The novel
“The Bus”... between alienation and disappearance
Hoda Shawa
■ Saleh Al-Ghazy’s bus transports its passengers and their dreams around the
city, distributing stories and anecdotes about estrangement, nostalgia, and
memories.
If it is
correct to describe the novel as “the daughter of the city” in the complex
human relationships of its inhabitants, which are shaped by the hierarchies of
brutal, fast capitalism that crushes everyone who stands in its path, then “The
Bus” by Saleh Al-Ghazy makes “the bus,” that means of transportation, a space.
The mobile spatial monitor to monitor the circulation of Gulf capitalism in a
Kuwaiti version.
The bus,
in the narrative of the novel, is a means of transporting the workforce of the
category residing in Kuwait to places of production. It is not surprising that
the novel takes the heart of Kuwait City, which is vibrant with commercial and
financial markets, as the scene of its events between the paths of the public
transport lines at the Mirqab, Financial, and Sheraton Roundabout stations.
While its
hero is Ahmed Saber, an employee at a major telecommunications company (BUS),
who finds himself lost in a huge meeting room on the first day of his work,
surrounded by a sea of employees in uniforms, as if he were a cog in the
machine of huge global companies, and centers Power and money.
The
narrator of the work, Ahmed Saber, who rides the bus every day to his
workplace, holds the reins of the wheel of the story, in the first person, in
most of the chapters of the novel, and he is the one who shows us, through the
bus window, the city through the eyes of the expatriate, from the perspective
of the other.
Contemporary
Kuwaiti literature addresses the theme of (the self and the other) in several
literary works, including: (Away to Here) by the novelist Ismail Fahd Ismail,
and monitoring the suffering of (Kumari), the Asian maid, in her life in a
Kuwaiti family, or in the novel (The Sun’s Shadow) by Talib. Al-Rifai, which
monitors the suffering of the marginalized from the perspective of an Egyptian
construction worker, or in (The Bamboo Stalk) by Saud Al-Sanousi, which deals
with the alienation of the hero character Issa/Jose between two identities; The
father is Kuwaiti and the mother is Filipino.
But we
find that the novel (The Bus) is not concerned with exploring the depths of the
dialectic (the self and the other) of the relationships formed by the dominant
system versus the marginalized system. The character of the Kuwaiti (the
controlling ego) is barely present in Ahmed Saber’s story, and therefore it is
absent, just as the passengers on the bus from the category of citizens are
absent. .
The
alienated ego
Rather,
the novel seeks to dig into the fragments of the “alienated ego” in the face of
the dominant system of the rising, brutal capitalist arsenal machine.
Therefore, the human relations in the novel were centered between characters
from the (resident/expatriate) background. They were either from the employee
class at the major telecommunications company where Ahmed Saber worked, and who
succeeded - as one employee says - in convincing a Bangladeshi worker to buy an
iPhone in installments. In reference to the company's practices of targeting
profit and financial gain, or from the class of female employees such as the
Filipino girl Norma, who develops a relationship between him and her, or they
are among the bus passengers whom the hero meets during city trips, and the
narration devotes a large space to their stories of different sects and
genders, through the verb ( monitoring).
In the
space of the bus world, the small screen in the hands of the bus passengers
becomes a gateway to infinite spaces of eavesdropping and espionage, and Ahmed
Saber’s alienation takes another turn when he hacks into the bus passengers’
phones - using techniques he acquired through his new work - as if he were
clicking, touching, and scanning with these strangers the details of their
lives. And their delicate living transactions, and their communication, so the
screen and their virtual lives become the pulsating sap of life, and an
alternative to the human connection that he lacks in his alienation.
Evoking
memories
The
narrator engages in internal monologues, repercussions, and recollections of
childhood and youth memories in his city in Egypt, Mahalla al-Kubra, the huge
industrial city for cotton production, where large factories and gins are
located, but it is also the city that did not provide him with an opportunity
to work, and it left him out.
Ahmed
Saber recalls his city’s landmark, the famous clock tower, which he describes
as lofty as a Pharaonic obelisk, and which appears on the cover of the novel.
Does it represent the savage arsenal of another dominant economic system in
Egypt this time?
The clock
regulates time and regulates school and work hours and workers’ shifts, which
reminds us of Michel Foucault’s model of the role of the tower (the panopticon)
in his book (Monitoring and Punishing), as a mechanism of control and
authority, which monitors and does not monitor.
Thus, it
represents the story of Ahmed Saber’s exile and the characters of the bus novel
from the expatriate class confronting the dominance of huge capitalist systems
shaped by the world of large corporations, and their components of human
resources (the workforce) of expatriate residents in Kuwait City, who are the
passengers of the sweeping bus, and its human groups, who are transported by
the bus while... Citizens are absent, they live in a world parallel to the
world of public transportation.
Alienation
and disappearance
Between
alienation and disappearance, the novel prompts a question: Doesn’t life teach
us, and history teach us, that there are always attempts to penetrate the major
dominant systems, by the forces of civil society? Attempts that seek to create
cracks in the arsenal of hegemony, to dismantle structures that we think are impenetrable,
to bring about change?
If the
novel is the daughter of the city, then Saleh al-Ghazy’s bus moves with its
passengers and their dreams around the city, distributing stories and anecdotes
about estrangement, nostalgia, and memories... and it may also carry a call to
achieve justice, equality, and participation.
We wish
Saleh Al-Ghazy bus safe travels. And arrive safely.
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