A Book Review:
Is it ‘Dates on My Fingers’?
By: Azeez Jasim Mohammed
Novel title: “Dates
on My Fingers”
Author: Muhsin Al-Ramli
Language: Arabic
Publisher: Al Mada House for publishing
Pages: 173
“Dates on My Fingers” is a novel of moral values that advises readers not
to spend time thinking of a plan that reaps nothing finally. The novel focuses
on the discrepancy between achieving one’s ends after consuming long time by
harnessing all self-abilities and the quality of the results that one reaches
afterwards. It gives a lesson that not all enjoyable actions leave good impression
after they are over.
Noh, an obedient son of a Shaikh who belongs to a tribe of a huge
number of his own people, is changed suddenly into a man who lost his temper
and starts behaving savagely. The change in his personality frightened
psychologists as his sudden transformation into a whimsical man proves how
people can change easily to this extent. Noh spends most of the remaining of
his life seeking revenge; not for the sake of ecstasy but for regain rectitude
that he lost when his ill daughter is harassed, in his presence, by a son of an
influential man. He does not know that he is going to be fatigued by the
psychological thinking of revenge which will put an end to his clannish, social
and moral pertinence. In the same way that Hamlet does when he abnegates the
luxurious and royal life he lives just to make himself convinced whether his
mother and his uncle are betrayals when they lead such a harmful conspiracy
against his father or not, the inner conflict that leads to his fate.
The context of the story shows the reader that the more time you take
to achieve your end, the more disastrous results will be not only on your
shoulders but also on those whom you like as well. His reaction to get revenge,
which is supported by his relatives, burdens him insofar as burdening them all
and it becomes a boring mission though it still sounds interesting to him. The
loss that Noh faces, so to speak, is not only ideological, but it is a loss of
an individual’s own social entity. This is because the decision of
counterattacking, as a reaction to revenge, is a conduct of challenging a
state, and it comes to be thought politically as making a rift in the entity of
the state itself. No one cares about Noh’s feeling as a father who is insulted
in public and in his daughter’s presence. Noh spends his life respecting others
in the same way that he expects respect from others and that’s perhaps why he
expects more from those who find him doing nothing rather than destruction.
From a rural character into a dude one, from a man of social
commitments into an apathetic man, and from obedient into indocile, Noh is seen
changed completely throughout the plot of the story. All his family members are
shattered here and there in this world, and he finds himself travelling to different
countries, changing his habits and dropping most of his values just to bite a
dog in the same way that the dog bites him.
The novel reflects Muhsin Al-Ramli’s bad impression about life in
diaspora through his experience of living abroad. The author calls for
compromise and he tries to forward a message of hope to those who suffers from
consuming their life just for the sake of getting revenge. The concept of this
novel is quite clear that if you want to live with peace of mind then think as
Dale Carnegie puts it “stop worrying and start living.”
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*Published: Oman Observer. Feb 26,2023
https://www.omanobserver.om/pdf/2023/02/27/omandailyobserver-20230227-1.pdf?ts=221721
https://www.omanobserver.om/ampArticle/1133323
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