Yousri Elfattah

The Wanderer Yousri Elfattah

The Wanderer is a tale in lyrical prose of someone with firm roots in the Middle East as he makes his voyage back and forth from his boyhood home in Egypt into various areas of Western life. The wanderer, in achieving life, he was called upon to continually open up new territories, to expand, avoiding concern about achievement per se. This expansion was a lateral act, and lateral acts are craziness to most people who are taught to live only through vertical acts. Like arrows heading to illusions, vertical living is often identified when it is too late. Lateral acts can be developed when one first unlearns the cultural conditioning of a system and ceases to take actions and environmental messages for granted. This unlearning of the culture can be initiated by the shock of experiencing another culture, by being exposed to another culture. Cultural shocks bombard whatever one has long retained and taken for granted as truth. After several such shocks, one finds out that a new system of reference is needed for orientation. The Wanderer discovers that the new system of reference demands of him to abandon the need for continuous rationality, and to be aware of quantum leaps of changes in energy, space and time. To gain more dimensions to life is to relinquish our adherence to a vertical system in which relating is confined to what is up and what is down. To repossess our cherished humanity there is need to open to lateral approach to life and cultivate own wandering outlooks.