The critical session “Read Me, I Am This Book” which is broadcasted every Monday on the forum’s YouTube Channel supervised and managed by Dr. Abdelhak Belabed, Professor of Literature Issues, Critical Studies and Approach at Qatar University, hosted Dr. Abdel-Hamid Heema, Professor of Criticism and Literature at the University of Qasidi Merbah and Ouargla, Algeria. The session shed light on “Cultural Patterns Embedded in Qatari Novel: A reading in Forms of Women’s identity and Self-Construction.”
Dr. Heema considered that the field of research in cultural patterns is still in its infancy. It is overburdened with questions, and promising knowledge and methodological breakthroughs that must be studied culturally and critiqued. This should be done based on new mechanisms and concepts to analyse texte from a cultural and social perspective. It is a newcomer to the Arab world and it invests a number of tools and methodologies to analyse the novel from different angles, not concerned with the aesthetic and the artistic, but rather with the text as a subject of discussion, and a form of meaningful expression in terms of form and content.
During the session, Dr. Heema revealed the various relationships existing between the fictional writing of Shamma Al-Kuwari, and the patterns formed within and interacted with it based on the fact that the fictional text is influenced and affected by the entire political, social and cultural patterns surrounding it. He considered the writer’s view of the social and cultural issues that she lived, and cited the cultural patterns embedded in her novel “I’ll meet you in twenty years”, whose foundations and dimensions have crystallized, and whose discourse is shaped by the transformations that Qatar has undergone culturally, socially and economically in the modern era. Hence, this novel is significant in that it monitors the evolution of women’s self-awareness and the extent of her ability to face reality and realize herself before the authority of the masculine community.
He also clarified women’s resistance to the other in all its forms to rehear their voices, discover their identity and build themselves, by asking a number of questions about the ability of the writer to reflect her reality in all its dimensions and to raise the main and central issues of women through her novel.
At the end of the session, Dr. Heema came out with several conclusions that revealed that the novel “I’ll meet you in twenty years”, by Shamma Al-Kuwari, managed successfully to reveal the changes that the female self encountered in Qatar, which are the result of the changes that affected the country society’s structure culturally, economically and socially. This has led to the emergence of a new feminist discourse that reflects women’s concerns and issues, highlights their aspirations and hopes, and maintains their identity and heritage.
For his part, Dr. Belabid, member of the Forum and creator of the critical initiative, confirmed that the aim of these weekly meetings that started nearly three months ago and will continue to the middle of next August is to change our habits in critical reading. He also explained that this initiative enables the reader to draw up a strategic plan for choosing and reading books in light of clear critical mechanisms that enable him to distinguish between poor and rich writing and define the aesthetics of texts.