The Cycle of Poverty
A substantial percentage of the work of this author is concerned with portraying how living in a poverty is a cyclical thing almost impossible to work one’s way out of. The comprehensive aspects of this cycle are extensive and touch upon many daily components of life. The ending of “All on a Summer’s Night” becomes a metaphor applicable to any number of other individual stories:
“And the harsh inexorable day loomed ahead like a huge monster, bigger than the sun. Stark and merciless, awaiting, threatening, his eyes spitting fire as we approached, awed and quivering, knowing full well there was no escape.”
Darkness
Darkness is the unofficial metaphor of post-19th century literature. Once you start noticing it, it is impossible to escape. Authors absolute love to engage the idea of darkness metaphorically and, of course, Idris is no different. He even commences the story “House of Flesh” by engaging this metaphor twice…and then repeats the exact same imagery verbatim near the end of the story all over again:
The ring, beside the light. Silence prevails, ears cannot see. In silence, the finger sneaks. It puts on the ring.
In silence, the light is extinguished.
Darkness consumes all.
In darkness, eyes cannot see.
“Hard Up”
"Hard Up” is an example of how an entire story can serve as a metaphor as concise as a single example found within the text. The narrative tells the sad parable of a man named Abdou who begins from a point of upward mobility as a cook only to inexorably “work his way” downward. This trek takes him from cook to doorman to hawking produce on the streets until finally he is forced to literally sell his own blood in order to survive only to eventually have even that opportunity taken from him when he develops anemia. It is a tactical assault upon the exploitative nature of capitalism to metaphorically require the blood of its workers to keep functioning.
Character Description
Most of the stories of this author rely upon character more than the mechanics of plot. As a result, character description is particularly pervasive, ranging from the direct to the more oblique. An example of a more straightforward simile can be found in the story “The Caller in the Night.”
His skin was the color of dust and he was so fearfully huge that people called him the Sphinx.
Symbolic Character Descriptions
An example of the less straightforward type of character description is on display in “The Dregs of the City.” This extract reveals the stark divergence from that in the previous example as it moves away from the more concrete comparisons offered by the simile into the more symbolic realm of pure metaphor:
The old lean on the young, the children lead the blind, and the walls support the sick. All are strung together like the beads of a rosary. One spirit inhabiting many bodies. Time does not exist. The child suckling at its mother breast is the same one who crawls on the garbage heaps, and the same one girt with talismans against the evil eye.
