In this corner, Al Jazeera Net opens a space for female writers and writers to talk about the event or accident that changed their lives, and made them poets, novelists, storytellers, dramatists, translators or even publishers, contrary to the expectations of family or friends.
At the same time, this angle is considered a window for the reader and the follower, to get acquainted with an intimate - perhaps secret - part of different creative people in ways and styles of thinking, life and writing.
Our guest today is the writer Najwa Barakat, who was born in Beirut in 1966, and is a Lebanese novelist, journalist, translator and founder of "Professional How to Write a Novel".
After possessing a postgraduate diploma in theater and then in cinema (Sorbonne University in Paris), she worked as a freelance journalist in a number of Arab newspapers and magazines, and also prepared and presented cultural programs in international broadcasters, such as Radio France International and the British Broadcasting Corporation, in addition to completing a number of narrative scenarios. And the documentary, and prepared the first 15 episodes of the program "A Date in the Diaspora", which was shown by Al-Jazeera.
In 1985, at the age of 19, she emigrated to Paris due to the civil war that broke out in Lebanon.
In 1986, Barakat's first novel, "The Transformer," was published, and was followed by the novel "The Life and Pain of Hamad Ibn Salama" in 1989.
In 1996, Najwa Barakat won the Cultural Forum Prize in Paris for her third novel, "The Oudem Bus."
Then, in 1999, her fourth novel "Ya Salam" was published.
Her fifth novel, "The Secret Language" - which was released in 2004 - was included in the list of the French "Femina" prize for translated literature, and reached the short list for the Arab Literature Prize in France, and after 15 years her latest novel "Mr. Nun" was published by Dar Al Adab, which issued most of Its business.
Najwa Barakat wrote one novel in French (La locataire du Pot de fer), and she translated "Camus's Notebook" in 3 parts, issued by Dar Al Adab and Kalima Project.
The novel "The Oemim Bus" won the Best Literary Creativity Award from the Lebanese Cultural Forum in 1997 (Al-Jazeera)
Writer Najwa Barakat is currently traveling between Beirut and Paris, and she has a weekly column in the French newspaper La Croix, and here is her testimony about the questions that Al Jazeera Net asked her.
A corner between two chairs
From my early school years, I was literally enchanted by the books I found in the school library, borrowing them to devour in secret.
Now, I wonder when and where I would have found the enormous time to read so many books, when I did not have my own room to isolate me from the noise of family life?
Yes, there was a corner between two sofas, in the salon my mother used to prevent us from going;
Being reserved for visitors, I hide in it to dream.
Reading was part of those dreams, but rather it was its vehicle, its first substance, and its magic juice, which I used to take it with austerity, with pleasure, so that I did not exhaust it quickly, so that it remained as long as possible, before my mother’s voice flowed from under the door, inspecting and ordering to return quickly to the camp.
The attractiveness and mystery of literature
The “calmness” of reading, in contrast to the hustle and bustle of the house, the street and the school, was my space in which I lay, fly, wander, risk and not be afraid, unlike everything else, and I found in literature an attraction, mystery, comfort and capacity that none of the other available activities could provide me.
Yes, there are also those stories and stories that my mother used to tell to my little brother so that he could fall asleep, so I picked them up without realizing and I would mold them to my size: the prince becomes a princess, the knight is a knight, the girl is a boy.
In short, all tournaments were available to me.
All the qualities and descriptions become my preserve, and all love stories of mine.
Only imagined speech, contrary to the ordinary and the ordinary, radiating with the grace of its sentences, was striking my attention, the contradictory speech, the new, the widening and the winged, which kept me floating in its echo, between awakening and dreaming, reality and metaphor.
How could a child become so attached to books that she wished to live in them forever, lost and no one finds them after that?
The novel "The Secret Language" was published in French by the French "Sinbad" (Al Jazeera)
The smell of paper and the Civil War
There were also my father's stories about the elves and the spotted remains guarded by goblins in the distant caves, so they are only detached in front of the pure in hearts who - for the purity of their hearts - end up wasting the treasures and squandering them due to their complete ignorance of the nature of what they found.
My father carries his treasure hunt equipment in a bag of "gypsum" (burlap), and he is smaller and smaller until it slips into that pouch, so he carries me with him on his adventures in the snow and valleys and in the caves where the jackals live, and the nests where snakes lay their eggs.
My father does not find the treasure, and I grow up to realize that my own treasure is the scents of wet antique paper, black letters, and those lines that go into my head and leave the brain with black ribbons.
I loved living "there," and I didn't know how to call it or know about it.
Then came adolescence, more severe than childhood frustrations, as the civil war pushed me to more evasive and retreat.
The bombs are falling, the electricity goes off, and I am continuing by candlelight.
The pages turn in front of me as bridges and moons and into valleys.
I forget that I am, where I am, and when I return to reality, I wish I had been swallowed up by any book, and I would not leave it until after the darkness and blackness had passed.
Outdoors in Paris
But I went out to Paris.
The war that had waited for the end of years did not end, and I felt that I was on the way to more abandonment, atrophy and withdrawal.
My emigration to Paris was not easy, nor was my residence there;
Cold, isolation, anxiety and fear.
The war continued with the addition of snow frost, loneliness, and an enormous open air that I could never contain. Rather, it expanded until I felt that it was a mouth of my being that would devour me, and that I would completely fade into it, without a sound or a trace.
Thus, when I rented out a house after exhausting searches for four months, I found me sitting at a table with the wall facing me, facing the wall.
I took a pencil in my hand and ran over the white paper, automatically, spontaneously, without a plan or decision, and it stayed that way until I finished.
The novel "Mr. Nun" deals with the Beirut crisis and the suffering of its people (Al Jazeera)
I am not saying with this that I had not written anything before, but writing was at that time an exercise, a bit of bragging and playfulness, of the frivolity and rudeness of adolescence.
No, perhaps it was the confused innocence in itself at the time, short texts published in newspapers here and there, reconsideration, confusion, modesty and bragging at the same time, the magic of the name published in a newspaper at the end of a printed text.
Intestinal anthrax
In Paris, the writing came to me as a guest who forcibly entered, without an appointment, as if someone had a fever. I stayed "Ahdhi" for about a month, days and nights. A spring burst inside me and I couldn't stop its flow. I go out to the nearby market and buy strawberries in bulk, and add fresh cream and fine sugar to them. I don't eat other than this. From morning to evening. Turn off the light so that I can sleep, and I am surprised by an idea, so I will light it up and write it before it flies. Yes, the writing came to me like a fever, no event caused by no decision. It is a "sore" that you get infected with and no medicine can get rid of it. You have to take cover from it and from its fire and fire, which, if it fades, and if you learn to control it; It remains lit like anthrax in the guts.