A dialogue with the Syrian writer Maha Hassan. Be tuned for a really thrilling experience with a dialogue probing into the Art and mind of one of the talented Arab female writers...
Here is an excerpt...
Tell us about Maha's early life?
Contradiction and dualism seem to be core components of my writings. Born in a contradictory milieu, it is no strange that my Kurdish family spoke Arabic and my leftist father was very is open-minded with strangers and much repressive at home. A free and independent girl among friends and relatives, submissive at home, I was. Early I discovered the idea of alienation between two lives: theoretical life armed with beautiful slogans and real life full of repression and decayed freedom. Still young, I started reading, due to political atmosphere in the family and the social milieu, much of Russian literature that got into my life through politics: this is because USSR then was the façade of Kurdish and Arabic left wing. Thus I tasted the flavor of exposure to realms of "others" very early, to be totally involved later in reading great names: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Out of freewill and sense of taste, I was drawn to apostate writers who renounce mainstream ideas at the time, to the "French", through my discovery of the fertile land of existentialism where I located my own place whereby I could express worry, fear, loneliness and almost all questions I got in mind during my intellectual and political adolescence. That's why my debut book was entitled "The Infinite. The other". In this book, I used unconventional technique, and I insist to classify this tiny book as a "novel."