“ نار جدة و جنتها، وجهان لعملة واحدة”

“Jeddah’s hell and heaven are two faces of the same currency.” 

Abdo Khal’s novel Throwing Sparks (2009) has been subject to immense contenestion even after it’s rightful awarding of the Arabic Brooker award in 2012 for best Arabic fiction. The novel takes place in the coastal city of Jeddah in the 1980s and retells the story of a Tariq and his experiences as a hitman for a wealthy businessman (referred to as al sayed or the master in the novel), who builds himself a palace on the edge of a random, village-like neighborhood on the city’s waterfront. The neighbourhood is portrayed to be on the periphery of disintegration. Tariq explains that it seems as if the neighborhood resisted the advancement at time, still patriarchal and unable to move away from the conditions that oppress them, content in passivity and herdierty life progressions. Humble but fatigued of their circumstances. In the 430-page-long novel, it’s difficult to sympathise with either Tariq or the master,“al sayed”, Munif. The reader only starts to somewhat sympathise with Tariq as he retells the journey leading to his appointment as one of the master’s hitmen. He articulates how his childish dreams of attaining wealth came at the cost of his reduction into a murderous and rageful instrument. One that assaults, rapes and tortures on demand. 

“Outcased and dispirated, I embraced a life of crime. Standing in the punishment chamber, I would contemplate my naked body, bruised and degraded by brutal acts it had performed”…” I carried out my duties down to the most minute detail as required by the Master, ensuring that nothing would mar his enjoyment while he watched me sodomize his rivals” (p.7, opening) 

“خسئت روحي ، فانزلقت للإجرام بخطى واثقة.  وقفت في غرفة التعذيب، أتأمل جسدي العاري الملطخ بآثر آثامه؛ جسد خاض عشرات المهمات التعذبية، و التأديبية المنتصرة والمهزومة، الفاشلة و المتقنة”…..”اقدم على أداء مهمتي من غير إخلال بأي ركن من أركان الخطة التي اعدها السيد، مع حرصي على عدم انقاص  نشوة التشفي المحتاجة لروحه”  (ص. ٧) 

The book opens with an internal dialogue that Tariq has with himself 31 years after his last act of torture for the master. Tariq describes the master to have the temperance of a child, and explains that his job entails the dishonoring and killing of anyone the master perceives to be an obstacle or an annoyance. The master’s figure is a veiled one, unknown to the public but treacherous to those who’ve been allowed inside the palace. In the news, he’s portrayed as a benevolent man, a man who donates thousands to charity, a man who enhances the economy and strengthens it. Munif’s (the master) immediate impact on local life however, is unknown to the public. Tariq then goes on to retell the story of the master’s arrival years before, describing how the construction of a “heaven ” in their random, village-like, “hell” of a neighborhood came to be. During the passage he laments his life choices, his delusion with the palace and its angelic edifice, saying “ya layatanee baqyat fe alnar”….”al suqout hwa al qanon al azali, w kulana suqat”.  (p.43). “How I wished I stayed in hell, that wish can never be granted because I have fallen to the very bottom of the abyss. Gravity is an immutable law. Although we are all governed by it we have trouble understanding the precise way it affects our lives. The process of falling is the inevitable, we’re all bound to fall” 

As the reader becomes more acquainted with the essential ugliness of the palace practices, including the ones Tariq himself has engaged with, they notice how the master’s arrival urges this once “unmodernised” neighbourhood to slowly surrender to the master’s thirst for demolition, construction and expansion. Those who dare defy him or his plans to further the grandeur of his mansion end up with a fate similar to that of Abu Jalambo, a man who vanished after asking compensation for the confiscation of his land. The palace is built on the ashes of the resident’s hopes and dreams, who at first think of the palace’s construction as a good omen, but quickly become aware of how false that perception was. Unable to resist these changes, the residents are forced into giving up on habits that have characterised their lives and values. This coastal community of men and women, with their gender hierarchies and humble professions as fishermen and tradesmen, who lived and thought of the sea as theirs, now realize they own nothing, and can do little but comply. “Al Farsi has turned Jeddah into a single block of sugar, he feasted off it, and with the accumulation of flies -The city’s sea desiccated”. “لقد حوَّل الفارسي جدّة إلى قطعة سكّر، وأولمَ عليها، ومع تكاثر الذباب كان البحر يجفّ”, fishing stops as a result of the city’s now assaulted sea, and ambitions collectively shift towards the great pursuit of wealth. A path Tariq and his comrades took, and soon enough the entirety of the city would follow suite. They resolved to conform and accommodate the master’s wishes, in the presence of no alternatives. Visually, they see beautiful, high shielded mansions and they aspire to mirror that, to possess and own a conniving goodness that in actuality oppresses them. 

In the story, everything withers as the palace’s corruption infiltrates the city. Tariq’s soul withers working under the master and soon becomes a parallel image of him, society decays out of defeatism, even the city’s sea withers as a result of the forceful intrusion of concrete into its waters. The story explains the duality of wealth and poverty coexisting paradoxically alongside each other and figuratively words said duality in its most grotesque and essential form. Khal satirises the violence of boundless wealth and its ability to extract an evil stem and replicate its seeds by the dozens, it does so by mirroring how deceitful the palace’s exterior is in comparison to what happens behind its lavish gold gates. Its language is harsh, explosive and provocative, a disclaimer should be made regarding this. Khal presents us with a violently wordeed assemblage on the conditions of a society under attack, under constant threat of extermination and assault.