Derna between the sea and the two dams.. Stories of the wet memory of a city thrown into the water | Culture

Tripoli- As its first anniversary approaches, the devastating Hurricane Daniel disaster remains an open issue whose thorny files have not been closed, especially on the official level, from the final death toll to compensating for the damage and rebuilding the stricken city to investigating the causes that multiplied the damage and actually holding those responsible accountable.

But a witness to the event and one of the victims did not dwell on the responsibility of the authorities for long, and took upon himself since the first days the responsibility of documenting the disaster, and he persisted in trying to publish the facts, figures and information that many feared would be swept away by the roaring floods, along with what and whom it swept away relentlessly in the darkest nights of the floodwaters – the city of Derna (a thousand kilometers east of Tripoli).

What the responsible authorities did not do for nearly a whole year, one of the sons of Derna and its most prominent intellectuals tried to collect between the covers of a book published a few days ago – The Derna Flood between the Sea and the Two Dams – which is 572 pages long and divided into 22 chapters, and includes 11,300 names of victims of the flood caused by an unprecedented hurricane that struck the eastern coasts of Libya, and its rains flooded the coastal city of Derna on the night of September 11, 2023, after torrential floods destroyed the dams of the city’s valleys located between the mountain and the sea.

The book – which took 10 months to prepare, starting on the morning of the devastating flood – narrates 266 stories that its author deliberately included without the slightest modification, abbreviation, or even linguistic or editorial correction, because, as he confirms, “I dealt with the stories that reached me from witnesses as original documents written hundreds of years ago on deer parchment, and they are, first and last, a trust that I preferred to deliver to the reader as they are.”

A book that combines stories, history, statistics and documentation. Most of its stories are bloody and painful, squeezing the heart of the narrator and the collector before the heart of the reader. The writer also cites what an official in the UNICEF organization said, “64% of the children in the city of Derna are psychologically distressed” and need special care.

In addition to the stories and live testimonies, the author included previous warnings by local and national experts about the deterioration of the dams of the city of Derna and the destruction they could cause in the event of heavy rains, which is what happened on the night of September 11, 2023, when the old dams – which had not undergone any maintenance for decades – held back 6 times their capacity, so that international experts estimated the water flowing that night at more than 8,000 cubic meters of water per second.

The new book, the first of its kind since the disaster so far, was introduced by the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tripoli, Abdullah Malitan, who described its author as “a researcher with the spirit of a lover of his country and a sincere bias towards the truth,” saying that he wrote it “devoid of emotion, and objectively criticizing all parties, formulating his phrases in simple and clear language. He monitored the flood incident and the history of the tragedy of the greatest disaster to befall the country.”

The author of the book, in turn, confirms that his achievement is a purely national and humanitarian work that documents the largest natural disaster witnessed by Libya, stressing that he does not aim to condemn this official or exonerate that one, neither explicitly nor implicitly, but rather that the writing began as an attempt on his part to absorb the momentous event and deal with it after days of shock and astonishment to the point of collapse.

Al Jazeera Net reviewed the book as soon as it was published, and met its author, the writer and former politician Abdel Fattah Bou Houra Al-Shalawi, and conducted this interview:

• “Derna Flood between the Sea and the Two Dams”… First, why this book?

The idea of ​​the book came to avoid the shortcomings of the history of previous floods in the valley – the valley of the mountainous city of Derna – the most famous of which are the floods of 1959 and 2011. Despite the enormity of the first, which left human and material damage, we do not have accurate information and details about it, which I feared would be repeated after the recent disaster of Hurricane Daniel.

• The event was so momentous that it confused even the local and international authorities and organizations in its first days. How did you come up with the idea and the ability to document it when the effects of the disaster had not yet subsided?

Yes, the effects of the storm were greater than us, even than stable countries with their capabilities, and it came in the shadow of a political division that enveloped the country, and this is what prompted me to collect the news and the picture and follow the event first hand, especially since I am a son of the city even though I was outside it, and this was not easy as some think, but it was pressuring our feelings and emotions. It is true that I did not collect the subject, but I obtained what was worth publishing.

• Critics, researchers and readers also record several objections to everything that is historical or documentary, so what about a work like this, in which many of its readers will be eyewitnesses to the event? How did you deal with this challenge?

The fact is that writing about any contemporary event has many caveats and obstacles, let alone a catastrophe whose effects are still with us today. But I doubled my efforts as much as I could, and I tried to document carefully and carefully. I even published some testimonies as they came, without any manipulation on my part, and I dealt with them as if they were historical documents that should not be touched.

• The book was celebrated by readers and the first edition is close to selling out according to the publisher and distributors in most Libyan cities. What do you think is the secret behind this interest in reading the book?

This is due to people's sympathy with the people of the afflicted Derna, and the enormity of the event, which the World Bank described in its report as “the worst rainstorm in terms of killing in Africa since 1900.”

• I have read several comments on the book describing it as a “groundbreaking” for anyone who wants to document or write about the Daniel disaster. Will there be new revised or expanded editions or even additional parts of this book in the near future?

Certainly, the event will be discussed by others from several angles, and will be an incentive for many writers and interested parties, as it is a national entitlement and a historical necessity like other countries, and a subject of academic research and study.