The Poor Man — Karim Bouarqi

About this book

Between two banks separated by a wide asphalt ribbon stretch the tales of a city seething with glaring contradictions; on one side huddle the thatched huts and forgotten dirt roads, while on the other, palaces of wealth and extravagant bliss saunter. And in the heart of this immense gulf stands "Awad Allah", a young man carrying in his chest the blazing energy of youth and a mind avid for knowledge and existential questions, yet finding himself besieged by the walls of poverty and the darkness of bolted doors in a merciless labor market. The novel takes us on a profoundly psychological and human journey in which waking dreams intertwine with the torments of daily reality; the hero enters a hidden struggle between his authentic fitra yearning for love, dignity, and faith, and intellectual and material currents calling him to tear away from his soul and treat life as a dry consumerist equation. The pace of events escalates through charged confrontations and paradoxes that reveal the duplicity of faces when human slogans are tested on the ground, while the voice of his mother and her warm words remain the faint, sole light in the long night of wandering. The Poor Man is not merely the narration of social suffering; it is a literary elegy and an intense philosophical meditation on the essence of existence, the meaning of true happiness, and the search for a glimmer of hope and relief when every path appears closed in the face of a man who refuses to sell his dignity.