My Report to Goiko is not an autobiography. My personal life has some value, quite comparatively, for me and for no one else, and the only value I knew of in it was in the efforts to ascend from one rung to another to reach the highest point it could reach. Its strength and stubbornness, the peak that I arbitrarily named “the Cretan View”.
Therefore, you, reader, will find in these pages the red trace left by drops of my blood, the trace that indicates my journey between people, emotions, and ideas. Every human being, worthy of being called the Son of Man, must carry his cross and ascend Calvary. Many, in fact most of them, reach the first or second degree. Then they collapse panting in the middle of the journey, never reaching the peak of Golgotha, in other words, the peak of their duty. To be crucified, to be resurrected, and to have their souls saved. Their hearts weaken because of their fear of crucifixion, and they do not know that the cross is the only way to resurrection, and there is no other way.
The village has always been a symbol of simplicity in its system of life and in the psychological makeup of the villagers, who rarely suffer from what is called “phobia” or “mania,” and accept everything that happens to them as normal, no matter how harsh.
This was in those eras when crops fed those who worked the land and provided them with a surplus for sale that provided them with an important part of their living expenses. However, after agriculture became a loss-making business, and sometimes a heavy burden on the farmer that did not provide its owner with the minimum necessities of life, the village mixed with the city due to the migration caused by various crises, which generated sharp paradoxes that were nullified by that person who was imposed on him in the city a new way of life. At the same time, his customs, traditions, and connections to the village remained strong, which created a duality in him that made him a rich and diverse personality. This friction that occurred through migrations, as well as due to the great technological development that occurred, also transferred part of the city with its relationships and way of life to the village, which constituted a shock to a part of the villagers whose thinking remained based on the old pattern of rural relations.
All of this constituted, and continues to constitute, an important source of literature and drama. In this book there are a number of stories whose events take place in the village of Umm al-Tanafas, a name taken to be a symbol of the village in all works that touch upon the village. This will be the first village notebook and will be followed in the future by other notebooks, because the village’s stories are inexhaustible.
