اخبار السعودية – وطن نيوز
عاجل اخبار السعودية – اخبار اليوم السعودية
W6nnews.com ==== وطن === تاريخ النشر – 2026-02-13 00:09:00
The name of the writer Ahmed Al-Hogail has emerged in the Saudi cultural scene, as a narrative voice aware of the transformations of society and the questions of writing and humanity. His writings do not merely monitor reality, but rather dialogue with it and redeconstruct it in a language that combines depth, simplicity, creative sense, and intellectual contemplation. In this dialogue, we strived to approach Ahmed Al-Hogail’s experience. We stopped at his definition of himself, his beginnings, his creative concerns, his vision of writing and culture, in addition to his reading of the literary scene. The Saudi today, and the questions of the future and the concerns of writing that are brewing within him, then to the dialogue: Who is Ahmed Al-Hogail? He is Ahmed Al-Hogail, as my mother knows him, and as friends know him. We used to chase together “The Fleet Car” and other friends we started talking about the complexities of post-modernism in American literature, and as colleagues I associate with and I am the editor of “Abari Al-Sass” know him, and other colleagues I associate with and I am the director of “I push” doors and head over windmills. He is as a reader who has read me but has not met me knows him, and as he is recognized by a reader who has not heard of me. He is the wise one who reconciled between two people fighting over a parking space, and he is the foolish one who quarreled with another over a parking space. So I refer the question to the other, as each one of them will know me differently. As for me, as I see myself, I use my context as a peasant boy who avoids talking about himself directly as much as possible to evade the answer. • When did I feel that writing was no longer a hobby, but rather an inescapable personal destiny? • • I do not know if it is a destiny, for it is a choice, no matter how much poetry we color it with. But I will say that it has become an established nature. I think it was established long ago. The greatest thing about writing is that it is the rediscovery of feeling. As you get older, your brain becomes less active in registering things because you’ve seen them before, which is why time seems to speed up when the day passes without new input. But writing brings you back to the brain activity you had in your childhood and youth. How many times have you walked on a beach? Many, what will you record new? But you write the scene, and you re-live it in all its details, as if you are seeing things for the first time: the sand between your fingers, the sound of the tide, the movement of people, the reflection of the sun on the water. I remember that my childhood ranged between two things: the street and the home. In the street, experiences are raw, unknown, from which immediate, ambiguous, and exciting impressions of people, life, and possibilities are extracted. As for the house, it is more discursive, its people and its worlds more direct and deeper in communication. Both worlds are floating and abundant, overlapping each other and jammed with new input every day. I remember that when I was reading books and newspapers or watching movies and television, it amazed me that there were people who could extract meaning from all this abundance that I was experiencing. Of course, I think writing took hold from then on, because it seemed like a potential tool for ordering chaos, and as I grew older and the inputs diminished, I realized more of its importance because it slowed down the fast time outside of it. Therefore, writing at a young age is vulnerable to vulgarity; Because it is a direct and stimulated reflection of the impressions entered, and in adulthood it is more abundant and masterful. Because it is a careful retrospective look at those impressions.• What was the first text you published? Do you still remember your feeling the moment you saw it printed? •• The book was a collection of short stories that was kindly printed by the Riyadh Literary Club, and I have been trying hard for years to attribute it to another “Ahmed Al-Hogail,” who died young after a desert air conditioner hanging on the second floor fell on him while he was walking in the street. But unfortunately no one believed me, and it is still being attributed to me. So I am not ashamed to say that I was not happy with it. I knew as I held it that I had better. I also remember that I was terrified of displaying my mind in front of people, just as Abdul Malik bin Marwan was terrified of displaying his mind in every Friday sermon.• Who are the writers who shaped your narrative awareness in your early days?•• They are many, difficult to enumerate, and their impact contradicts your taste and intellectual fluctuations. I grew up in a popular heritage environment, so I read ancient Arab heritage (poetry and prose) and listened to popular literature (poetry and stories), then I loved movies until the video store employee started taking my nominations, which is what introduced me to modern literature, Arab and international, so I read the classics, then the newest and the newest. I learned English to read what I heard about but was not translated. In each stage there are names that shaped consciousness, preceded by the names of the next stage, and therefore it is difficult to choose specific names. The beginning is a huge stage that consumes part of your life, and includes names and readings that contradict your ever-changing positions. Therefore, it would seem strange – and perhaps showy – if I brought together Al-Tawhidi, Al-Tabari, Ibn Laboun, Ibn Jadlan, Dostoyevsky, Beckett, Fellini, Oso, Siebold, and Cheever in the context of one influence, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? • The reader of your writings will notice the strong presence of place in your works. Is it a real place, an imaginary place, or a mixture of both? • • I claim that it is realistic, to the extent that you can trace it cartographically. I was bothered by writing that seemed out of place, including my own. I loved Beckett, for example, who wrote outside of time and place, but this seemed a deliberate choice within his postmodern context. So I tried to imitate him, but the more I tried, the deeper I realized that I wanted to write about my things, about my people, about my neighborhood, about my group. How do I write about them without their places? After all, I am not a European living in Paris after World War II. I am not Beckett. Then most of the literature I loved was a history of variables and geography. Aren’t you able to visit the places that Al-Mutanabbi wrote in his poetry, as Abdulaziz Al-Mana did? Aren’t you able to follow the ways of America that Jack Kerouac wrote about and Wim Wenders depicted? How do I write realistic literature without the place being an essential and real element that is almost tangible?• In your novels there is a clear tendency toward unconventional structure. Is your writing aesthetic? Or is it a natural result of your way of thinking? •• As I said, I am a peasant boy, although I know more about literature and art than its students do. I lived in Sudair, and I mixed with people – “Hurban and Bedouins” – who speak poetry but are austere to the core, their feelings are hidden and their words are cautious, realistic, figurative, and sensual by nature. I did not want to write direct, rhetorical aesthetic prose, but rather I wanted to reflect the real experience of these people whose hidden secrets are ambiguous but their appearances are frank. It adopted the cinematic narrative and scenic structure, which resembles them. Therefore, I claim that I am a constructive writer, even if it seems that I am a storyteller, just like the “old men” and the old women who tell a short story and fill it with seemingly simple details and references in a complex Seleucid structure.• How do you usually begin your text…with an idea? With personality? Or in a fleeting way? •• The text is often formed in the form of a fleeting image. It is a complex and mysterious process, which I still find difficult to explain. Most ideas are a flash, you seize them, then build on them, and quickly discover that you have a text that you hardly know how to put together. In that, it resembles life, all dispersed flashes gathered in a slowly forming awareness. How many times have you woken up and suddenly discovered a shocking truth about life? Do you write according to a pre-planned plan? Or do you let the text guide you? •• I plan a lot, to the point that I only write when I can almost imagine the scene in front of me. But it is impressionistic planning, all done in the mind, and not based on stereotyping, indoctrination, or biblical theories about what you should and should not do. So I don’t know if it was planning or contemplation. I think it is closer to meditation.• What exhausts you most about writing…the beginning? Or continue? Or the end?•• The beginning, of course. The beginning of everything is the hardest. Like “gray men” and old women who love to gossip, “a hint of knowledge” is enough for them to come up with complete “knowledge.” • You wrote a short story and a novel, which one is closer to you? • • I do not think that one form of writing is closer to you than the other. Every situation imposes itself. I have written in all forms of writing, and I have never found that I prefer one form more than another. What the text says is subject to the template, this is my rule.• Do you think that the short story is critically oppressed in the Arab scene?•• Yes, critically and popularly. I think that the novel gives the impression of “completeness.” The critic studies it as a revealing work with objective unity, and the reader reads it as a work absorbed by a continuous experience. As for the collection of short stories, it appears to be a mosaic that needs to be shaped and assembled.• Can it be said that some of your texts move in the gray area between literary genres?•• Perhaps, some of them. The final book, “The Edge of the World,” is a mixture of biography and fictionalized short stories. It is really in a gray area. But I think that most of what I write can be projected onto specific templates, even if it contains experimentation within it.• To what extent do you believe that literature should be understandable to the reader?•• I gave a poem written by Saad bin Jadlan to my niece, and she did not understand most of it. One of my friends memorizes a lot of popular poetry but finds it difficult to understand Al-Jahiz’s prose. Does this mean that Bin Jadlan and Al-Jahiz are not understood? The same can be said about James Joyce: Is Ulysses incomprehensible? Is modern poetry – criticized by a modernist and avant-garde writer like Gombrowicz – incomprehensible? I believe that criticism should focus on the substance of the work rather than receiving it. So when Gombrowicz criticizes poetry, he focuses on what this poetry says in itself, and how some of it is disconnected from its real and real connection. Reception is another matter, and I do not think it is a good idea to link it to evaluating the work. If we opened this door, creativity would become absolutely hostage to the world of commerce and production, and every creative person would be required to be subject to the complexities of reception.• What is your relationship with the critic? Are you waiting to read it? Or are you wary of it? •• My relationship with him is like my relationship with the reader. They both receive the book in their own way, love it, hate it, or be neutral towards it, and the condition is that the reaction is respectful and does not invade privacy. I do not think it is wise to assume a relationship between the writer and the critic, as if they work for each other.• How do you see the Saudi novel scene today?•• There is noticeable activity, but it is limited. Everyone in the scene is amateurs driven by their passion without any significant benefit, neither financially, nor morally, nor in marketing, nor in rewards. All the writers I know write because they love writing. They could gain greater returns – material, marketing, monetary and moral – if they turned to other sectors. But they toil and operate in a potential vacuum. Problems in marketing, problems in distribution, problems in studies, problems in reaching the reader. The lucky writer is the one who finds a segment of readers that he can rely on, otherwise he will work in a certain vacuum.• What is lacking in the Saudi writer in your opinion… criticism? Pulpits? Or patience? What the Saudi writer lacks is what any writer might lack in any incomplete creative scene: meaning. Why do you write? If you write as a hobby, and this is the case with most of our writers, then the meaning is personal, and you cannot come to an amateur who writes with personal motives and tell him that you must write with specific motives from outside of you. Why do I do that? In America and Europe, the writer is linked to commercial, academic, award-winning and marketing institutions that create an integrated scene that gives every writer an advantage, regardless of his style or goals. Here he is linked to what? He is connected only with his person, and therefore he lacks everything outside him. Our popular poetry, for example, is an integrated scene that imposes itself as the greatest creative product in the Gulf, because it is linked to well-established historical, marketing, moral, critical, and sometimes even institutional contexts. The same does not apply to many of our forms of literature. Therefore, as I said, the lucky writer is the one who finds his readership and connects with them, because he will not find anything else. From this relationship, his writing is shaped, developing or regressing based on it.• How do you view the impact of social media on writing and reading?•• Social media is a medium, a method of publishing and receiving. The mediator sometimes facilitates the content. Journalism, for example, changed in electronic publishing because it separated from paper and television production, and thus it changed in and of itself. The method of presenting news and reports changed. Movies and series have changed because viewing platforms tend to simplify the work for the viewer who may be busy on his mobile phone. Media changes, this is inevitable. The problem with social media is that it has become an end, not a medium. Many writers began to mold themselves to it instead of exploiting it to communicate their voice. Here is a philosophical and commercial conflict: the medium or the content. I may be an idealist, but I believe that the relationship should be complementary. If you give the mediator a free hand, what will remain in the authority of the content? And vice versa as well.• What remains of Ahmed Al-Hogail outside of writing?•• He is more outside it than he is inside it. I hope that this will continue.• Why are you upset by those who say that journalism is dead, writing has declined, and readers no longer exist?•• Perhaps because they are, in many cases, canned theories influenced by immediate impressions. You discuss with someone who says that journalism is over, only to discover that he means that traditional journalism is over, not journalism itself. You discuss with another who wonders sadly, “Where are the readers?” Only to discover that he is isolated from reading communities and does not know book sales numbers. You study the writing crisis to discover that a large part of it lies in other problems such as distribution and marketing. The objection to packaging and lazy freedom in presenting the idea is not the idea itself. You will be shocked at how many specialists and large consulting houses “hard-boil” their future theories.
