Description
Literature was and still is one of the most important means of influencing nations and peoples, and perhaps from here it gained its role and importance in documenting a number of historical, political and social events. There has often been discussion and debate about the distance between historical and literary in novels that take real ancient or modern history as a basis for their construction, but what if the writer's original and basic intention is to document the disaster that happened to his region and its people? How is it? Does he really commit to neutrality? Does the matter in his hands turn from merely documenting the event to a crude melodramatic narrative?
In his novel, recently published in an excellent Arabic translation by Dr. Yahya Mokhtar from the House of Wisdom Foundation for Chinese Literature, novelist Liujin Yun recounts the events that took place in his hometown of Henan Province in 1942, a terrible disaster and famine that killed nearly three million people between starvation and death by locust plague. What disturbed the author and prompted him to document this incident was his feeling that it would be forgotten amidst the major events that took place in China and the world at that time.
