Observers often see war from a news or political angle, but it has another human dimension that is the cruelest and most painful, in which a person loses himself before he loses his home, and his memory is blinded, just as the earth becomes devastated.
From this angle, the novel “Memory Blindness” by the Yemeni novelist Hamid Al-Raqimi comes as one of the most prominent new narrative voices that captures the tragedy of the Yemeni war, and turns it into a human story full of pain and questions, within a contemporary Arab novelistic project that seeks to dismantle the impact of wars on the individual human being, not on geography alone.
The novel, published by Dar Jadal Publishing and Distribution, opens with an intense scene that combines bullets, rubble, and a torn childhood, where a child survives from under the rubble after a random bombing toppled his family. He is pulled from among the corpses by an old sheikh who claims to be his grandfather, and gives him a new name, “Yahya.”
This second birth closes his first memory and sets the foundation for his long journey in search of his lost self. When a young man reaches puberty and discovers the secret of his forgotten childhood, he begins an internal struggle between what he lived and what he does not remember, between his new identity and his absent history. Here the idea of “memory blindness” is embodied as a major metaphor for loss: loss of origin, identity, and meaning.
Memory load
In this novel, Al-Raqimi not only tells a personal story, but also formulates a national elegy for a generation lost in the corridors of war. The hero of the novel, “Badr,” is not a traditional hero, but rather a model of what is known in modern criticism as the “anti-hero,” that is, the character who is crushed under the weight of events without having the ability to change their course.
Wars surround him from all sides, and haunt him at every stage of his life, even when he tries to rise from the ashes, missiles chase him to return him to point zero. As if his destiny was to be the living witness to everyone’s death, and to carry the burden of memory when others were unable to carry it.
Badr’s journey is distributed among the destroyed villages and cities inside Yemen, then extends to the spaces of the Arab diaspora from Aden to Cairo, Khartoum, and Libya, before he throws himself into the boat of irregular migration towards Europe. This intense spatial journey is not presented as geographical movement, but rather as an existential journey searching for salvation.
Every city the hero enters seems to be a new version of the first devastation, as if the war is following him wherever he goes, and as if Yemen has become a mirror for the entire world when a person experiences the loss of safety and exile. At each stop, Badr meets new faces with their own stories: lovers, survivors, immigrants, and those aspiring to life. All of these people form human threads that connect their fates to his fate, turning the narrative into a mosaic of painful experiences that intersect in one estuary, which is human alienation.
Al-Raqimi writes his novel in a language saturated with poetry, even in the most cruel and bloody scenes. Language here is not only a means of narration, but rather a space for solace, as if the writer is trying through it to save a person from the ugliness of reality by infusing him with the beauty of language.
Nature has a remarkable presence in the text, as it is the only refuge that gives the hero a bit of tranquility amid the hell of war: the mountains, the sea, the sky, and even the desert, turn into parallel characters who share his ordeal and help him endure existence. This poetic tendency does not weaken the realistic structure, but rather gives it a contemplative dimension that makes the text closer to spiritual confession than to military documentation.
Whenever the hero is buried under some rubble, he emerges again with another name and another life, until his name becomes a sign of continuity, not of a fixed identity.
Memory ruin
The novel succeeds in building a delicate balance between realistic narrative and the symbolic dimension. On the one hand, we see the field scenes in their precise details: the destruction, the corpses, the rubble, the smell of gunpowder, and everything that brings the reader to a vivid picture of the war.
On the other hand, we see a dense symbolic layer that makes these scenes signs of deeper devastation: the devastation of the soul and memory. Here, Al-Ruqami’s skill is highlighted in making the Yemeni experience specific in its appearance, but universal in its essence. The war he writes about is not the war in Yemen alone, but rather every war that crushes a person and takes away his past and his future at the same time.
The title of the novel, “Memory Blindness,” summarizes the philosophy underlying its text. Blindness here is not an inability to see, but rather a loss of insight and a loss of the ability to remember oneself. It is the blindness caused by trauma when it closes the consciousness’s doors of memory to give it temporary protection, before the memory suddenly explodes, and the person drowns in a flood of forgotten images. In this sense, the title is no longer a description of an individual case, but rather a metaphor for an entire generation that has been blinded by a succession of wars and calamities.
From a technical standpoint, Al-Raqimi relied on narration in the first person, which made the novel closer to a subjective confession than an objective story. This choice creates an intimate relationship between the reader and the narrator, and gives the experience a rare emotional sincerity.
However, the writer is not satisfied with the position of the victim narrator, but rather breaks the barrier between him and the reader in several moments, addressing him directly in a tone similar to a soliloquy: “You may have read a lot of tragedies…but I am unable to draw a single scene in which I do not find a body thrown out in the open.”
This technique, known in contemporary criticism as “breaking the fourth wall,” gives the text acute self-awareness and makes the reader a partner in the tragedy, not a spectator.
The novel also relies on a circular structure that begins with death and ends with new birth. Whenever the hero is buried under some rubble, he emerges again with another name and another life, until his name turns into a sign of continuity rather than a fixed identity. At the end of the text, when he alone survives the drowning immigration boat with his companions, and finds himself in the hands of a psychiatrist whom fate makes his savior, it seems as if he is born again. This third birth closes the circle to confirm that possible survival is not in escaping war, but in confronting and acknowledging memory.
The novel enriches its references with a poetic quotation from a poem by Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh, one of the most important poetic voices in Yemen, as if Al-Ruqaimi was summoning this ancient voice to connect the afflicted present with the cultural past that still shines in the collective memory. He also writes a long dedication in which he pays tribute to the victims of wars and exiles, and describes his work as “advocacy in the face of injustice,” which opens the novel to its human moral dimension, as a testimony and not just an artistic imagination.
Save memory
Despite the darkness of the narrative material, the text does not surrender to darkness, but rather insists on holding on to a thread of light. Whenever hope disappears, a form of resistance emerges from among the wounds: in love, in memory, or in the desire to write itself. Here, Al-Raqimi excels in making writing itself an act of salvation, as if the narrator, when he writes, is restoring what was destroyed in both him and his homeland. The act of writing down becomes a form of survival, a means of preserving memory from complete blindness.
From an analytical perspective, “Memory Blindness” belongs to the postmodern war novels that not only document the tragedy but also question it. War is not an external event in the text, but rather an internal experience that reformulates man’s relationship with the world. From here, the novel seems closer to a journey into the depth of the Yemeni and human self, a journey that raises more questions than it provides answers: What does it mean to be a survivor? How can a broken life go on? Can memory be cured of its blindness? These questions form the core of Al-Raqimi’s narrative experience, and give the novel its deep philosophical dimension.
The novel won the Katara Award for Best Published Novel, an award befitting a work that was able to transform personal pain into comprehensive human discourse. The aesthetic value here is inseparable from the human message, and the poetic language does not contradict realistic documentation, but rather integrates with it to produce a text dripping with honesty and pain. In this sense, “Memory Blindness” represents a qualitative addition to the Yemeni and Arab novel scene, because it re-asks the most important question in times of war: How can literature return the human being to the center of the story after he was obliterated by cannons?
Hamid Al-Raqimi’s novel is not only an elegy for a lost generation, but rather a testimony to the ability of literature to resist oblivion. Between blindness and insight, death and survival, memory and loss, the writer weaves a text worthy of a major tragedy without drowning in lamentation or rhetoric, in an elegant and sober language that listens to human pain and gives him a voice amid the noise of weapons. It is a novel about war, yes, but above all it is a novel about the insistence on survival, about the person who emerges from the ashes to write his biography, a witness, not a victim.