This version of Maryam managed to escape censorship at the Doha International Book Fair. Honestly, I’m thinking about the story of censorship and prohibition since last night, and I’m contemplating my reaction. Perhaps one can become accustomed to it. I remember when it was first banned in Saudi Arabia, how affected and upset I was, but then the same thing happened in Egypt, and now in Doha. Sometimes the reactions are linked to others, meaning the accompanying concern for the publishing house, and the issue of suppressing freedoms and reaching beyond mere deportation to imprisonment and murder. The reality we live in today is truly embodied in the novels of Abdul Rahman Munif and the depths of oppression and suppression of opinion in our countries. Today, we have all become victims of systematic repression in the Middle East, wielded by various instruments of tyranny that agree on eliminating the possibility of any dissenting opinion in this exhausted part of the world.
I still wonder what incites these authorities everywhere, between politics and religion, to the point where differences and disputes have accumulated and crushed us as societies caught between these two poles.
And on the trail of Maryam, the journey continues.