Syrian fiction literature in wartime in “Visions of Writers and Critics”

Damascus-Sana

The ability of the novel in Syria to keep pace with the war in its course and its repercussions and its monitoring of its effects on the souls of Syrians are themes that are being discussed by a group of writers and critics within the monthly meeting “Sham and the Pen” hosted by the Arab Cultural Center in Abu Rummana.

The novelist and critic, Nazir Jaafar, explained in his intervention that the novel entered this war through its widest gates, and there are novels written in blood, while there are other novels that falsified facts and followed misleading media and coordinated with aggression, indicating that the success of the creator is based on his response and the extent of his interaction, feeling, sensing and predicting the paths and matters of these War and its effects and his ability to see and say what he did not say or what others did not see with new methods and techniques and imagination that break the monotony and the familiar and do not stand on the surface.

Jaafar indicated that there are more than 200 novels and a few Arab novels about the war on Syria, which are five types. The first reclaimed the history of the eighties through a narrative linking yesterday and today, while the second drifts to the level of reports condemned to hostility and settling accounts, and the third was satisfied with the role of the witness who writes his diaries as he wrote. Al-Badiri Al-Hallaq about the crimes of the Ottoman occupation soldiers and those walking on their passengers. The fourth took a philosophical turn to understand what is happening by digging deep into the insides of the human psyche, like Hassan Saqr’s novel “Al-Bamboo Street”. The fifth type is the narratives that lived through loss and suffering and triumphed over the reality of what is happening as “Missing” by Haider Haider And “Two Stairs in Adra Al-Labor” by Safwan Ibrahim.

Novelist Iman Sharbati asked in her intervention about the extent of the maturity of the fictional experience, the event is still fresh, and the war continues, especially since there are immortal novels such as war and peace by Tolstoy who wrote a time of the spread of peace, which gave her the opportunity to contemplate and move away from reporting and devotion to imagination, creativity and innovation, which gives her the characteristic of permanence.

As for her novel "The Godfather's Girl", which was written in 2015, Sharabi explained that this novel is a love story that war was the backdrop to its events and opened the way for the development of characters and their intertwining in light of what is happening without addressing the noise of the battle and sought to avoid the report that many works fell into.

Novelist Muhammad al-Hafri explained that the documentary novel is present in literature, and this does not harm art, but rather increases its diversity and beauty, indicating that some writers of the new generation worked on technology and forgot the story, and this is not permissible, as the two conditions go hand in hand, but the story is slightly superior because we are the children of this pain.

Al-Hafir, who completed two novels about the war, “Janoub al-Qalb” and “Daraan,” in addition to a number of stories whose focus was the war, referred to a number of narratives centered on the repercussions of the events of these ten years, including “fornicators” and “sins” by Suhail Deeb and “Ghazlan al-Nada” Perhaps Ali al-Mazal and “Shamo” by Muhammad al-Taher and “Flames of Flame” by Manal Rashid Abu Halfa and “Tya Ya You” by Amal al-Mani, pointing out that what was written on the level of all literary genres is still a little compared to the size of the Syrian event and the horrific catastrophe, rejecting the saying that says that The novel is not written during the war.

The seminar was moderated by Faten Daaboul, who drew attention to the role of the Syrian woman in writing the war novel, noting the contrast of this novel between those who trusted her with credibility and those who politicized it and made it reactions.

Bilal Ahmad