All things

All things is a novel by Buthaina Al Essa, the ninth in her literary journey, published by Takhween Publications in a modern edition as part of a distinguished series of Arabic novels. It is a political-social novel that offers a critical review of Kuwaiti society and the political movement in 2011. About the novel All things: In the book All things, Buthaina Al Essa writes about the realism and legitimacy of the opposition discourse, and about the oppression of authority. She seeks to dismantle the relationship between the individual and authority, whether this authority is represented in literature, the state, or the global system. In All things, Buthaina Al Essa raises questions about the feasibility of confronting the system, and whether an individual can exist outside it at all, or if, at best, they are a gear in the very machine they try to dismantle. The novel begins with the moment "Jasim Al-Azeemi" returns to Kuwait after four years of absence to attend his father’s funeral. He finds himself forced to confront a memory full of defeats, a world without horizon, and a stolen future. This is a novel about the conflict between generations, the search for the true meaning of the word homeland, the fall of slogans, the purpose of struggle and the responsibility of existence itself, about writing as a way of knowledge, and about all the things a person faces on his way to reclaim his self. Quotes from the book All things by Buthaina Al Essa: We invent relationships to create meaning, so we do not admit that the world is meaningless. What hurts us is not the past, but the future that will not happen. All the wasted possibilities of that person you could have been, if you hadn’t looked in the mirror and discovered that you don’t know yourself. He remembers himself years ago, when he doubted the correctness of right and the wrongness of wrong. Today, he doubts the existence of right and wrong altogether. “You are just a sacrificial lamb to atone for the system of things and its continuity. Your existence, until now, is just a coincidence.” His father used to say: You cannot overthrow an existing system; you can only develop it.