Damascus-SANA
Malak Haj Obaid’s creative achievement represents one of the important experiences in the current Syrian women’s literary movement with its diversity and its handling of human issues in general, especially women and their concerns in Arab societies in general.
Malak, whose first work was published by the Union of Arab Writers in 1983, finds during an interview with SANA that narrative literature has taken its role nowadays and has advanced over poetry that has escaped its chains, and the number of writers who find it easy to compose the poem has increased.
Although Malak does not deny the existence of creative poets who still light the path with their poems, she believes that the abundance of storytellers made us find in them a lot of good that fascinates us with his writings and continues to monitor the issues of his society literary without much interest in people's preoccupation with matters of narrative, poetry and culture in general to matters of living.
The author of the novel (Novels of the Sea) compares the story and the novel, and explains that the short story does not take long to read, and this is an argument for those who are impatient and get bored, but reading the novel is more enjoyable in terms of its temporal and spatial space and following the fates of its characters.
Time and place, according to Malak, are expansive in the novel and limited in the short story. As for the event, it is formed through the characters, their behavior, and their interaction with the outside world and its reflection on their inner world and their dialogue with others.
Malak considers that the writer's fame is based on his novels, not on his stories, so the novel has become more attractive to the reader, who in her opinion, when standing in front of a library, prefers to buy the novel over the collection of stories.
But Malak currently sees herself in the world of the novel, while the short story in the past was the closest to it, so she wrote six groups where her interaction with others was stronger than it is now because she was at the head of her work mixing with people and hearing their stories and taking from their experiences, but after her retirement she became closer to meditation and thinking And she had plenty of time to write, and that's what the novel needed.
And about her opinion on the very short story, she expresses her belief that it is real literature, including a specific event that has a sudden end, like a prick that alerts us to an idea of deep significance, but not everyone who wrote a very short story succeeded in writing it. There are very short stories that take the form of a floating idea that does not It has no beginning and no end, noting that the very short story and other updated arts will not dispense with reading masterpieces of stories and novels.
Regarding the presence of the war on Syria in contemporary literary production, Malak believes that what happened in our country needs a long time to be written about, considering that poetry is the quickest response to events, followed by the short story. They directly kill art.
Malak, who confirms that she did not read all the novels issued during the war years, stops at the novel (Two Floors in Adra al-Omaliyah) by Safwan Ibrahim, which was born from the heat of experience and made it a work that lives up to human literature and its beauty.
Malak believes that the writer does not write for himself, but rather to be read or heard by others, and because he loves to stand on the pulpit or to publish a book, he desires to see the echo of his product in the recipient, noting that man in general loves fame, so how about a writer who is rich in thought.
The King of Writers calls on young people not to rush to fame and not to publish before they own their artistic tools, the structural foundations of the novel and the short story, which are time, place, characters, event and language.
It is noteworthy that Malak Haj Obeid, a member of the Arab Writers Union, holds a university degree in Arabic literature, worked as a teacher in Syria and Kuwait, and has published several books, including “The Wedding of Cats” and “The Sleeping Princess” in children’s stories and “Exiting the Waiting Circle” in the novel. .
Muhammad Khaled Al-Khidr