Fermin Cabanillas |
Granada (EFE).- Joumana Haddad (Beirut, 1970) decided to be a writer when she was only seven years old to tell the story of her grandmother, whom she found dead in the kitchen of her house, and she assures, in an interview with EFE, that In all his books there is a common characteristic: telling the stories sincerely, “with flesh, blood and nails”.
Haddad, writer, poet, journalist and activist for human and women’s rights, has been one of the protagonists of Letras Mediterráneas, conferences organized by the Fundación Tres Culturas in Granada, where she has explained that in her works she is “incapable” of make up nothing, although he adds: “Obviously sometimes I make things up, but I like to tell things from the intimacy.”
Reference of Arabic literature
With 17 published books, it is a benchmark not only for Arabic literature; His work as a journalist is reflected in “In Search of Fire Thieves”, his latest book translated into Spanish, which includes interviews with writers he contacted between 2003 and 2005, sending them handwritten letters to arrange talks.
“Some told me no, like García Márquez”, he laments, but, as a summary of those days, he remembers that he liked “to know what the human beings are behind the writers”, and almost 20 years later he has finally seen light in Spain that work.
She explains that, as a writer, she does not set a clear discipline when working: “Before, I tried to force writing, until I understood that everything has its time”, so she decided not to force inspiration, because “if you force , it does not come out”.
“Even when it arrives -he adds-, I have to let it take hold in my head for as long as necessary, and when I start, I can only write, not do anything else, I even sleep three hours a day if necessary”, something What happens to him with everything, be it poetry, essay or story, because sometimes he is afraid that the inspiration will go away forever.
Literary vocation after the death of his grandmother
But if something clearly influenced her literary vocation, it was the death of her grandmother, when she was only seven years old.
That girl was the one who found the body in the kitchen of her house, and for a long time she asked her mother what had happened, “without her answering me”, until she herself deduced that her grandmother could not handle the pressure of having suffered the Turkish genocide in Armenia, from which he miraculously survived.
It took her 40 years to be able to carry out the book in tribute to her grandmother, which she titled “The Seamstress’s Daughter”, in which she captured the story of four women who could be the same: grandmother, mother, daughter and great-granddaughter, born in different wars, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Armenia.
Haddad portrays these women on the pages of the book through love, pain, motherhood, grief, and the struggle to move on.
The writer and journalist was for more than two decades the head of culture of the Lebanese newspaper “An Nahar”, a position she held until 2017 and which she combined with her own project: “Jasad”, a magazine specialized in literature, art and the politics of the body .
From the beginning of his career, Haddad put information at the service of his commitment to human rights. She was recognized by the “Arabian Business Magazine” as one of the most influential women in the contemporary Arab world.
He has published collections of poems -“Espejos de las fugaces”, “El retorno de Lilith”-; stories -“Lovers should only wear moccasins”-; essays, such as the trilogy made up of “Superman is Arab”, “I killed Scheherazade” and “The third sex”, and theater (“Cages”).
In all of them his multiple social interests and his critical attitude towards the world and towards everything that generates strangeness are evident. “Authentic freedom requires continuous awareness,” he defends just before taking a flight to the United States, where he will give lectures before returning to Beirut to follow his prolific daily activity.