The Cycle of Poverty
Although it seems unlikely if not impossible that even one such person exists, the facts are clear: millions still fervently believe that poverty is a condition of life that can only exists because of something lacking in each individual who suffers it. The short stories of Idris, including “The Queue” among many others, still do not work together to serve up the full portrait of poverty as merely one single symptom caused by the much larger problems associated with systemic economic inequality.
Throughout the short fiction of Idris, characters are revealed to be hard working, compassionate toward the needs of others even as they remain needy themselves, and full gripped by a belief that the system can work for them. They are also revealed to be constantly secured in their position by concerted efforts aimed at keeping them ignorant and uneducated. Poverty is a multi-symptomatic expression of a disease that shares much with alcoholism: both are easily enough solved if one has the will and desire to do so. Unfortunately, one of these too often becomes a condition of suffering the other.
An Absence of Empathy
If his stories weren’t served with dollops of absurdist humor, irony and satirical social commentary, the prevalent motif of characters lacking empathy would make it a tough grind, indeed. Having just pointed out the existence of compassion within the exploration of the cycle of poverty, it should be obvious where this lack of sympathy in his stories is located. In “The Queue” it is found in the black heart of a landowner bent on exploitation of his tenants.
“Hard Up” is a cruelly corrosive inversion of the dream of upwardly mobility in which Abdou begins with respectability and economic stability in his job as a cook and gradually makes his way down that ladder until he is forced to blood only to lose access to that income when he develops anemia. Abdou’s story is perhaps the author’s ultimate metaphor for how those pulling the strings of transactional economics can put on price on literally everything without feeling a moment of shame or regret.
Loneliness and Alienation
The bulk of the author’s work can really be broken down into two distinct types: those taking place in the country and those taking place in the city. Many differences exist between those two categories, but the dominant divergence is that the city-set stories present a world lacking that sense of compassion and unity which binds those trapped in the poverty conditions of country living. The city is a nightmarish world existing beneath a heavily oppressive symbolic fog of anxiety, fear, paranoia, loneliness and an ever-changing sense of a stalking danger ready to attack without warning.
