Translated by: Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi
I can confidently say that Ahmed Saif Hashed has entered the narrative field with expertise and skill, revealing a distinguished creative presence that achieves wonder in its finest forms. His remarkable ability in artistic expression is evident, alongside a profound evocation of a life marked by sorrow and chaos. He maintains an unwavering connection to the land and a determination to emerge from the shackles of despair into the realm of freedom and self-identity. Despite overwhelming circumstances, he embodies a deep human will, rich in feelings and questions, aspiring to merge with love and beauty, elevating the self to a level befitting a conscious individual aware of reality and its components.
In his narrative work, we see a strong-willed adventurer wielding transformative possibilities and directing them towards success. His writing encapsulates oppression, decay, and fear, revealing vast injustices and life’s hardships that simmer within him. These struggles compel him to seek revenge and pursue his desires, sometimes through adventure and other times through insight and cunning.
From early childhood, he faced fatigue and deprivation, which sparked numerous questions about life’s complexities—especially the aspects of humanity that remain unilluminated. He portrays the anguish of living in humiliation, where deprivation, illness, death, and the loss of loved ones leave an open wound that leads to endless realms of suffering.
Hashed presents a series of surreal sorrows, giving voice to their depths. He lives in a bitter reality that drives him to protest, resist, and scream against the darkness. He captures time’s exhausting torrents, flowing with pain for himself and the world. He remembers being a diligent, passionate student, eager for public reading and yearning for love, yet shy about expressing his feelings. Instead, he encounters moments of defeat and an overwhelming rush of emotions, haunted by memories of an idealized woman.
He writes with a creative spirit overflowing with beauty, presenting a vision of the world filled with painful events, senseless deaths, and battles over nothingness. The oppression that pervades his world ignites a passion for freedom, love, and peace. Thus, he weaves his life from the threads of suffering, anxiety, and suspicion about an unilluminated future, excelling in expressing emotions and the complexities of daily life.
Despite the rarity of joy, when he encounters it, he celebrates it, activating his memory for more hope and determination to succeed. Within the space of his dreams lies a person eager to express everything within his heart and conscience. He also hosts a shy, introspective individual wrestling with how to articulate the self and make it scream to the point of fainting.
In Hashed’s world, suffering is rooted in the essence of memory, extending to the farthest reaches of the past and the daily life he observes, filled with bitterness and human failures. He confronts those who brazenly strip humanity of existence, freedom, and rights, which are seized by machines of destruction, war, chaos, and corruption. The absurdity in his world leaves him with nothing but the relentless power to scream, never faltering or retreating into despair.
Reflecting on the events of January ’86, he unveils the atrocities of identity-based killings, daily hunger, thirst, and defeats, alongside the meager existence sustained by biscuits. He witnesses torture in prisons, where human flesh is crammed into narrow cells with dear friends bound by shared memories, only to be killed without reason.
Here, we find an active self-intertwined with its world, struggling against the darkness. Life’s essence connects his experiences with daily struggles, and the uncertain future that may never arrive. Nonetheless, the writer tirelessly seeks a window to meaning and freedom, embodying struggle, resilience, and awareness of reality.
Hashed’s narrative offers varied, rich spaces filled with the abundance of his dreams, suffering, and rebellion against all that limits humanity and hinders aspirations. It reveals a person whose life is saturated with tears, teetering on the brink of suicide. Hashed is a profound reader of reality, navigating through a crowd of pretenders. He resists valiantly, addressing challenging topics and pouring his entire being into his narrative, revealing the enigmatic and what is often unspeakable.
He possesses the courage of an innocent soul yearning for justice, desiring betterment, and striving to fulfill the meanings of his existence amid the secrets and manifestations of painful events. These include adventures from adolescence that lead to guilt and habitual behaviors he cannot abandon but wishes to rebel against.
At other junctures in his life, we see a passionate lover who immerses himself in the world of women, repeatedly falling into love that ends in failure, as if the beautiful train of life has passed him by. Yet, he soon finds joy—love for him is a celebration, a joy, a yearning, and a vast space where he can touch his healed self, free from oppression and sadism. It is a pure, innocent, and sincere love for a tormented soul seeking warmth in relationships, caught in the melancholy of longing for the beloved, and trapped in the snares of defeat—the defeat of a spirit yearning for joy. Whenever he stumbles in love, he begins anew.
Thus, we see him cling to the fateful and the human, celebrating it and racing through its wilderness without fatigue. He rises above monotony and constriction, opening the wounds of memory and seeking deeper meanings. Reality merges with the past, where past experiences resonate in the present as a result of regional and tribal challenges that hinder humanity. His temporal journey is rife with obstacles.
He recalls a university professor attempting to fail him, looking down on him for being from the North, yet the student triumphs, achieving the highest rank in success. He also excels in military college, where he earns first place, akin to winning a Nobel Prize in its broadest sense. Joy emerges from simple moments and modest situations, yet they are profound enough to astonish him. It is the passion of existence as a high meaning that allows one to feel their value, surpassing all barriers to ambitions and aspirations.
In his narrative, we read an interwoven geography of societal diversity, economic conditions, political intertwinings, and a human shaped by the soil of this homeland seeking liberation. We encounter the creative diversity within the human self, struggling through a life filled with bitterness, condescension, and attempts to strip others of their existence and freedom. It is as if we are witnessing a moment in history, exploring the human experience filled with sighs and a quest to reorder existence in a manner worthy of humanity.
Hashed stands as a true witness to a phase of national history marked by loud and soft rhythms, sometimes subdued and at other times rebellious. We encounter a homeland and society filled with pain and hope, the bitterness and sweetness of life, the noise of existence and its subtlety—an intertwined, fluid world.
The narrative reveals a world filled with regional and partisan tensions, another realm we must chase after to grasp its essence and hidden meanings. Through various events or emotions brimming with rebellion that quiet down and do not resist, they simmer in their depths to emerge as screams, anger, rebellion, protest, and adventure.
This strangeness in a self-consumed by a desire to champion humanity unveils a reality that is often ambiguous and intricate, necessitating a relentless pursuit through its wilderness until a flag of love and a mark of victory can be planted, despite the pains that continue to come.
Hashed possesses a refined artistic style and a lyrical, flowing language, enhanced by remarkable imagery and the construction of contrasts between moments. He writes with the ink of the heart and a passion for meaning, elevating language, unlocking its mysteries, and molding it into pliable forms that draw us toward it irresistibly. He surprises us with stunning aesthetic structures and the ability to reveal human emotional depths.
He is, therefore, a keen observer and sensitive receiver of everything unfolding in reality, encompassing its political, social, and economic dimensions. He presents us with times that have shaped him, opening avenues for him to explore the human spirit in its struggles and fluctuations. In this sense, he is a witness to history, embodying the pulse of simple rural life and the soaring spirit longing for beauty, rejecting domestication and submission, and seeking security, stability, and true citizenship.
In his magnificent work, Ahmed Saif Hashed reads us, explains us, and confronts us face-to-face with truth as it is, without embellishments or falsehoods. He creates a world where dreams and reality intertwine, where vision and protest coexist, where the rejection of monotony meets the acceptance of humanity in all its manifestations, and where the desire for liberation from the abysmal prevails. Hashed embodies a realm of exploration—a response to times within a time and a discerning critic of quotidian reality and the aspirations of humanity, striving to affirm existence and express being.
