omniscient
al-Ayshuni. He knows everything there is to know about Ghaylana and
Fatima, their dreams and their desires, their bodies and their hopes. By
using them as models and as lovers, he not only paints them but also
symbolically becomes their creators. Hence, al-Ayshuni emerges in
chapter 2 as the absolute narrator, telling the story of Ghaylana to her
daughter Fatima, thus helping Fatima to understand and rediscover her
mother. All this seems to be possible only through the media of sex and
painting. By making love to the previous lover of her mother, Fatima
seems to come ever closer to her mother.
In chapter 3, a third-person narrator, very sympathetic to
al-Ayshuni, tells us of his boredom and artist's block in front of
his blank canvas. As usual, while "he was at the threshold of a
slow-coming nap, just before sleep blurred his eyes," al-Ayshuni
hears the doorbell: Ghaylana shows up after a three-year absence. The
narrative gets more interesting when Ghaylana tells of her sexual
adventures and degradation as a professional prostitute in Spain.
A1-Ayshuni tells of Fatima's affair with him, only to make the
mother jealous of the daughter. In chapter 4, which is a long
confessional letter from Fatima, although the narrative technique
attains its greatest effectiveness, Fatima's cruel manipulation of
Matthias, her French husband, does not seem quite credible.
The novel ends with a section entitled "Excerpts from
al-Ayshuni's Notebooks," which reflects on his life and his
artistic struggle to capture the elusive meaning of life as it is
embodied for him in the fugitive right. While the light flees eternally
from al-Ayshuni, he himself must run away from "the words of these
memoirs and renounce the illusion of recording through them the
experiences I lived." According to these last words, one cannot
escape the idea that the protagonist in this novel ends up rebelling
against his author or at least dismissing him as unreliable.
Saadi A. Simawe
Grinnell College
