فاطمه کره ئی

The Role of Language in Depicting the Characters of Children with Special Needs in the Works of Ahmed El-Zahham

Abstract

The society is made up of human offspring; from the healthy and the unhealthy; both adults and children. The subject of our research is the unhealthy children, who are referred to as children with special needs, the disabled, or the impaired. Human beings have the right to life, and people with disabilities also have the right to life. We are all responsible for others, especially children, due to their physical and spiritual weakness, especially when they are disabled. One way to help disabled children is to create literary works for them. Due to the lack of discussions and studies on this topic in Iran compared to Arab countries, the author of these lines has tried to study, examine, and analyze the works and texts created for these children using descriptive and analytical methods. It also addresses how language and style are used for disabled children in these works. The Egyptian writer Ahmed El-Zahham is someone who has made significant efforts in authoring and creating works for children, especially disabled children. To conduct this study, the researcher referred to the works related to El-Zahham and to sources that include linguistic issues, such as books on rhetoric, morphology, syntax, and so on. The researcher selected a play and a story by Ahmed El-Zahham, known as "Kamân Zaghloul" and "El-Hâdî Lâyaghda". Both revolve around children who have the problem of complete loss of vision and are blind. The important point is that the blind, whether adults or children, despite having physical defects and losing an important member such as the eye and the inability to see objects and the world, have other abilities, which enhance their sense of touch, hearing, and smell. It is important that the blind children in the examined works, despite their lack of vision, have turned this lack into another ability to compensate for the visual deficiency and strengthen their other senses. At the end of the play and the story, both blind children are successful in their artistic, scientific, and school aspirations. In addition, after reviewing the dramatic and narrative literature of blind children, the researcher found that there is no difference in terms of language or the external form of sentences between this type of literature and the dramatic literature for healthy children. The only difference is that works dedicated to the blind focus on emotional and sentimental issues. Since these disabled children have abilities beyond those of the healthy ones and have strong non-visual senses, concepts are conveyed to others using auditory descriptions, the sense of smell, and other senses, and they use fewer adjectives because they do not see to describe.

Moreover, the researcher found that the most important narrative style present in these two works is the emphatic style, which aims to establish the subject and remove doubt. The use of emphatic sentences and nominal sentences with repetition in the text shows the importance of using these linguistic tools to convey the concept of stability and continuity. The use of nominal and verbal sentences, the use of emphatic tools and the repetition of words with the repetition of expressions and concepts in multiple sentences shows that the authors of these works have succeeded in their work simply by using linguistic tools that are understandable and accessible to children. Because the transfer of various concepts such as self-confidence, strengthening the sense of usefulness, creating intellectual and psychological creativity in children, and trust in adults such as family, parents, and friends has been successfully done through the use of appropriate linguistic tools.

Keyword: Children's literature, dramatic and narrative literature for children, language of literature for disabled children, Ahmed El-Zahham