Cockroach's fate

Author's name: Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Among all his plays, "The Fate of a Cockroach" stands out for its angry, protesting tone, a strong tone that had never appeared in Al-Hakim's works before! It's as if he foresaw with his artistic flair the events that led to the 1967 disaster that befell everyone just a year after he wrote it. In the netherworld to which Al-Hakim descends, living things are divided into ants and cockroaches! Ants were created active, a cohesive army, thinking only of their basic needs and satisfying them, and stalking their victims with patience and determination. As for the cockroaches, they are disjointed, fragmented creatures, each working for himself, preoccupied with his food and withdrawing into himself without caring about what happens to the other cockroaches. A king with no talent to qualify him to rule, and no one invited him to assume the throne! I wonder who Al-Hakim meant by the ants, and who he meant by the cockroaches? What happened that made people become "cockroaches" in the artist's eyes? "The Fate of a Cockroach" is one of Al-Hakim's most mature plays, ripe with bitter sarcasm and a harsh protest against everything that leads to the abolition of human humanity and the relegation of man from his lofty position among creatures to the status of insects.