Amman — The novel Memories in Hell (Dar Fadaat, Amman, 2025), by Jordanian writer Yinal Jihad Abu Hashish, doesn't reveal its narrative world until after it has plunged the reader through successive layers of darkness: a symbolic dedication titled "Evil," then a cosmic scene set in 2078, then Tokyo in 2004, then a remote Japanese village in 1919, then movement between San Francisco and the halls of Imperial University.
اضافة اعلان
This non-linear sequence is nothing but a symbolic structure declaring that time here is a victim, and that hell is a recurring structure across both memory and heredity alike, delivered through a memoir novel written by a killer named "Zero" — a name evoking a void, not an identity — in a final moment of confession. Yet Abu Hashish transforms hell from a metaphysical concept into history, and from "the others" into the self, the father, heredity.
The novel rests on five interlocking themes that together form a moral void. The first is the theme of symbolic patricide: Zero's killing of his father Yoshinaka in Tokyo, and the killing of Doctor Joseph at the hands of his son Sotoh, revealing that the father, as much as he is a source of authority, is also a source of both genetic and religious contamination. The second is the theme of heredity and tainted blood, "blood doesn't disappear... even if you bury it, it rises from beneath the earth," a theme presented as an existential fate that negates redemption, within a Nietzschean-Kafkaesque horizon. The third is the theme of multiple hells: the village, the bloody elevator, Imperial University, the cave, and the inner hell of the self; overlapping hells that declare hell to be a structure that replicates itself at every level, from the individual to the cosmic. The fourth is the theme of killing as knowledge rather than pleasure: through the character of Kitsune, who slaughters the child Yakuto "in pursuit of knowledge, not pleasure," in an inverted evocation suggesting that knowledge here is ruin, not liberation. The fifth, and most significant, is the theme of the fragmented self, the inverted mirror, embodied in the twinning of Zero and Kitsune, two brothers from a single father, and in each son's relationship with his father as a version of himself, which the novel invokes.
Philosophically, the narrator takes a morally nihilistic stance, that life is a mistake corrected by death, yet a nihilism that refuses self-justification, as Zero says: "I don't ask for forgiveness... all I want is to remove this corpse from my head." A close reading reveals that the novel is built on a collective self, Zero is a type, not an individual, a son, a student, a soldier, yet this collective vision is delivered through the voice of an isolated self with no defined cultural identity, opening it up to being read as a novel of existential exile. Symbolically and mythologically, the text draws on Japanese references (the samurai/bushido), Abrahamic religious ones (Cain and Abel, Abraham/the sacrificed son), and Greek ones (an Oedipus who kills his father knowingly, unlike the ignorance of the original myth).
The internal rhythm rests on alternation between short, fragmented chapters that end in ellipses creating silent pauses, against reflective chapters with intertwined sentences closer to hymns. This fragmentation forms a symbolic structure matching the fragmentation of the narrating self. Internal harmony, meanwhile, is achieved through recurring phrases such as "blood doesn't disappear" and "the whole world is darkness," repeated across different characters' voices as a philosophical structure; lyrical embedding at moments of dramatic climax, such as Kitsune's chant during Yakuto's slaughter, creating a chilling contrast between a childlike melody and a demonic act; and structural parallelism between killings across generations (Zero's killing of his father mirrored by Sotoh's killing of the doctor), creating a tragic harmony reminiscent of Greek tragedy, where fate repeats across generations, evolving in violence rather than repeating literally.
The novel intersects a Japanese context (the isolated village, imperial Tokyo, the 1912-1945 era and the kamikaze phenomenon) with an implicit Arab context (displacement, depopulated villages, tribal authority). The construction of the narrating self rests on a father complex in a deviant Oedipal form: rather than the son killing the father and marrying the mother as in the classical myth, the son kills his father to free himself from his control, only to discover that killing doesn't liberate but repeats, across four stages: identification with the father, where the son sees himself as an extension of him and accepts his profession; then doubt, when he begins asking questions about his true identity; then discovery, when he learns that his father raised him to be a memorial concealing an old shame; then symbolic/real killing, which entraps rather than liberates. Father-son pairs multiply (Zero and Yoshinaka, Sotoh and Joseph, Yoshinaka and his more distant father) in an inherited structure passed from generation to generation, where killing reproduces the chain anew, and painful memories are inherited across generations through unconscious mechanisms.
The text thus revolves around the question: does the self transcend its inherited condition, or does it inevitably reproduce it? Multiple, conflicting answers are offered through the characters without resolution, making the novel a novel of the question itself.
The novel also reveals a system of marginalization affecting children, women, peasants, and minorities, who are mentioned only for their disappearance, their deaths recorded without their stories being told, in a thoroughly silent history. The narrator himself, despite belonging to the dominant family, remains marginalized, functioning as a tool rather than a self, and a hunted killer, which creates a hidden solidarity between him and the marginalized. The novel resists the discourse of genetic/familial purity, exposed as a mask for annihilation, the discourse of institutional authority as a mechanism for producing submissive selves, the discourse of patriarchal/tribal authority, which reveals its oppressive structure despite presenting itself as a foundation of order, and the discourse of the scientific function of killing as a mask for sadism. In contrast, the novel legitimizes the discourse of confession as a liberating act, and a collective vision of the human condition in crisis, one content with diagnosis without promising salvation.
Memories in Hell, by young novelist Yinal Abu Hashish, represents a serious attempt to present a universalist Arab novel addressing the human condition in its total dimensions rather than its local specificity, an ambition worthy of praise despite its risks. Artistically, the novel rests on a complex, multi-voiced, multi-temporal narrative structure, though it suffers from structural flaws affecting coherence. Linguistically, it reveals a striking poetic rhythm weakened by stylistic gaps. Intellectually, it presents a coherent morally nihilistic vision marred by internal contradictions. It can be situated within the current of the modern Arab philosophical novel, yet it stands out for abandoning a direct Arab context in favor of a Japanese/cosmic one, closer to experimentation.
It establishes a promising novelistic voice worth following, and the novel deserves a second and third reading, because it raises new questions, and leaves its final question open: what does a person produce, when they produce killing?
Writer and photographer
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Saleh Hamdouni
