Le Monde interviews Hoda Barkat in the context of its five “big interviews with big writers”
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It is often said that Arabic is closely related to the Koran. Does one need to read it to write Arabic literature?
I never know in advance what I’m going to talk about. I wrote about how the community can crush people who do not follow its rules.
Maybe it comes from the experience of the Lebanese civil war? Maybe it comes a little too from Lebanon in peace?
Is the civil war another nature of war?
(…)Literature in the Arab world has long been crushed by political commitment. How did you escape?
From the beginning, I told myself that we had to give ourselves entirely to literature. Only Mahmoud Darwich [1941-2008] could jump the line between literature and politics with ease. He was very involved in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but we felt close to his poetry.
There were tons of publications whose only quality was to talk about “noble causes,” and which were worthless, literally. This is no longer the case, fortunately. The Lebanese war has been very effective from this point of view: these small bellicose ideologies have come to an end. This is where a second renewal could take place.
From my first novel, The stone of laughter, people wondered: where does she come from? (…) Someone even wrote: the language is very beautiful but it is not Arabic literature. It was a little treacherous, but I took it as a compliment. At that time, I loved Musil passionately. Fortunately I am not only Arab.
Young Lebanese artists keep talking about the war …
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You said that the Arab world is going through a great civil war. What effect does this have on creativity?
Of course these earthquakes will create new approaches and other ways of expressing themselves (..)
Religious books continue to be massively disseminated. But, in the forefront, there are new voices. The Arab world is subject to the dictatorship of petrodollars or dictatorship. It’s serious for people’s lives, but not for the quality of the expression.
In France, do you feel like you’re passing by or in exile?
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I was doubly horrified: as French and as Arab democrat. Imagine! I flee the war and the extremists in coming to Paris and I could have lost my children in a Parisian cafe because of these people. It’s surreal.
These people keep me from coming home, and here they prevent me from living normally as an Arab. They defile everything. When they shout “Allahu akbar! They chase me to my tongue. Let them invent a cry in another language! It does not belong to them (…)
You do not participate much in the public debate around Islam, jihadism and the Arab world, like Kamel Daoud for example. It is voluntary ?
As if, because I write in Arabic, had to enter the maze of Arab-Muslim tragedy. I am Arab but I do not feel concerned by the story of Kamel Daoud, by that of his country, or by his relationship with Arab culture, or with Arab masculinity.
(…) What is really regrettable is the attitude of the Westerners, the media. They must have pity, they must defend us. Kitsch is made to be easily received. It is flashy, and it gives good conscience (…)