"Not as It Seems".. Malak Muhammad Opens the Doors to Her First Novel World
Amman5 min read
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From a quiet winter night in Amman, the story of writer Malak Muhammad's novel began, which carried in its details something of the spirit of the city and the memory of its writer, before it matured over two years of writing, reflection, and attachment to the characters, and her journey ends from the researcher's schools in Amman to the Al-Joud International Schools in Mafraq, reaching a contract with the Arab Literature Center.
The novel revolves around the lawyer Helen, the girl who chose to take coldness and indifference as a refuge for her, after she gave up many of her feelings and dreams, and nothing in life means to her except that her only friend "April" is fine. However, an incident turns the lives of the two friends upside down, leading April to life imprisonment, and Helen finds herself facing a difficult choice; saving her friend through a twisted path that contradicts her principles and the purity of her profession, and pushes her to leave her usual life and enter a new chapter with a mysterious character named "Matteo".
Malak Muhammad's novel takes psychological drama as its main axis, approaching the impact of experiences and feelings in the depths of man, and deals with true friendship with its loyalty, closeness, and complexity, while presenting love in a bleak and dramatic way, away from its ideal image, trying to dive into its fragile and painful aspects.
Writer Malak Muhammad narrates that the idea of the novel came to her on one of the winter nights in Amman, the city where she was born and lived in its details, where new questions began to form in her that were linked to experiences and feelings that she was discovering for the first time, from loss and death, friendship, love, and psychological harm, to life questions that she did not have clear answers to.
Malak Muhammad's love for reading since the age of nine, starting from comic stories to novels and literature of all kinds, was one of the factors that contributed to forming her linguistic and literary stock, and gave her the confidence to embark on the experience of writing and expressing her ideas and feelings in her own language.
Malak Muhammad describes her experience with the novel as being like an internal dialogue with herself and her soul, and an attempt to understand what is happening inside her and reflect on the meanings she began to discover, in conjunction with creating a novel world that reflects her own vision of life.
Over two years of writing, Malak Muhammad says she formed a close relationship with the characters of the novel, as each character represented an aspect of her, whether from her ideas, feelings, fears, or questions, until her attachment to them exceeded the limits of writing, and she felt that these characters and her world were a real part of her experience.
The writer did not set a specific date for the end of the novel, nor was the idea of publishing or announcing it present at the beginning, as she was writing it for herself, and her main goal was to finish the work she started. When she reached the last word, she felt that she had achieved the purpose for which she had set out, while deals, exhibitions, marketing, and interest in the novel came later as an extension of the dream, not its primary goal.
Malak Muhammad points out that her mother was the first to know about the idea of the novel on the day she was born, and she remained her main support throughout the writing journey, reviewing drafts and ideas with interest, while she informed her father upon the completion of the journey, who, in turn, was a supporter of her psychologically and morally, and provided her with what she needed to complete her project.
Her friend "Reem", whom she describes as her soul mate and a poet whose presence had a special impact on the experience, also accompanied her. She was responsible for reviewing the novel linguistically and orthographically, and her poems were a source of inspiration during the writing stages.
Malak Muhammad confirms that the novel remained her purely personal experience, as no one wrote a word about it, and no sentence was written on her behalf, because she wanted to bring out the novel with her voice alone, with her pen, feelings, ideas, and even her mistakes, considering it a work that resembles her and expresses her.
Between Amman, which hosted the first idea, and Mafraq, which witnessed part of the writing and maturation journey, Malak Muhammad's novel appears to be more than a literary work; it is a personal space for self-discovery, embodying feelings and questions that formed at an early age, and turned into a whole world of characters, events, and secrets over two years.
