About metal, dogs and breaking chains! – Mahmoud Abdul Shakur

This collection of stories captures moments, characters and situations with great sensitivity and contemplation, blending dreams and nightmares with reality and pondering disturbing ideas such as daily life, isolation and relationships with others. It is not imposed on the story, but appears smoothly without adding a point in it. Every ending is a new beginning waiting to be written. The author of this collection, Muhammad Al-Barami, published by Dar Al-Kutub Khan and entitled “He Attracts Metal, Loves Dogs”, travels in his texts a richer and more diverse world than in his first collection, “For Lovers, Villains”. There is also a lot of structure in the structure of the stories, one could even say a mixture of simplicity and strangeness, which gives a special and unique flavor to this group, which is undoubtedly a difficult and impossible combination. Starting from the ordinary that you can’t notice, in the course of daily and repetitive processes, to take it to the horizon of strange and sometimes nightmarish experiences, this shows talent, skill and ambition. Despite the diversity of characters, events and worlds, despite working on very different social, economic and cultural details and levels, most of the heroes of the group experience a fateful moment when facing their environment, dealing with what they have inherited or acquired. The conflict is often caused by the distance between dreams and reality, or by the difficulty of adapting to a hostile or turbulent environment, or the conflict may arise from the alienation of the character from his surroundings, from people, and sometimes even from himself and his discoveries.He must immediately save himself in the remaining time. Just a situation, it may not completely change the personality, but there is always a celebration of trying, of human nature, and ways of adapting, no matter how strange. The feelings, desires, small fights of this group, all deserve a chance at any time, their situation is difficult, their inner conflicts are even more difficult, so there is no moral condemnation, and there is no soul. Carried with guilt, but in dreams, nightmares, or hobbies, or even in another existence, there is another choice that can help us face life. The characters of this group do not stop using all means to adapt, to accept their anxious selves, and despite the irony in some stories, the strongest feeling is understanding and sympathy for the characters, because they are mostly docile people who are thrown into an environment that is greater than their ability, because they … They suffer from severe internal alienation, even if they live among others, even if they have families and children.Let’s test these ideas with examples from the stories in the collection: In the story “Plan to Kill My Shoelaces” there is an example of a persecuted hero who projects his hostile environment onto his shoelaces, and then this same shoelace becomes his This story is also typical of the combination of the ordinary, the trivial and the simple, which leads to our strangest ending. In “My Father’s Hidden Lonely Room” there is another attempt by an ordinary hero to break the routine, to have a small room of his own in the center of his house, a world that belongs to him even if there is not much life, a small dream that becomes reality in the face of the deadly routine he has been experiencing all his life. In “The Husband and the Murderer” the technique of shared dreams is used, even the interference of dreams with reality, as an alternative to murder, which is certainly an attempt at adaptation, much better than the realization of tragedy, and in “The Murder of Mrs. Mercedes” the same technique is used in the framework of irony, the husband refuses to become a marquis, nor will he give up his wife’s dream of being like the marquis. The marquis’s wife, the story ends without crime and resolution, but we feel very sorry for both parties, because their logic of “compensation” is expressed with strength and wisdom. The protagonist of the story of “Sinan Street”, because of his loneliness, his old rules, because he is waiting for his apartment to be evacuated at any time, he enters a Kafkaesque nightmare experience, where the boundary between reality and imagination becomes blurred. Through a strange story, it allows the hero to face himself, instead of the usual escape. And the protagonist of “The Road of Muhammad Ali”, who discovers the pleasure of his body because of a fleeting poem, instantly faces the reality of the absence of women in his life, and he seizes the opportunity to find his own happiness. The experience of sin and repentance, as if he were reborn. The situation of the heroine of “The Girl Who Looks Like Amy Winehouse” is strange, like every tragic heroine, she is the victim of her wrong choices, from veil to liberation and vice versa, this character is in the fall, rupture and suicide of the British singer Amy Winehouse, but the story of the heroine is also told from another story. We do not know its end, but we read the description of the image of its owner. “He sucks money and loves dogs” is a strange story about a hero who can’t find a bridge to communicate with people, but finds a bridge with a puppy that fills his life. The hero of the story embraces several metals in his body, which were implanted on different occasions, from a submarine bomb during the revolution, to dental fillings, two pieces of debris and several nails stuck to his bones. The strangeness here is the lack of interaction with humans despite embracing dogs and minerals, just like the strangeness that appears in the story of “Tortoise as a Turtle”, trying to bring good luck to the turtle and making the best efforts for it, the hero of the story even hopes to become a turtle, without making similar efforts to deal with reality or humans. In the story of The Sixth Day, we sympathize with the family who lost their young son in the Volunteer Army, and we recall with the protagonist of the story, Windows, a failed love story, without regrets or apologies. The pictures and letters tell of memories and lessons from the past, just like my stories A Box, My Mother, and The Wall of Memory. In the last story, the summary of the journey emerges: nothing is permanent, and what life destroys can never be repaired, but we must keep moving forward, without too high expectations or exaggerated regrets.