Palestinian novelist, storyteller, and documentarian Liana Badr was born in Jerusalem and lived in Damascus, Tunisia, and Ramallah (Al Jazeera)
Liana Badr is considered one of the prominent literary figures in Palestine, and her literary experience has always formed an amazing horizon rich in many works that ranged from poetic and novel writing to documentary cinema.
Badr's literary and cinematic works seem more rooted in the Palestinian environment and its worlds, as the owner of "Stars of Jericho" is keen in every work of hers to identify with her land, its history, and its memory, and to make it a horizon for thinking about what serves the current reality.
Despite her strong belief in literature and its function in terms of influencing the reader, she believes that literature itself seems deficient in the face of the occupation tanks because it is unable to capture the daily killing, abuse and displacement of the Palestinian people.
In poetry, Layana Badr seems immersed in a dream, and in the novel, the author of “Turtle Land” remains concerned with building characters and digging deep into the layers of time, in order to reconstruct reality with all its details and protrusions.
Regarding the literary momentum that the writer is experiencing between the literary and artistic genres and the extent of her relationship with the Palestinian reality today, Al Jazeera Net interviewed her about literature and cinema.
The novel "Land of the Turtle" reflects the story of an entire people who were forced to emigrate and move from one exile to another (Al Jazeera)
Literature function
To what extent, in your opinion, can literature capture what is happening in Gaza today?
Literature cannot capture what is happening by an invading colonial state that is working to kill all the people of Gaza in a “identity-based killing” manner.
No literature or art can look at what is happening now, driven by the Zionist ideology, of comprehensive genocide against the civilian population under false slogans related to self-defense. No literature or any words can describe the torment of families whose members have been divided and whose members have been lost from each other due to the demolition of buildings over their heads and the displacement of... Families, women, mothers, their children, the elderly, the sick and the hungry?
What literature can describe hell?
What is the secret that made you move from poetry to novels and then to cinema?
In fact, every topic that occupies the mind and conscience has a different way of manifesting and appearing.
An idea may appear that can be addressed in a short story, or the topic of my existence may preoccupy me, so I find nothing but the novel to search through it into the origins of the world and the origins of ideas and their meanings reflected in our lives.
Basically, I grew up with a strong connection to the language that appeared in school composition subjects and in my urgent desire to read without stopping.
Since the age of ten, I wrote a serious diary, and in high school I wrote short stories and published some.
I knew myself as a writer during my university years.
Because of my passion for discovering Palestinian life after my return from exile in 1994, I directed and wrote films, starting with “Fadwa... The Story of a Poet from Palestine” to “Olives”, “The Green Bird”, and “Siege... A Writer’s Memoirs”, in which I depicted the invasion of Palestine. The occupation of Ramallah 2002. And then “Open: Closed,” which revolves around people’s lives after the establishment of the Israeli separation wall, as well as “Jerusalem is My City.”
I felt the urgent need inside and outside Palestine to understand the changes taking place on the ground, and I was sharing this with them through these films, in addition to writing scripts for feature films.
But poetry has not left my life, since I wrote my first verses about Algeria when I was in the first middle school to the poetic texts I write now.
The subconscious is the one that determines the means of expression according to what it sees.
From literature to the fascination of cinema
Cinematically, you worked on the film “Fadwa... The Story of a Poet from Palestine.” What made you choose photography and not writing?
A documentary photo can create history and express this history.
I lived in exile outside Palestine for 26 years, and when I returned, life had completely changed under the occupation, and I had to find the objective equivalent that would enable me to understand these huge changes in Palestinian life. I had no choice but to enter the places and understand the images taking place in them to know the picture. Complete.
The country was living under the fence and complete control of the occupation and social and political relations changed completely.
When I returned, I started with the film Fadwa because she was my friend and I knew her well through my visit to Amman and her visits to Tunisia, and I saw in her two books about her life a foundation for Palestinian feminism that confronts reality and asserts itself despite social backwardness and the frozen occupation of people’s dreams.
Do you think that documentary photography is more capable of capturing the details of the Palestinian scene than literature?
The image has its magic when one works on it, and language is just a tool to show the image.
The invention of photographic devices, cinema, then cameras and smartphones created a new language through the creation of images, which once again transformed into a language that spoke to the mind.
During the Second Intifada, (Egyptian critic) Jaber Asfour wrote that he could understand why I started making films. He said that he knew in these difficult circumstances the magical effect of the image, which forms high-speed emotional telegrams to send the subject without waiting for the first language. He said that the image is telegrams faster than letters. And words.
The novel "Stars of Jericho" discusses Palestinian alienation (Al Jazeera)
Your novels and films appear to be a chronicle of Palestinian history.
Can the writer in this case become a historian?
Through my novels, I recreate life in order to look at it and contemplate it closely.
I always lived a forced life in exile and in many cities, and I felt the magnitude of the enormous oppression imposed on us Palestinians under the occupation. They seized our lands and places, violated our cultural property, stole our antiquities, and made a living by selling and renting them before our eyes. Therefore, we had to reject the occupation in order not to be slaves and in order to We live the freedom we crave.
Source: Al Jazeera