The Mediterranean Sea has always been a source of inspiration to sailors, philosophers and lovers. It has also chambered many actual and mythical characters that affected our childhood and hewed our present lives.

Recently Kit Azzopardi, a Maltese award winning writer and the President of The Writers Club in Malta, ventured through the depths of the Mediterranean’s past, into the Nile, and wrote She Dreamt of Tomorrow which won the Resurrection of Ancient Egypt 2012 award in Egypt.

His short story is about a young woman reaching the age of marriage, and her mother is convincing her to start thinking about joining a man, same scenario that happens in any village, and in Egypt until today.

Her daughter shares her dreams and notions with her mother of which she does not belong to any man, she only belongs to the “night” , where the night warms her when she said “sleep in the dark when it’s hot” where men in general turn her cold “I am the daughter of the night, and I’m cold to men”.

The young woman struggles between chasing the divine night, and between being haunted by the routine obligations of life. Her mother is a symbol for the practical side of life, the one who knows that some things are necessary to survive and keep the village alive, for in the end we all need to find a way to live with one another.

Her mother may manage the practical essence of life, however she does them in a very divine way "She tells me not to talk to her when she's praying over cloth and tools" for she blesses the material first because she knows that sometimes the sword whispers to man and not the other way around.

Her father on the other hand, the mysterious fighter who had a blurry life with them, because of his battles and hunting trips, was never forgotten after he was killed by the "beasts that haunt the night".

The father is a metaphor for the past of Egypt, that no one actually know how did this enigmatic civilization started, what was the sperm that triggered all that, and who was the womb that sheltered its secrets. "I still hear of animals unknown fighting my father."

Those are the foes of the spirit of the "night" those are the ones who live in the present but still try to stab the past and deny its reality, they are the ones who try to bury this ancient civilization, of not only Egypt, but humanity. In the end the past always wins, "His spears made by Ateria, my mother witch, tear deep into their flesh; their gushing blood is a blessing." The past is alive, it purifies the present that why their "blood" is a "blessing".

The daughter is Egypt, also a metaphor for the beginning of humankind, although the man who married her, slept with her, was according to her own will along with her mother's, yet she felt she was raped and hurt. Egypt had to sacrifice a lot, do things she did not long for, just to keep surviving on this land, although the daughter's ideology might be immortal.

In the end Kit allows Nature to interfere, "That night, the Nile overflowed, and when I woke up, the village was not there anymore. I was the Nile's and the Nights'." The Nile's flood swallows everything, leaving only the daughter, the one who knows all the stories. The most powerful thing that remains from Egypt is its Literature, where literature here is a metaphor to all the events which happened in it.

Currently, The Forgotten Writers Foundation is running its second story competition entitled Women’s Domination as part of ‘Democracy through Literature’.

The reason behind the competition is to measure how different cultures throughout our world would view the power of women, whether in work, sports, economy, psychology, relationships, politics, spirituality and any other aspect in our lives. The competition’s aim is to also make each woman share her own power with others, or perhaps rediscover her powers through the story, and for men to contemplate over women through literature. The winning stories will be published in one book along with the research of how different genders and cultures view women’s domination.

Currently we are translating all the winning stories of the Resurrection of Ancient Egypt competition into Arabic to be published in Egypt, and the next project will be to translate them into other languages as Maltese.

 

Mahmoud Mansi, Founder of The Forgotten Writers