The Rise and Fall of the "Saad Sheen"

Author: Hamdy Abu Guleil

I am always searching for a language that resembles speech, and this is precisely what prolongs the writing time of my works. The novel "The Saad Sheen" took me ten years to write. It's a complete, present experience, and I can almost touch the characters. I remember every event, every gesture from the beginning of the novel to its end. What did I do during those ten years? I searched for the tone, for the language most like spoken language, not colloquial, although I love writing in colloquial Arabic. Rather, I mean the ease, lightness, precision, and persuasive power of speech. Perhaps this goes back to my upbringing in Bedouin culture, a culture of oral tradition, a culture of speech... The author. The novel traces the journey of what it calls the "Saad Sheen citizens," or the nationality invented by Muammar Gaddafi, who were Egyptian Bedouins who moved to Libya in the 1970s. It also addresses the experience of illegal immigration from the Libyan coasts to the Italian coasts. The novel employs a new technique for Arab novels and a language that draws from a cocktail of Arab dialects. Muammar Gaddafi named this group of people "Saad Sheen citizens" because they were from the Eastern Desert, brought by the late Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi to live in his country. They took their name from the first two letters of "Sahra Sharqia" (Eastern Desert). The novel also covers the conditions of Egyptians who traveled to Libya, how they lived in Libyan coastal areas hoping to migrate to Italy, and how the protagonist successfully migrated to Italy on a rubber boat that cast him onto the Italian shores, starting a strange adventure in Europe between France and Italy, also revealing the conditions of immigrants in European countries.