Cairo Magazine - Screen-scroller

It’s not a book. Is it a novel? A website? Entertainment? Literature? None of the above? All of the above? Perhaps the best indication that Mohammed Sanajleh has done something truly innovative with Chat is that it so stubbornly resists categorization.

Sanajleh, the head of the Arab Union for Internet Writers, says he’s written a novel. He’s even got a name for the genre: “digital realism.” Chat was released 23 October, on the Arab Union’s website.

Chat tells the story of Mohammed, a young Jordanian engineer who works for a multinational company in an isolated seaside town in Oman. Driven by boredom and chance, the protagonist turns to cyberspace, which he finds more fulfilling than his everyday existence.

Both the narrator and the author are Jordanian. Both are named Mohammed. At some points, the protagonist drifts into long passages of metaphysical meditation that seem improbable coming from a math-nerd engineer.

Sanajleh used a mixture of Flash and HTML to create backgrounds and add special effects. The first chapter, Al Adam Al Ramly (The Sandy Vacuum), begins with a short clip of wind blowing through an empty desert.

Every time the protagonist receives an SMS, an icon of a mobile phone appears in the text. Clicking on the icon allows the reader to hear the message tone and read the message text gliding across the image of a mobile phone screen. Whenever Mohammed turns to chat services on the Web, Yahoo! or Maktoob icons appear on screen. This really is literature for today’s Arabic youth.

Background music plays during certain passages. If that’s not enough to suggest the mood of the protagonist, cartoon thought balloons appear as the reader glides the mouse over certain words, to explain what the narrator was thinking while he wrote them: literary meta-text and computer hypertext. When characters make reference to American Beauty and The Matrix, links to clips from the films appear.

On the union’s website, Sanajleh writes that “In the digital realism novel, words will be just one part of a larger whole. For, in addition to words, we should write with pictures, sounds and animation.”

But does all this focus on technological tricks merely disguise bad writing? Lengthy passages in Chat, in which the narrator describes his feelings for a Lebanese girl, contain such a long and complex array of symbols and images that they are almost incomprehensible.

Though Chat’s multimedia effects give the reading experience a new flavor, the novelty quickly wears off. In the end, these effects accomplish no more than what readers’ imaginations have long done: visualize elements in the story. Thus, one wonders if the pyrotechnics are merely a means of compensating for writing that fails to evoke a scene or capture the imagination. Chat may be the first novel of its kind in Arabic literature. A new path has been opened. Let’s hope many more gifted writers travel down it. Otherwise, it risks being no more than another forgettable experiment.