Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024
Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.
Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.
The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?
From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.
There are other characters besides Sumaya and Faisal, the bereaved parents desperately trying to find him, making up a cast of antiheroes trapped in the maps of wandering. Among the female characters is Ruwaina—an African woman who transports Mishari from Mecca to the south. The events reveal her relationship with Jerjes, who leads a gang that kidnaps and sells lost children. Before being murdered by Jerjes, Ruwaina contacts Faisal using the phone number that had been kept by Mishari on a scrap of paper, and asks for a ransom in return for his son. This call will prove, across the wide landscape of this novel, to be explosive.
During their search, Mishari’s family find themselves at Sharm El-Sheikh International Airport, contacting a team of investigators, and proceeding to Al-‘Arish, where they spend a few days moving between the Swiss Inn Resort, the Al-‘Arish’s Security Directorate, and the hospital, with its decomposed and putrefied bodies in the morgue. Through these tours with the Egyptian Criminal Investigation Unit, al-Eissa sheds light on Camp David and the normalization of Israel-Egyptian relations via the character of Huwaishel, an ex-smuggler whom the Egyptians accepted in return for secrets surrounding the Palestinian occupation, as well as information regarding senior officials in the Egyptian Interior Ministry who facilitated, as partners with the Israelis, the smuggling of human organs. Al-Essa writes:
One of the tribal elders who used to work as a smuggler told Huwaishel that disposing of the dead bodies they receive from Israel is a lucrative business. In other words, crimes aren’t being committed at Sinai’s border. That place is just a cemetery, a human dumpster for crime networks. Sinai’s border is perfect for criminals because none of the countries on either side wants to tackle criminals head-on. Do you understand?
Other characters include Nitham Shuja a-Din—a Pakistani who manages the farm of a late Saudi businessman, Ibrahim Hijab. Nitham lives alone and coincidentally finds Mishari, who had escaped during a brawl between Jerjes, Uthman, and Ruwaina on the beach. Though he gives Mishari shelter, his intentions turn out to be much more nefarious as he repeatedly rapes the child, turning their relationship into one of hostility. Al-Essa skillfully presents Nitham with a plenitude of details, subtly letting the character grow until readers come to comprehensively understand his inner inclinations. Despite the lack of communication between the child and the rapist, al-Essa manages to craft a mutual language between the two characters—a truly exceptional task.
Lost in Mecca is Nada Faris’s debut translation, and her work is to be admired. The English captures the rhythms of al-Essa’s fast-paced, flash-like chapters and briskly interwoven dialogues that lend to the novel’s borderless mood—one that can easily lead a reader astray. Faris also brilliantly preserves the sonic landscape of the original, and highlights its prominent style by effectively slipping rhyme and half-rhyme into the English without being too flashy. Al-Essa deploys a high poetic style open to experimentation, but Lost in Mecca can be said to be of the realist school, to some degree. The point of view oscillates between the boy’s family and the kidnappers, and the author’s painful descriptions make readers feel as though they are trapped, just like the innocent child trying to escape from the clutches of the aggressive and dominating characters. In addition, the novel creates a sensation of marvel and splendor, from the opening line—“Before that moment, everything had been fine”—to the shocking, unexpected finale, as though characters have been, all along, rushing towards an impending doom.
Within Lost in Mecca’s medley of geographies, languages, and desires, readers hear the voices not only of those who have been marginalized in Mecca, but in surrounding countries as well—individuals of unknown parentage living in camps, poverty-stricken individuals traversing the Sahara in search of a better life, children who have been trafficked or molested. With both compassion and a stoic eye on the world, the novel explores what motivates marginalized individuals to resort to criminal activities, and readers will be compelled to question what circumstances would cause them to disregard their own moral values. Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.
Ibrahim Fawzy is an emerging literary translator who works between Arabic and English. He is dedicated to bringing stories from Africa and the SWANA region to a wider audience. His translations, reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in various outlets, including ArabLit Quarterly, Alchemy, The Markaz Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Consequence, and elsewhere. His first full-length book, Belonging to Prison, is due to be published by Cambridge Scholars in the summer of 2024. Ibrahim is also an editorial assistant at Rowayat, a literary journal based in Canada. He is an editor-at-large at Asymptote and podcasts at New Books Network (NBN). In 2023, he completed a six-month mentorship with the British National Centre for Writing (NCW) as part of their Emerging Literary Translators program. He is a two-time graduate of the British Center for Literary Translation (BCLT) summer school. Ibrahim’s work has been recognized by various literary organizations. He won the 2023 English PEN Presents award and was longlisted for the 2023 Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations Anthology.
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