The forgotten between two waters - Leila Almutawa

I am from the tribe of the Ashraf, whose forelocks are not cut, and whose women are not enslaved. We open our chests to death. We do not bow to a king nor fear a mercenary. Before the forgotten ones stand between two waters—Layla Al-Mutawa, with deep awareness, the novelist Layla Al-Mutawa addresses the specificity of the local place in her new novel "The Forgotten Between Two Waters" to write the biography of the two waters or the two seas: the salty and the fresh, and to shake off the deposits of salt of forgetfulness from the representations of collective memory among the inhabitants of the island of "Land of Immortality," whose existence and rhythm of life are made by the sea, between its ebb and flow. The forgotten ones between two waters is a new novel, unique in its treatment of the sea and its cultural specificity, rituals, and life patterns that it dedicates. Nadia, who follows the traces of water, appears as a driving force in the narrative and storytelling, taking on a threefold role: the narrator, the narrated, and the story being told. The author excels in exploiting the seizure of epilepsy as a striking technical device, deliberately breaking the rhythm of punctuation marks and violating their logic, to make Nadia speak on behalf of her grandmother Nagwa’s memory, to evoke her positions, and to connect contemporary individual memory with the memory of ancestors neighboring the sea. Al-Mutawa relies on references from history, myth, personal memory, and people's stories to establish the background of her literary world, but she soars with the wings of symbolic imagination, language of wonder, questioning, stance, and experimentation to fill the gaps in the story of the collective self of the islanders between the two seas. Reading the novel is an enjoyable adventure that breaks the path of extended reading, but a risk requiring arduous interpretive reading skills, where the movements of extension and retraction intertwine, due to the language’s aesthetic particularity, surprises, paradoxes, mysteries, secrets, and intensification, as well as the narrative techniques that the writer skillfully manipulates like a seasoned filmmaker—cutting scenes, distributing them between shots that creatively move and scatter across elusive time spans, shading them with sensory visual and auditory effects, masterfully drawing them with a poetic and inclusive language that captivates the reader’s breath, placing him before promises and surprises that never end. The forgotten ones between two waters—Layla Al-Mutawa