Harith Rasmi Al-Hiti
Photography: Mahmoud Raouf
To restore the amazing fictional characters created by Ghayeb Tohme Farman in his multiple novels, the seminar hall on the Baghdad exhibition ground had to host a seminar on absent and drama.
The seminar, which was held in partnership with the General Union of Writers and Writers in Iraq and moderated by Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Tamimi and participated in it Yassin Al-Naseer, Dr. Safra Naji and Dr. Alaa Karim, dealt with the importance of the novel and its theatrical transformations known to us, and absent Tohme Farman is one of the modern novelists who formed a qualitative leap that left the local to Arabic.
Critic Yassin Al-Naseer, who talked about the absent Tohme Farman dramatically as a novelist again and his nine works that he presented are considered as advanced artistic models for the Iraqi novel, we will talk about it today as dramatic as Al-Naseer presented the play Al-Qurban for modern theater in 1975, in all the works of the absent there is the principle of dialogue because in each of his works there are five main characters, and these five characters are between them a dialogue that practically represents the plurality of opinions in Iraqi society, Farman spoke early about the plurality of voices Opinions, the theme of pluralism is Bakhtin’s theme in the Soviet Union and he was influenced by it. The dialogical principle is Farman’s narrative principle. And not just a dramatic principle.
Farman’s artistic narrative is based on dialogue, These five from different classes and groups of Iraqi society are not with a single identity or a single intellectual direction, but there was social pluralism, and this nature reflects the pluralistic Iraqi society in terms of its religions, nationalities, cultures and cities.
Al-Naseer adds that “the advantage of the absent is that he sometimes writes colloquially as it seems, but his colloquial is classical, which is a simplified classical and reaches the level of the receiving audience, the narrative of the absent was surrounding the subject from all its aspects, as there is a historical and social tinge, in the sense that he did not present empty characters, but characters full of their senses, attitudes and emotions.”
Dr. Safra Naji, professor of literary criticism at the University of Baghdad, talks about marginalized characters in the novels and works of Ghayeb Tohme Farman, her paper entitled The Structure of Marginalized Characters in the Novel The Palm and the Neighbors, which Safra Naji called the novel of prophecy in the novel and theater. Farman creates what is now called in modern theater the discovered places and the characters discovered, when he adds features to them such as the baker, the Arabanji and the bicycle, but with Farman we discover in the subconscious that we discover the raw behind these characters. Therefore, my name is The Palm and the Neighbors is the prophecy at the level of criticism is the struggle of the margin and the center, as the writing of the novel for Farman turned into a theatrical reading presented on the stage. He writes the novel with a technique that it is not going to the narrative, but it goes and approaches the drama. The dialogue between the characters in his works made them docile and closer to the theater than to the novel.
The professor of literary criticism added that “Farman always goes to create the discovered characters, and these characters are the marginalized figures in society, and he wants to tell these characters about her dream to lead this future, and he made a prophecy that the margin will move the center as the 1958 revolution was a revolution that was triggered by the classes that are located at the bottom of society. They are invisible groups in class societies, as it is these classes who have drunk the cup of injustice and oppression.”
Dr. Alaa Karim, who presented a paper on the reality of the palm tree and the neighbors, as this novel is directly and deeply linked to the mentality and memory of Iraqis. Because it is related to the dreams and aspirations of Iraqis, as he said that “Farman was affected by Soviet realism as a result of living in Russia for a long period of time, so he tried to embody many actions in the body of his novels, the narrative side of the novel we find that the dialect in which the writer deals with a tone that touches the privacy of the Iraqi citizen and simulates his psychological perceptions, which affected the recipient and affected his psychology as well in this novel.
Karim added, “At that time, there were many novelists, but Farman, especially this novel Al-Nakhla and the neighbors, stuck in memory because it included a lot of real drama that simulates the Iraqi individual or society.