Khalil Swaileh: Even when I write of love, war haunts me

"I'm not one of those novelists who build their characters before writing, who already know their fates, like someone being shot in the fifth chapter, or experiencing betrayal, or living through a turbulent love story that ends in suicide," he says.

"For me, a novel begins with a phrase, a line that suddenly appears, then slowly grows, like a wild plant. This inspiration happens once every 2-3 years, not unlike a fever.

"The novelist is a sick and melancholic being who heals his wounds with writing, drop by drop. A character invades my mind without warning, carves out a place in the margin, then gradually crawls into the main text."

The ordeal of loss

Swaileh uses his own experiences of loss to tell stories. This approach defines Remorse Test. In it, Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo sits next to the narrator, who had previously read Rulfo's novel, Pedro Paramo. What connects them is not just the bus but the shared ordeal of loss: the death of their mothers. Each went to their birthplace to bury their mothers, places separated by thousands of kilometres.

"When I recall my connection with the novel, I realise it truly accompanied me on an old journey to the same place, which made it resurface at this time where the dead speak to the living as a usual matter.

"And because in this novel I have a mass grave of the dead, the mother was speaking to the grandmother as if continuing a conversation in front of the house. These references to other texts, primarily heritage ones, do not stray from the theme. They serve as a rhetorical fence for the field of storytelling, rather than being a burden."

False puritanism

Swaileh's portrayal of the female body in Zuhur, Sara and Nariman, Writing Love, and The Test of Regret also garnered attention and backlash.

"In Zuhur, Sara and Nariman, there is a reading of the restrained female body, the liberated body, and the vulgar body," he says.

"Writing on the skin in a moment of nudity is the only secret space to say what cannot be said. In these forbidden contexts, Arabic eroticism will remain a pure sin for some."

Those judging this writing do so from a moral standpoint first and foremost, he explains, suggesting a fear of "a sensual phrase in the folds of an imaginary life".

Swaileh's writing, he worries, will forever remain a censor's target, "attached to the violation of entrenched values as a kind of false puritanism that has led us to a worldly hell guarded by ignorant shepherds and a linguistic dryness".

Reading Swaileh's novels Nuzhat Al-Ghurab, The Blind Man's Pit, and Against the Library, we encounter texts resembling an autobiography intertwined with the lives of Arab and foreign novelists and writers. For instance, Swaileh deftly moves from the child reading on the ground with a kerosene lamp to the adult reader lost in a library's maze.

"I can place these books under the category of a reader's autobiography more than critical books in the conventional sense," he says. "I merely wander the path of reading, relying on personal taste to catalogue some of the titles that captivate me, although I do also consider them exercises in writing practice.

"These books, therefore, act as a kind of tribute to those who left their marks, like tattoos on the skin, even with just one impactful sentence."

Literary influences

Swaileh says he tries to bridge the gap between text and reader, opening a window between them. Every writer has a compass that helps them navigate their own work, which is formed by their own reading, especially in the early stages of their careers, when they are finding a sense of direction.

Swaileh's early reading was random. By chance, his hands fell on a copy of The Broken Wings by Gibran Khalil Gibran, the content of which he now barely remembers. He then took a different direction, shaped by Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

"The highest passion was with Cervantes' Don Quixote, one of the timeless novels. Whenever I have the opportunity, I revisit its chapters," he says.

"One Thousand and One Nights will continue to haunt me both narratively and technically. Generally, I lean towards autobiographical books, those revelations that discard evasiveness."

He lists For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky, My Last Sigh by Luis Buñuel, and The Frog's Sweat by Kurosawa as among the other notable works to have registered.

Re-reading a work can give a different perspective, he explains, adding that he did not appreciate One Hundred Years of Solitude the first time he read it but was inspired the second time around.

"We wonder with amazement how we tolerated the foolishness of a book, perhaps being captivated by the author's name or simply being an untrained reader.

"On the other hand, I find a high dose of modernity in some heritage books, especially Al-Jahiz, to whom I return frequently. I have many literary fathers. Ultimately, we carry a cemetery of ancestors on our shoulders."

Drawn from the desert

Many of Swaileh's book titles—The Snail's Isolation, The Crow's Promenade, The Gazelle Will Come to You, and The Wolf's Eye—derive from the names of desert animals and the rich Bedouin environment.

As a young boy, he longed to discover other lands and preferred reading to playing during school breaks. Books were sourced from the library of a cultural centre in his hometown on the edge of the desert. Did it influence his writing?

"I didn't plan for my book titles to be like this, but it is really something notable, probably due to my desert lexicon," he says. "Each has its own rhetorical and aesthetic references".

For example, in The Gazelle Will Come to You, a grandson wakes through nightmares and is extremely thirsty. The title comes from his grandmother's words ("Sleep, sleep, the gazelle will come to you carrying a water skin and quench your thirst". At the end of the novel, the boy is left asking whether the gazelle will come.

Advice for others

A novelist today must navigate the struggle between originality and the demands of 2024. Success is sometimes defined by how many likes or views a piece gets online. The audience has changed how an author is granted status.

When asked what now makes a good novelist, the Syrian author says it is someone "who writes a profound text, regardless of the temptations and pitfalls of the media or the race for awards… It's about writing a text of residence, not a fleeting passage."