SANAA, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) — Amid Yemen’s decade-long war, novelist Hamid Al-Raqimi has emerged as one of its most vital storytellers, tracing how conflict fractures ordinary lives. His fiction unfolds in fragments and broken scenes, a structure that mirrors the splintered worlds his characters inhabit.
Al-Raqimi’s latest novel, “The Blindness of Memory,” recently won the 11th Katara Prize for Arabic Novel, a recognition that affirms both his distinctive craft and the growing international attention to Yemeni literature. In recent years, that literature has turned its gaze inward, toward the ruins of ordinary life and the quiet devastations that follow spectacle.
Al-Raqimi’s work rejects ideology. It refuses to make war intelligible through politics or polemic. “I focus on war as an internal state that lives inside a person and breaks him from within,” the 30-year-old author said in a recent interview with Xinhua.
“The fragmentation of time, the discontinuity of narration, and the repetition of shattered memory are not just artistic tools,” he added, “but mirrors of the reality Yemenis endure while trying to preserve their humanity.”
“The Blindness of Memory” follows Badr, a Yemeni man whose life and identity are obliterated by decades of violence. As a child, Badr loses his family in a bombing and is raised by an old man who conceals the truth about his origins. When he finally learns who he is, he embarks on a wrenching journey of self-discovery. He moves to Sanaa to study law, falls in love, and is swept once more into violence that claims everyone he holds dear.
What follows is an odyssey of displacement. Badr flees Yemen through Aden, Cairo, Sudan, and Libya, crossing the Mediterranean to join the tide of refugees. Each stop reveals the shared suffering and broken dreams of Yemenis scattered by war.
Al-Raqimi knows this terrain intimately. He once lived in the Maris area of Al-Dhale Province, south of Sanaa, one of the first regions consumed by fighting in 2014. For nearly a decade, he has moved between camps and displacement zones across Yemen and the Arab world, never settling.
Fikriyah Shuhrah, a scholar of Yemeni literature, sees Al-Raqimi’s method as part of a broader movement. “Writers cannot separate themselves from their surroundings,” she said. “What Al-Raqimi and his peers are doing is turning suffering into narrative, making literature a mirror of their society.”
Contemporary Yemeni fiction, she noted, has become a meticulous record of the country’s ordeals, with war casting its shadow over nearly every recent work.
Novelist Saqr Al-Sunaidi shares that view. “Even writers outside the battle zones cannot ignore what is happening at home,” he said. “Those inside face daily hardships that affect their ability to write and publish.” For Al-Sunaidi, these novels have become chronicles of displacement and loss, a role embodied in Al-Raqimi’s fractured style, where memory, trauma, and endurance converge.
What distinguishes Al-Raqimi is his scrupulous realism. He centers the lives of ordinary Yemenis who are displaced, grieving, yet enduring, and renders their struggles with compassion and restraint. In his work, the boundary between art and testimony dissolves. Lived experience becomes literary form, at once recording and redeeming.
In “The Blindness of Memory,” Al-Raqimi addresses his readers directly: “Before these pages marked by darkness carry you away, remember that the one writing his story here is a human like you, who once lived an ordinary life like you. I do not know in what time you are reading me or from what land you watch this weary journey, but I know we are much alike, even if the war thinks otherwise.”
It is this quiet, humane, and intensely personal appeal that gives Al-Raqimi’s work its power. By insisting on the constancy of human experience across borders and time, he transforms Yemen’s tragedy into something larger: a testament to resilience, memory, and the unbroken thread of our shared humanity.
