Deserto e poetica del limite in le fini (1977) di ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Munīf

In his novel The Ends (al-Nihāyāt, 1977), ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Munīf describes the life of a village at the limits of the desert during a season of drought that threatens its existence. To survive, the inhabitants rely on ‘Assāf, a skilled hunter who embodies a value system linked to Bedouin society in which human beings are part of the ecosystem, in contrast to a capitalist system of domination and exploitation. In the novel, the desert becomes a symbolic space, constructed and deconstructed through the negotiation of numerous boundaries: between the individual and the collective, human and nonhuman, tradition and modernity, powerlessness and power, natural and supernatural. My analysis aims to propose an ecocritical reading of this text to highlight how the desert becomes a narrative strategy to represent the boundaries that underlie identity-building processes in Arab societies and their shifting nature. The desert is also used to depict the relationship between human and nonhuman during great historical changes, since the discovery of oil.