TWO DAYS

In her novel Neharan (“Two Days”), Dr. Latiffa Halim works with spatial and temporal shifts, delving deep into meaning and piercing through the familiar and the conventional. While Joyce spoke of a single day in Ulysses, the author speaks of two days — the Montreal day and the Chicago day. This temporal division in the novel, its critical tracking, and the attempt to measure it against reality, is in my view misleading and mistaken. The author does not actually depict two separate days; rather, time flows freely, and through this flow both the movement of thought and the actions of the main characters take place.

So what is the point of defining and confining time to the characters if the work as a whole is a fictional construct, one that overflows with imaginary time — time that is enacted and imagined by the characters themselves, who, in turn, venture in their thoughts to even more distant and extended temporal realms?

Fundamentally, I find that time in a literary work is a mere illusion. It cannot be measured as we measure real-world time, nor can it be projected onto the imaginary in the same way. The “two days” in the novel are not, in fact, two days, but rather two lives — the life of the East in the twentieth century, and the issues, crises, and hopes that this East has faced.

Latifa HALIM

Translated by Mourad EL KHATIBI

 978-9920-438-33-9