The ancient Arab culture was not only the culture of a word, but the image remained one of the most important and prominent artistic and aesthetic components that characterize this Arab civilization, which the thinker Abdul Kabir Al-Khatibi has long considered "the civilization of the sign."

Despite the terrible siege imposed by some cultural institutions on the arts of painting and poetry alone, some Arab poetic experiences that have a project remained clinging to their dreams and are working hard to open new lands within the poetic writing itself, although some of these poets tried to expand the horizon of writing from During writing fiction and continuing to write poetry.

While others went to the novel, believing that the time of poetry has passed, and it is most likely that these poets migrated to writing fiction not because of what it granted in terms of freedom to work at the level of language, narration, narration and building characters and their ability as an artistic template to contain major political issues and try to imagine them only, but because of the awards Which is now enjoyed by this narrative art alone.

In this investigation, Al-Jazeera Net presses the wound more in order to understand this intertwining relationship between poetry and the novel within the Arab world, and searches for the hidden reasons that led a group of poets from Syria, Iraq and Morocco to write the novel while taking constant care of their poetic texts.

"Al-Diwan Al-Shary" has declined in sales

Yassin Adnan, Moroccan poet and novelist

Moroccan poet and novelist Yassin Adnan says, "A number of Arab poets have recently been involved in what can be called the season of migration to the novel without this implying that it is a matter of rogues who sneaked in and sold outside their poetic circles. The discontent expressed by some of these poets 'exodus' to the novel is as well. If they are about to be condemned as "illegal immigration", then it is an exaggeration. That is not about the illegal infiltration of rogue poets towards the bank of the novel, but rather with deeper transformations at the level of the sociology of (psychological) reading, publishing and literary taste. "

He believes that Jaber Asfour's book "The Time of the Novel" was not the first advertisement about it, despite the criticism it faced upon its publication.

That is, the first person to have this idea flashed in his mind was Naguib Mahfouz in his reply to al-Aqqad published in 1945, where he explained that poetry prevailed in the eras of innate and myths, and perhaps the new era "The era of science, industry and facts inevitably needs a new art."

The same art thanks to which Mahfouz will be awarded the Nobel Prize 4 decades after his polemical article on the pages of Cairo's "Al-Risalah".

Yassin Adnan added to Al-Jazeera Net that today, "even the fiercest poets are no longer able to confront this saying. The poetry office has retreated at the level of sales, and poetry events have lost their luster. As for the prizes, we see how the most important of them, of the caliber of Arabic poker, Katara and the Naguib Mahfouz award, went to the novel without The rest of the literary races. Even the prizes open to the various literary arts deal with poetry collections like racing bunnies, as they often devolve at the end to the novel. Moreover, the Nobel Prize for Literature itself, if we deal with it with statistical logic, we will discover that it is a prize for novelists in the first place. "

But what is certain for Adnan is that “the exceptional poets are not interested in these considerations, but it must be recognized that the context has its impact on all those working in the field of literature, without this means ignoring the individual paths of writers. Each of the Arab poets who have recently turned to the novel has his own experience. In them there are those who initially stated that narrative writing is merely a diversification in which the poet refines his tools, before the narrative game appeals to him to leave the tent of poetry and devote himself to the essence of narration.

Adnan cites examples such as Ahlam Mosteghanemi, who began as a poet in Algeria before the novel was swept away, the Lebanese Rachid Al-Daif, who devoted himself to the novel and mastered it, and the Syrian Khalil Sweileh, who has not published any poetry since his titles.

On the other hand, there are writers who combine poetry and novel in writing and publishing, as is the case for the Moroccans Muhammad al-Ash'ari, Hassan Najmi, Fatiha Murshid and Aisha al-Basri.

As for his personal experience, he says, "I used to alternate in my publications between collections of poetry and story groups, so if I switched to the novel recently, I moved to it from the short story - which narrowed its space - not from poetry. Knowing that the novel today is attracting pens, not from a tribe." Poets or storytellers not only, but also historians, intellectuals, philosophers, and even journalists. This is evidence that Naguib Mahfouz’s old opinion needs a more comprehensive approach from us than limiting the issue to accusing poets of this time of betraying the poem.

"I moved into the world of the novel without realizing it."

Farouk Youssef, Iraqi poet and critic

The Iraqi critic and poet residing in London, Farouk Youssef, has another opinion, as he considers himself that he did not write a "novel in a professional manner," and says, "I am a novel reader and not a novelist. I look at the world with the eyes of a poet. The ten prose books I have published belong to a literary genre called it." In the West, it is called "personal literature", which is a genus close to the novel, but it does not compete with it in terms of the multiplicity of its characters, the diversity of its axes, and its extension horizontally. "

He added, "This does not mean that some readers have been under the illusion that a number of these books were novels because of the stories they contained, both real and imagined. All were inspired by a personal desire to narrate what I experienced, but I later discovered that I narrated what I lived. And what I dreamed of in a tangled way. Not for nothing except because what I have been remembering does not place boundaries between the dream and reality. All that I remembered was true to me and I began to tell it to others after I believed it. Because of that engagement, I had moved into the world of the novel without knowing.

"But all of this seems to me at least hypothetical. If I was asked to separate what is a novel and what is part of my personal biography, I would not be able to do that. And as I see, my love for writing was the reason. I love writing, regardless of its subject matter or gender," he said Some people may think that I write easily. That is not true. I find writing a difficult work like love. However, my deep passion for stories always deceives me and slips me into the isolation of writing. Since everything in writing emanates from a poetic moment, I have been chasing language like A cat running after its water. "

Farouk Youssef concludes his speech by saying, "When I decided to start writing my biography, I was thinking about converting it into a novel? I do not deny that the novel's imagination was and still insists on me. But the quality of a novelist does not seduce me. Not even an art critic. Although I devote a long time to practicing This high gender of writing. I have always dreamed of being a poet. The language of poetry has enriched my life and opened avenues for me to reach aesthetic truths that I could not reach through ordinary language. "

Exodus to the novel, such as "a desire to break with the theme of the one self."

Raed Wahsh, Syrian poet and novelist

As for the Syrian poet Raed Wahsh, he is surprised by the surprise of others when a poet writes a novel, without them being equally surprised when a historian, scientist or journalist writes it. Perhaps this is due to the common lie that says that poets are the best writers in prose, so there is double interest in their novels. Although the novel is not only prose, there is the story, the characters, events and the intellectual vision. "

For him, the exodus towards the novel represented his "desire to deviate from the subject of the single subject that is imposed by poetry, in order to search for other selves as much as possible, and as far as possible, as the poet's fictional writing is an exercise in abandoning poetic narcissism, that which does not think Other than herself, and she cares only for herself. "

Wahsh adds, "We cannot deny the central position that the novel reached, when culture became known to many that it is nothing but novels. And if I do not adopt this idea, I understand its many reasons and justifications, chiefly that the novel has become able to delve into everything: religion and politics." History ... has also become able to constitute a meeting point between science and myth, politics, sociology and economics, and between literature, philosophy and art. "

He concludes his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, saying, "Few of the poets were satisfied with writing poetry as the only artistic choice. If we look closely, we will find poets of the early and mid-century poetry who wrote theater alongside poetry, and we also found that many of the novelists whose works are popular today are poets in their languages," But the translation, driven by a commercial logic, seems indifferent except to the certain profit made by the novels. "