The wailing woman

In linguistics, a "Nadiba" is a woman who mourns the dead, meaning she eulogizes their virtues and merits, cries for them, and expresses grief after their passing. However, the novel "The Mourner" by Amani Tareef, published by (Arab Scientific Publishers, 2026), directs us to an emotional significance where loss transforms into a pathological state that seems endless, making reality itself appear absurd and paradoxical. It is the story of "Ahlam," an art teacher who couldn't paint her life as she wished. Like any woman, she loved, married, and had children, but death ambushed her by snatching her husband. She became weak and fragile, strongly susceptible to falling in her first confrontation with life, and her name became "The Mourner." The graveyard became her favorite place and refuge, and dreams became her world where she sought solace from her reality. Through these markers, and unlike the case in pathological narratives, the author Amani Tareef, with "The Mourner," crafts her unique vision of the human pain inherent in the state of "loss," exploring its psychological and existential dimensions and the symbols and connotations it embodies, elevating personal suffering to high levels of power and impact on the recipient. This manifests in the text through attention to the dramatic horizon of events and the monologic insights generated by the narrative voice, diagnosing the character's crisis, psychological complexes, and the state of isolation from shared humanity she has reached. This suspended state between two worlds, the real and the imagined, leads the narrative to the stage where the novel's heroine confronts her ordeal when she undergoes behavioral therapy and is diagnosed as suffering from "detachment from reality" and "bipolar" personality disorders since childhood, which is attributed to old loss traumas, explaining her severe episodes of hallucinations, depression, and extreme anger… So, do Ahlam and everyone who has lost a loved one need behavioral therapy to overcome their state and start anew? Death is the other side of life in "The Mourner," and "Life is a pause between two deaths," as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa says, which transforms the "theme of loss" into the meaning of his phrase in this novel that presents death as a transition or absence, and a promise of a postponed meeting but in another world… From the atmosphere of the novel, we read: "I stood before his tombstone, awaiting the arrival of another kind of explosion, and it did not miss its appointment. Tears flowed like floods, and my feet refused to carry me, so I was closer to the ground, weeping bitterly, performing tayammum with his dust to pray the supplication in that spot, with the scorching sun as a witness. I don't remember how much time passed while I was in that state, my hands on my temples, tears flowing, my eyes closed, my temperature high... A faint question escaped my lips: Where are you, my love? A cool breeze followed the question, as if it was sent at that moment to relieve me. I felt someone's presence. I heard Basem's voice in my head replying: Present. I startled from my place! I looked right and left searching for a living soul, but I didn't find a single bird; the place was completely empty, yet I felt the presence of wandering spirits. I looked towards the sky, I didn't notice the sun hiding behind the clouds, and the breeze began to extinguish the effects of its rays with its coolness, as if they had never been.