“Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table,” a novel by Libyan Muhammad al-Naas: gender fluidity and false modernity

In his novel “Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table,” Muhammad Al-Naas approaches the ideas prevailing in Libyan and Arab society, and they continue to direct and influence in general the mechanism of dealing and choosing everything that is feminist, and he re-presents topics such as the hymen and purity, and establishes, through different points of view, a special concept of adultery. As a result, the meaning of many concepts changes and turns into vague concepts. What determines adultery in the logic of some of the opinions contained in the text of the novel is not the fulfillment of marriage or its absence, but rather the decisive factor is the presence or absence of love and desire from both parties inside or outside the framework of marriage.
The novel is concerned with monitoring the transformations that afflicted Libyan society in a specific period of time, from a society based on religious and cultural pluralism in a context that necessitated cosmopolitan diversity to a society of one culture and certainty of integrity. This is why the return from the city to the village appears to be the first indication of the act of regression and the focus on the constant. This is supported by the departure of Italians, Caucasians, and Maltese to their homelands, and the migration of Jews from Tripoli to Djerba, Tunisia.
The novel tells us in faint details that the film is about Abd al-Salam al-Absi, but the entire story is linked to the special recognition of Milad through the act of remembering and reinterpreting, and that this is an indication of unity and conformity, even if the tendencies and orientations differ, in order to present to us an identity implicated in stability, rooted in its traditionalism. Her eyes are open at the back, drawn into overlapping knots, rooted toward stability and the past. It may seem to some that the novel represents a call towards modernity due to the fluidity of gender and the shift in its definition from the biological linked to stability and determination to the cultural linked to social and actual role and performance, but upon careful contemplation, and after the ending scene, it becomes more indicative of the effectiveness of tradition, the fixed view, and patriarchal concepts with their many patterns that shade life. Arab society and the lives of its members.

Gender fluidity
Between biological and cultural

The reader discovers the moment he reads the novel that there is a state of liberation from sexual and gender determinants, through an image outside the boundaries of the ready-made stereotyping inherited within Arab culture of the image of men and women, and the characteristics, functions and roles that surround them. There is, through the characters of Milad and Zainab, a transformation and exchange in male practices. And the female. There is a centrality to the female from the beginning, and through the formation of a signifying hegemony and a shift in tasks, Zainab, by doing the work and bringing in the money, appears as if she is the focus of the movement and a space to frame the actual directions of the narrator Milad’s life.
What this novel insists on is the idea of ​​gender, not as a biological distribution, but as a fluidity linked to tasks against what is stable in the Arab mentality. The novel is wounded through characteristics given to the hero, Milad, and his wife, Zainab, in a special direction. These tasks remained within the framework of their fixed distribution, standing within the limits of a specific pattern, despite the Arab women going out to work. If the woman, in occupying this space in framing orientation and movement, formed and directed a special direction, then the direction of the character of the narrator, Milad, took on more profound dimensions.
The foundations of guidance in the novel text represent basic directions at the same time for interpreting the situation, starting with growing up within a framework filled with feminine presence. The hero’s upbringing is Milad in a house in which there is a mother and four girls. He looks into their insides and their psychological crises, shares henna on his fingers, and wears feminine clothes, in addition to his blatant harshness. In the father’s style of breaking this trend in his attempt to reshape and shape his son within the trench of inherited custom: (I asked God what I had done that made life treat me this way, because I was an only child of four sisters, and because I learned to braid my sisters’ hair when I was ten, and to make women’s sweets in At twelve… and I made bread… and learned to cook since my childhood? Perhaps because I agreed to wash my wife’s clothes, arrange them, and iron them… perhaps because I gave up the marital bed and playing since we gave up on having children.)
Repetition (perhaps) in the previous text – where it carries some aspects of interpretation of the situation – reveals the legitimacy of what we alluded to previously regarding the openness of interpretation to many aspects, but the most important thing in this part is represented by the presence and method of the father in correcting the defect from his point of view, the father in its biological sense. And culturally, the father, with his biological boundaries, represents the authority of the inherited pattern, as he maintains the boundaries of the pattern and fights any deviation with intensity, harshness, and cruelty.
The elements of the pattern of stability versus gender fluidity are many, starting with the father, Al-Absi, or Salha, and we can frame it within the same context, albeit with a different manifestation of the character (the Madonna) in his military service, where he continued to stalk him and torture him with all available means. But Zainab’s character comes on the other hand, revealing a different fluidity, which is represented by her presence in a special framework linked to the roles and functions that she performs. Her roles are displaced from the old pattern, so she leaves her husband to do the housework that is closely related to her, and devotes herself to work and her problems with the director of the institution, and forms a space of The different presence, through her formation of some concepts according to a new manifestation, influenced in that context by the tendencies of her artist uncle that grew up under him, as a result of his work as a visual artist and his travels to many European countries.
In the novel, we are faced with patterns that form, through the narrative – narrative and dialogue – significant ideological formations. There is Zainab’s uncle, the visual artist, who comes as an theorist of the values ​​of liberation, forming a narrative that is absent from the pattern he represents, but despite his absence, he is not devoid of effectiveness and influence in establishing gender fluidity in the daughter of His brother, and there is Al-Absi, who represents the values ​​of reliance on tradition and stability, and represents the authority of an imagined model in Milad, with the same degree or intensity that Zainab occupies in shaping the hero’s horizon and direction. There is also the modernist style that is content with its isolation with the distinct traditional style. This is evident in the character of Madame Maryam. In her high status in terms of place of residence, which leads to being rooted in a special social class, she can live self-sufficiently without conflict with inherited values, and in her dialogue with Milad’s mother, and her understanding of the cultural moment in which the mother lives, with its customs and traditions.

Pseudo-modernism:
Breaking free from the restrictions of ideals

By relying on the old and its continuation, and the marginality of the new and its constant struggle, and on the models of the village and the city, Muhammad Al-Naas establishes in his novel a duality related to the growth of the Arab mentality towards modernization, the obstacles to that modernization, and its problems that empty it of its real content, so that in the end it turns into a formal modernization dependent on eloquence and rhetoric and going against the format without Creating a vibrant horizon that reveals the radical transformation in contrasting the deeply rooted patterns even within the parties that seem more modern and extreme.
The novel is linked to distorted modernity, as it is leaked into the fictional text, within a context or mentality that is pulled back. This is supported by the fact that the attempts of the characters who fit into that framework within the novelistic work, their panting or exiting is surrounded by patterns of regression that are effective in stabilizing and restricting. In every chapter of the novel – and sometimes within the text – there is a proverb that forms a textual opening that establishes the closed scope. The proverb, despite being a compact structure, reveals an inherent depth rooted in the spirit of society and its culture. It comes in every chapter directing the movement, and active along the pattern, involved. In marginalizing and ignoring everything that contradicts and differs from it with overwhelming influence.
A closer look at the personalities who represent the side of the deviant from the established pattern and norms, and an examination of their trends and the outcomes they have achieved, proves the legitimacy of this approach. Murmurs of doubt tend towards Zainab’s uncle, the visual artist, even in light of his own concepts of abstract ideas that expand their framework and meaning, and influenced the formation of his niece in her saying (adultery is forbidden only with someone you do not love), and the framework of his practical behavior that reveals his approach in dealing with women. And the belief in her sexual freedom in general, in faint details, reveal his reactionary and reactionary mentality, in Zainab’s reference in her conversation about him with Milad to his madness if he knew that she was looking at his nude paintings, or his madness if he realized that she was with him now having sex in his apartment.
As for Madame or Maryam, the reader is faced with a modern situation that is not devoid of privacy, because she is content with her situation without quarreling or fighting with the opposing style. She is adapted to his point of view, and is not bothered by the criticism of others or his view of her behavior, as if this were a belief in the futility of conflict. After her travel With her husband and staying with her husband for a while in Paris, she returns, creating a tight circle around herself, creating a kind of isolation. She had a different vision and awareness, but it was a vision that was not concerned with advancing, revolutionizing, or changing the other in order to abstain from customs or traditions. She only stored her influences and imbibed the principles of freedom in her many travels, and this self-style has less impact and effectiveness, because it is not open to others, and nothing occupies her interest outside the boundaries of the self.
In light of the limits of previous reception, we can view the characters differently, especially if we place them within the framework of circles larger than their manifestation within their textual context, so the novel, in its general context, becomes concerned with monitoring cases of development or regression and submission that afflict societies in successive moments or cultural contexts, especially in those Societies that generate sharp trends in contrast from time to time, or contradictory divisions in belonging, so there is this suspicion of vision, and with each of these different trends and affiliations, there is crowding and distribution, which stops the movement to start again. The killing scene at the end of the work that… It carries within it the elimination of any sign of movement towards modernization, which is nothing but a state of repeated stopping and rupture, and dependence within an absolute vacuum.
Personalities are intertwined with symbols and connotations, and become a shadow of ideological fences, drawn to the horizon of renewal and modernization distributed at every moment of civilization into two directions, each of which obstructs the other, and attempts to destroy its starting points, so the result is distorted and not pure of the old, and is not directed towards modernization, change, and growth without obstacles that make Its movement is fixed and based on a mirage, and the novel and this situation become nothing but an attempt to reconnect with the world according to a cognitive orientation that belongs to its own cultural moment that carries within it trends towards modernization, but it remains isolated from the traditions and customs within it that hinder its movement forward.

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