Nabil Suleiman's journey as a writer includes 23 novels and a significant body of literary criticism.
Writing since the late 1960s, he has received several literary awards, the most recent being the Sultan bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Award in 2021. Some of his novels have been translated into Spanish, English, Russian.
Most recently, he chaired the judging panel for the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, awarded to Bassim Khandaqji, an imprisoned Palestinian author for his book A Mask, The Colour of the Sky.
He spoke to Al Majalla about the many turning points on his career and why he will not write his memoirs.
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Your first novel The Flood Expands was published in 1970 and you are still writing 54 years later. What drives you?
More than half a century has passed since the publication of my first novel, which I wrote in Raqqa while working as a teacher at the age of 24.
The initial motivations were an autobiographical impulse, ambition to become a writer, and the influence of my reading, both fictional and non-fictional.
Soon, it was aspirations for freedom and resistance against the tyranny of dictatorship. This resulted in my second novel, The Prison, which was published in 1972.
Six years into the seismic state we were pushed into by the 1967 defeat, I dared to write a novel about that, called Summer Snow. War became a stormy obsession. The 1973 war that followed prompted me to write two novels about it.
The autobiographical element served as a second driving force that led me to write Early Defeats in 1985.
War, or revolution, or uprising, became the impetus for writing four novels: Syrian Murals (2014), Night of the World (2016), History of the Dimmed Eyes (2019), and Permutations of the Golden Man (2022). War has many names, like the saying: ‘The names are many, and death is one.’
Perhaps I should add that the secret motivation for The Night of the World was my five years spent in Raqqa, some of the most fruitful years of my life.
The devastating question that arose after the defeat of 1967 and the preceding and subsequent wars was: why?
This question manifested in a deep exploration of history through fiction, leading me to write Orbits of the East in its four volumes over 2,400 pages.
There were other motivations or obsessions for other novels, but the enduring motivation for each is how to write a different, more beautiful, deeper novel. How to have your writing embrace the dreams of creativity.
Your novels are rich with ideas and hidden directions. How do you remove literature from political discourse and make it speak to humanity in future times?
Some of my novels are saturated with explicit ideas, not just hidden ones. When literature realises its identity, it is cured of all discourses, especially political ones.
When it comes to the novel, I advocate that they embody what matters to them in politics or philosophy. The challenge is in the embodiment.
I believe my novels embrace the future by being cured of the flaws of politics, by not by rising above it or avoiding it, by being faithful to art, and by prioritising what saves society from its ailments, to embrace the future with noble human values.
In several of your works, you reveal an unwritten history. To what extent does this contribute to showing the true history that might disappear over time?
Officially consecrated history does not always align with true history. Often, it is the opposite, or at least, it frequently lacks a greater degree of truth.
This is the role of unofficial, popular, oral history—rich, bubbling springs of truth and imagination. Some try to purify history of its fallacies. Others fill its gaps.
From the beginning, I have pursued unwritten history. This does not mean ‘once upon a time’. It may be happening now. This was evident in The Obelisk, which relied on what soldiers and officers said unofficially in oral testimonies.
This is what I gathered while performing military service, tasked with collecting testimonies from fighters. Without their unwritten history, The Obelisk would not have been written, including the different perspective it presented on the 1973 war.
That is also the case with Spectres of the Throne (1995), which returned to the French colonial period in Syria and the emergence of a religious movement whose founder was accused of deification, a movement whose true history remains ambiguous, even unjust in its politicisation and falsification.
Spectres of the Throne delved into the oral sources. Popular religious tradition covers both the written and the oral. I have long called for the novel to embody both.
Which novels do you feel have marked a turning point in your literary history?
I seem to have had many turning points! Summer Snow experimented with the technique of multiple voices, with a mind towards Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar and Suleiman Fayyad’s Voices. These came before.
With Summer Snow, the turning point was experimenting with different, modern, and modernist writing. In The Obelisk, the turning point was self-fictionalisation, where the narrator and central character bore my first name.
Before that, only Ghalib Halasa had done this, in his novel Sandstorms. He continued this theme in his subsequent novels.
In Chatter of the Nights, the turning point was writing a novel entirely to, and for, and about, women. This was through the characters of young Syrian women in the 1980s who were a mix of political prisoners and criminals.
The turning point in The Pathway of Love was experimenting in writing a novel without punctuation, except at the end of paragraphs. It aimed for open-ended narrative discourse. It also ventured into prophecy of upcoming wars.
Finally, my latest novel Permutations of the Golden Man, the turning point was its venture into existential questions of being, entity, and nature, amidst all that we are living through.
You have written more than 30 books that are not novels. Most of them are literary criticism, starting with Literary Criticism in Syria. Why?
I wrote no word of criticism except to gain insight. When Literary Criticism in Syria was published in 1980, it might have been a pioneer in criticising criticism. I followed it in 1983 with A Contribution to Criticism of Criticism. I then tripled it with The Triangular Text in 1999.
As for writing on public affairs, I started with a book studying the ideology broadcast by the state through education, which was in my one-of-a-kind book, Feminism in the Syrian School Textbook from 1977.
I wrote many articles on public affairs after what happened in Syria in 2011, resulting in two books that I am proud of: Tyrannyada: Excavations in the Cultural History of Despotism, and On Destruction and Its Refutation.
Will you write your memoirs?
I don't think I will, for more than one reason. In my autobiographical novels mentioned earlier, and others not mentioned, much of my life has already been used.
