After introducing me to crime mystery channels, YouTube was greatly concerned about my engrossment as I discovered a plethora of videos in the three languages I speak.
The Arab ones were my favourite as they were turned into intriguing series or programmes despite the presenter always ending the video with a sermon about the killer’s lack of faith and morals, which I found irrelevant. After a year of listening to these channels while preparing food for my cats and dogs, I became a semi-expert in the subject, guessing how cases would be solved and finding patterns of crimes committed in different parts of the world: mainly revenge in the Arab world and femicide in Latin America.
What fascinated me most is how detectives manage to crack cases, especially in countries with more than hundred million inhabitants such as Egypt (in one case, the police traced a killer from a shoe found in the crime scene). Sometimes I’d exclaim loudly to Old Mansoor who’d be sitting next to me nodding off: “Fancy that Mannu!” However, YouTube had to put a stop to this dependency and started suggesting other channels to watch including literature and philosophy to refine my gory taste.
One of the things it kept throwing at me was Sartre’s short story: The Wall in all three languages so that I don’t dare miss it. I accepted the offer gracefully and found the English audio recording of the female voice-over calm and sleep-inducing.
Moreover, while narrating she had a videogame illustration with a demon-like creature that she was painting a wall over (creative but extremely distracting). The Arabic version was turned into a radio play with Egyptian actors exaggerating their reactions, especially the doctor who was overly judgemental instead of sympathetic as Sartre intended him to be. Therefore, I decided to print out the story that turned out to be a better choice than the audios.
The Wall comes from a collection of short stories by the same name published in 1939. The title is derived from the wall that prisoners stand against when fusilladed. It’s set in the Spanish Civil War and tells the story of three political prisoners captured by Franco’s soldiers of whom two are Spanish, Pablo (the narrator) and Juan; and one Irish, Tom. After a brief interrogation, they’re locked up in a hospital cellar that’s turned into a prison. However, they’re sentenced to fusillation the next day and later joined by a guard and a Belgian doctor to ease their emotional suffering during their last night.
The brilliance of the story comes from displaying three different reactions from the prisoners who know that they’re about to die (varying from depression to panic). Pablo shares his inner thoughts about his life and the absurdity of everything he thought meaningful when it comes to the ultimate truth in life: death. He also observes the reaction of the living (the doctor) to the dying (the prisoners) and vice versa.
In the morning, Pablo is given the chance to continue living in exchange of information about the whereabouts of a comrade he knows. So, what would he do? Sartre’s existentialism is clearly reflected from the title’s choice (the wall is a separation between life, death, and humans) to the illusion of life: how we try to make it meaningful and worth living when in fact it’s insignificant.
The story was made into a French movie by the same name in 1967. It was adapted again by the Americans in 2016 and called “The Childhood of a Leader” that won Venice Film Festival’s Best Debut Movie and Director. The Wall is thought-provoking and unforgettable.
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