Novelist Osman: The Guardian of the Holy Grove
Al Sir Al Sayed
The Guardian of the Holy Garden, the third novel by the writer Osman Shankar, which was published in January 2024, that is, weeks ago, motivates you after your first reading of it to say: It is a novel that moves and draws from what can be called “daily and ordinary” magic.
It moves and draws from what is “mythical.” Wearing it in what we think is “realistic”. In one word, it moves and draws from what I call, if I may, (the aesthetics of reality). Since the novel is, at its distant root, a “biography” or almost combining the personal and the general, it is the biography of “Cody” or “The Sick Messenger.” we find it in many places drawing from Real information, facts that actually happened, and places that actually exist, such as the Somali Al-Shabaab movement Islam, the rescue system, ghost houses, the book of classes, the book of Katib al-Shouna, and the names of some capitals: Khartoum/Nairobi/Mogadishu and so on. Because this biography, as it appeared in the novel, is essentially a “biography of oppression,” the novel took the experience of (the rescue system) as its space and through various techniques , used in Narration is like playing with time and modifying it.
The location of the novel, the manipulation of pronouns, the construction of characters, especially the character of Cody, the explosion of the language, and the mobilization of its aesthetics to the maximum extent. The biography of oppression, or let us be precise (the aesthetics of the biography of oppression), appeared.
The novel is at its superficial level, and it tells the biography of rescue. It is not devoid of “directness” in the manner of “Don’t be mean and listen, O neighbor K.” Similar” from _similar_ to the godfather or who Naivasha signed with Garang. I mean here those direct references to real people and to events that actually took place. However, the novel, through its technical tricks that I mentioned above, was able to escalate from the legendary, the presence of Grandma Mama/the rape/murder scenes/Ibn Kodi’s funeral ritual/the world of intelligence/the world of prostitution, brightness and fading. The female and male body/torture/memoriesEnslavement/summoning the writer of the shuna and the author of classes).
These worlds, while trying to tell the story of oppression, spoke to him the aesthetics of this story, revealing what is legendary in everything… in salvation and political Islam… in Kodi… in the Islamic movement… in Sudanese intelligence… etc etc…
This novel, by betting on language and working to explode it, was able to build an imagination of a mythical world on the ruins of real facts, facts, and places… a mythical world that rises on the collision of the “politics of death” with the “politics of life.”
It is a novel that goes from writing a biography of oppression to writing (the aesthetics of a biography of oppression).
