The shelter of absence is a place built of words. Everyone in it belongs to the world of his imagination, and lives in a state of obsessions and doubts. A scientist who surrenders to ambiguity and hieroglyphs and loves the mercury of impermanence and uncertainty. In this shelter, we do not know whether what we read are the preparations of the goddess of talisman, or if they are the same as the preparations of others. We do not know whether to believe her or to believe in the suffering writers who create themselves with the power of language and invent worlds and selves with words.
In “The Shelter of Absence,” we read about the wreckage of events and people, and about the brewing panic of perishing cities, in stories that belong to the imagination and the grotesque, as much as they derive from the devastation that occurs in reality as material for writing.
Critic Dr. Mohamed Al-Shahat believes that the narrative of “The Shelter of Absence” builds “on constructing an imaginative journey, with successive episodes, that questions the concepts of space, time, and human existence. In doing so, it searches for the essence of human communication beyond “language” in its common sense.”
I started writing this novel, and the novel began to write me in lines. I may not be the one who came in this novel, and the novel may have come from outside the boundaries of contemporary times, but in reality it came and depicted people and events, and its events unfolded in a manner other than what I wanted to write about. These events may have occurred in a certain period of time, and in a certain village, and I may not have seen such hurricanes, but they are real. They may occur in a certain time and space, or rather they are a contemporary event, but in another way, they wear a garment that is compatible with the structure of the era in which we live. In it, we are in a time in which there are multiple reasons and technical methods, and in which models of human studies differ from day to day with the aim of achieving human goals and achieving his many different goals. All of this happens, and it happens at every time and place, as long as a person remains, and his limitless whims and ambitions grow, and it also happens in moments of departure from the conscious self and immersion in the mire of rampant animalism.
There will be night, there will be an earthquake, there will be a hurricane, and there will be death, despite the floodlights, the bright rays of light, and the modern speakers and lights.
The “human animal” emerges brandishing the sword of destruction, riding the horse of fire at the hour of the conscious self emerging from itself and being separated from the origin of formation, so the human being will be as it was at the beginning of its formation, instinct will be the essence of this formation, and deterioration will be the diameter of this being.
