Delirium Balcony

Author's name: Ibrahim Nasrallah

The poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah has published his novel "The Balcony of Delirium" (with which he opens his novel project: "Balconies", which includes a number of novels, each with its own independence, in addition to his major novel project "The Palestinian Farce"). In a unique style, veiled sarcasm, and concise expressions of various images of life, and with rare boldness in breaking with the established modern novelistic form, which is simultaneously traditional. With expressive images like flashes that come and go, with unique rituals that are unconventional in their intensity and studied form, the poet Ibrahim Nasrallah dialogues in this novelistic work with the bitter state of alienation that has come to occupy a vast space in the Arab soul since the first Gulf War, passing through the harsh shadows of what the Palestinian situation has become, arriving at the post-September 11th stage and the occupation of Iraq. These are balconies from which our writer overlooks the reality of the situation experienced by the novel's hero, Rashid Al-Nimr, and his family. They are stations that represent images of the life of the Arab person searching for his identity, freedom, and security, but he cannot find them. An era filled with conflicts, wars, and poverty to the point that he looks in the mirror and finds another image of himself. The novel's hero says: "I want to contemplate myself in a mirror that does not reflect my image!! Isn't this difficult, and what is the difficulty in that? This means that you will be where you were, without eyelids, with dreams that remind you of the day, without a road, and above all, alone, with this blind mirror!! His dead friend asked him: And why do you accompany me?! Because I cannot see myself in you! And why don't you see yourself in me?! Because you have no eyes! You get my point, don't you? "The Balcony of Delirium" is a new form in modern fiction literature through which Ibrahim Nasrallah broke the concept of building character with impersonality, and broke art with art so that there would be space in this (epic absurdity) We live in a new reality that can no longer be discussed except by going to the extreme border area.