Fayez Ghazi reviews 

Nihayat al-Sahra’

(The End of the Desert)

by Saïd Khatibi

published by Hachette Antoine Naufal,
Beirut, April 2022. ISBN: 9786140600164. Paperback

 
Young Author Winner,
Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2023

The End of the Desert . . . Truth in Water or Mirage?

On the heels of Sarajevo Firewood (Banipal Books, 2021), which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, comes The End of the Desert, the latest novel by Algerian writer, journalist, and translator Saïd Khatibi (Algeria, 1984). Having studied at the University of Algeria and the Sorbonne, Khatibi writes in both Arabic and French, and in 2012 he received the Arab Journalism Award. Since then he has published several novels, translations, and a travel journal, and works as a cultural journalist.

Holding The End of the Desert in one’s hands is like holding the pair of scissors pictured at the base of the cover: its sharp edges keep readers alert amidst the cascade of events that unfold throughout the narrative. Khatibi’s masterful retelling of the events assembled between its pages creates a perfect mosaic rendered with the insight of a social novelist whose feet are planted in the heart of reality and whose symbols take flight with the imagination.

At the beginning of the story, the text appears to be a police novel. There is a crime: someone has assassinated the artist Zakia Zaghouani, nicknamed Zaza. The discovery of her body by a poor shepherd in the area of the city where the slums are, sees the launch of an investigation to find the perpetrator through two intertwined hypotheses: the first is represented by Hamid, the police officer in charge of the case, and the second is represented by Noura, the lawyer of the accused or the first suspect in Zaza’s murder.

Yet, it would be reductive to think of this novel as another murder mystery. Set in the late eighties in Algeria before major changes and the start of the black decade, the detective story is one of the many disguises the novel wears. Khatibi richly portrays an environment that reveals people’s relationships with each other, their tragedies, their hopes, their economic conditions and their psychological repercussions. The novel also highlights sociopolitical problems such as the lack of medicine and food, water shortages, demonstrations and riots. Moreover, The End of the Desert follows the beneficiaries of the war of liberation and the wealth they seized and accumulated, denouncing their monopoly on medicine and basic commodities. At the same time, it chronicles the emergence of a bourgeois class that enjoys money, and contrasts it with a poor class living in slums and semi-destroyed homes.

The spectre of rampant corruption in state agencies, suspicious deals, extortion and mediations haunts the world of the novel as well. Khatibi deftly traces the cultural and doctrinal shifts within society, the beginning of its closure, the penetration into it of radical ideas, and the beginning of the emergence of the seeds of violence. The End of the Desert scrutinizes the relationship between native and stranger in a well-built homogeneous narrative.

 “In this country, the whale eats the whale, and who makes little effort, dies.”

Khatibi uses the technique of polyphony in the novel to great effect. The event begins with one character’s voice, then we see it from a different angle, to continue with a third character and another point of view. The writer also leaves room for his characters to express their innermost motives and emotions in monologues or dialogues. This technique invites readers to review events fragmented into mosaic parts to piece together the final meaning at the conclusion of the text. This technique gives way to many short stories also related to the characters, making the novel richer and creating a three-dimensional template instead of being limited to the suspense or detective part of the text.

Khatibi diversifies his narrative tools, using popular and mystical poetic passages, police reports, and newspaper clippings dating back to that period, in addition to the diaries of Bashir, the main suspect in the murder. The language is narrative, kinetic, and fluid, far from ornamentation, linguistic paradoxes, and the difficulty of composition.

The text takes on a symbolic dimension when the murder of Zaza, at that point in the late eighties, turns into the murder of art and beauty itself in which everyone participated without exception: Kamal, who muted her voice; Hussainiya, who shared in the action; Zaza’s first lover, who raped her; her brothers and father, who abandoned her; Bashir, who succeeded in his promise to marry her; Sheikha Dahabia, who was jealous of her and almost plotted against her; Maymoon, who increased her arrogance; Ibrahim, who planted in Kamal’s heart the desire to take revenge on her; and Hamid, who deceived her of security protection and died while she was trying to escape from everyone to live a comfortable life with the one she loved. This dimension makes us wonder: does life die with the death of beauty ­­– so that Zaza becomes a symbol of life, and all who participated in her killing a symbol of death?

In The End of the Desert, Saïd Khatibi argues with history, trying to interrogate it and lure it to remember those marginalized people who fell from its cold leaves to be captured in the pages of the novel. He writes that it is: “As if the history of this country is not moving forward but is revolving around itself.” This compelling work will draw the reader right to its last pages to discover the mystery and all the small stories assembled around it.

Published in Banipal 75 (pp200-203)