"Imagination"... Oh, Land of Eternity!

Perhaps the first thing that drives attraction to myths are those simple but  big childhood memories. Growing up, I would hear our mothers and grandmothers talk about this person who writes, this person who has a book and can do things no one else can. This was their idea of hidden force. 

My imagination went directly to books and language as material things. I would sneak into my brother's library when he was away, searching for that supernatural power, imagining I'd find it, even though I never touched a thing.

I grew up, read, and researched over a long period of time, and then I was drawn back to myths as an "inexhaustible" resource, as Nicholas Farida describes them. You can't describe them other than as opening the door to understanding the human mind and its creative interactions with nature and phenomena, life and society.

Mircea Eliade defined myth as "a symbolic interpretation or story that narrates a strange or supernatural event, found in a subculture, characterized by its widespread transmission and dissemination, and its profound influence due to the wisdom, philosophy, excitement, and inspiration it contains." It operates within a special sphere of human experience, intersecting with nonsense and folk tales, but it enjoys a sacred influence: that wonderful world called “imagination”!

Five years ago, I had the experience of writing for Saudi TV, in a program of my own idea and writing, called "Nas Logia." Its first season was about myths and folk tales from the various regions and areas of the Kingdom. I cannot describe what I went through on this journey from region to region, and my attempts to get closer to the legacy and its hidden extensions, over hundreds of years, to humans today.

This legacy encompasses  the world of jinn to the world of chants, rocks, clothing, food, love, animals, time, terrain, houses, death, fear, hope, sorrows, disappointments, victory, life in its entirety, and everything connected to it. It encompasses the life of the human being who created in his imagination another world, and this imaginary world has helped him to continue and persevere, to survive, to progress, and to dream. Everything was composed of morals and values, and the qualities and characteristics of Arabs in the region in general; with their honesty, generosity, and courage, and certainly with their universal human character.

You will find traces of Eve, her qualities, her influence, and her destiny in women’s speech; the gown that has become a weaving festival; the Arabian leopard that is on the verge of extinction, but which was once part of the family, fairies and poetry, the desert, valleys, and rocks, the sea, coasts, and mountaintops!

In the Saudi context, mythological imagination was the talk of the early generations. For example, the Saudi writer Abdel Karim Al Juhayman collected 136 Saudi legends and folk tales in his five-volume book "Folk Legends from the Heart of the Arabian Peninsula," and many more in other books, tales, and narratives.

What's striking is that this imagination not only raised the bar for language and dreams, but also humanized geography in its most minute features. These myths connected “man” - his memory, and the furthest reaches of his mind - to “place”: from pebbles to coral, from palm trees to the prairie, from land to everything around him. All that is called homeland, the land of eternity.

Al-Sa'la, Raha Al-Hilali, Hamarat Al-Qaylah, Umm Al-Sa'af Wal-Leef, Aja and Salma the Arabian tiger, the wells of the hair fairy, the robe of the orphan, the dagger of Barqan, Dhi Ain, the caves of time travel... etc., and hundreds of myths in all regions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, still present in its deep imagination in the oral and written, in the deep and the simple, in the behavior of people, their language, their beliefs and their natures. These are regions in their raw state for anthropological research that still needs to catch up!

Many of the clever, innate uses of imagination reflect a profound understanding of human nature and our need to create worlds beyond our own. Thus, popular imagination has transformed natural phenomena and environmental hazards into vivid, compelling characters, imbued with poetry, abilities, and power, and belonging to storytelling, to narrating the world from its own perspective.

I am still the one who goes not only to books, but to life and people, searching for that supernatural power, “imagination” and myth, and I am forever in awe  of its effect and its action.