Speakers
Dr Mervat Abdelnaser
Founder and Director of New Hermopolis, Touna Elgabal, AlMinia
Biography
Dr. Mervat Abdel Nasser, MD, MPhil, FRCPsych, is a consultant and visiting Professor of Psychiatry, King's University College, London. She holds a Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She has founded the New Hermopolis, Heritage and Development Center, Touna Algabal, Malawi, AlMinia www.newhermopolis.org. She wrote a number of important writings on the role of culture in the emergence of mental illness in the English language, and many other articles on literature, criticism, philosophy, and Egyptology in the Arabic language. She has also published a number of Arabic books on the same topics, among which: "Why Has Horus Lost His Eye: A New Reading of the Ancient Egyptian Thought", (2004), and an illustrated series of forty parts on the history of ancient Egypt for Children (1997-2002).
mervatnasser@aol.com
mervatnasser@hotmail.com
mervatnasser@newhermopolis.org
Presentation Abstract
The role of “myth” in children writing
There is an urgent need to create a new literature for little readers, designed to transfer the idea or information in a funny and interesting way. The "historical myth" might be the best framework to deal with this difficult literature, which must also be easy. Through its simplicity, common human values could be conveyed to the child regardless to the nature of time and place, and where the writer would not need to resort to the traditional adult technique in transferring those values through direct preaching and guidance.
Through the legendary narration, the child’s birth is regenerated; however, the child inside us—we as adults—also comes out from our inner-souls, making us creative children again, who see things through the eyes of a child, and understand things from the perspective of his fully surprised mind, and feel his instinctive thirst for knowledge. Myths allow us to celebrate all what is unusual, so we can see facts through changing eyes that bear impermanence and all what is amenable to doubt. As a myth allows stirring the thoughts, and titillating the imagination, it also allows offering information in a non-rigid and an interesting way. The little reader can feel it and belong to it, and recognize the beginnings of knowledge and its structural and formative role, with the necessity of non-separation between different branches of science. As if knowledge is scattered mosaic pieces, we only feel the beauty of the image after its completion.
The present proposal tackles the Egyptian Myth, in particular, "Isis and Osiris," which revolves around "Horus", the grandson of the earth "Jeb", and the sky "Nott", and whose Uncle "set" had killed his father "Osiris". By that murder, columns of the cosmic stability collapsed, the truth was assassinated, and the Mother, "Isis" knew that tears are the "river of life". Son Horus tries to understand the idea of "losing the father," and the implications of the conspiracy that caused this loss. He, then, reaches one fact; the good and evil are one, i.e. two faces of the same coin. Two brothers together possess all love and all hatred; the duality of human nature and the bilateral of human feelings are embodied within both of them. From death, the earth obtains its "privacy" and becomes a homeland.
Disney took advantage of this myth brilliantly in his masterpiece "Lion King", in which he dealt with the same symbols in the Egyptian mythology, where the Egyptians have taken from the animal’s world to symbolize what words cannot express. The Egyptian myth has an enormous capacity to translate vast complex and sophisticated concepts through images, which may deem to the superficial eye simple and even primitive; however, this illustrated simplicity is the real secret behind the survival of the Egyptian civilization that celebrated all images of life.