Mahmoud Hosny is an Egyptian writer and translator who is pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Southern California in his first year. He translated Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea (2016) and John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2016) into Arabic, and in 2018, he published his first book, Maps of Yunus, with the help of an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture grant.
Big fish in a small pond. As I kept reading this story, the phrase kept coming to my head. It revolves around a boy who is stuck in a place that he cannot seem to leave no matter how hard he tried. He had a vision of a young boy who dreamt of what is on the other side of the gulf, where does the ship disappear after the reef. With the excitement he shows as he is talking about the weekend he will be spending to visits the sea.
The reason they called the gulf the illusion of the sea id because of how little the water is at the gulf. This symbolizes how little thing can excite a child when they are not curious but as they grow up, they start questioning everything around them. “Those white salty lines uncovered our lies when the mothers asked us: Why are you late? Those white salty lines uncovered our lies after we’d convinced our mothers that we would never “visit” the sea.” Their curiosity of knowing what is beyond the salty white lines and why they cannot go over there makes them even long more for it. They start watching the place more longingly not with the same excitement but now a desire to visit the beyond.
Comparing the sun setting as the sun stabbing the horizon and the being awaken from their childhood innocence by the scent from the petrol factories, this shows how they are forced to face their harsh reality early on and in those moment the excitement of going to the gulf died down and now the thought of excitement settled.The main theme of this short story is very courageous and ambition of a young kid who aspires to be different. With the way he questions why everyone is his village always go the same direction and the fear of being the same makes him want to escape more often. It is courageous because his thinking was way of the box that he was raised in. He did not have the same mentality as his peers and had an independent perspective. “The voice comes back: When you go back home, you will find you father dead. Don’t leave the place just yet!” The voice here might refer to his inner voice that is telling him once he is free of the shackles of the people around him, he might escape. The father represents the society in general.
Reference.Hosny, M. (2021, February 21). New fiction in Translation: ‘The illusion of Sea’. Retrieved April 22, 2021, from https://arablit.org/2021/02/22/new-fiction-in-translation-the-illusion-of-sea/ Accessed April 22, 2021