Interview with Mouloud Benzadi, author of ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon”
By: Author Mouloud Benzadi
Tags: Literature, Novelists, United Kingdom, Authors, Interview

Interview with Mouloud Benzadi, author of ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon”

M. Benzadi:

"I live in the west and what I can see and hear here is completely different from what my colleagues can see and hear in the East. I can certainly make a positive impact."

□ By Dr Jernail Singh Anand

Mouloud Benzadi, is a British Algerian author, translator and a former member of the (Algerian Arab Writers’ Union), based in the UK.



Publications:



- (Beyond the Blue Horizon), novel



- (Angelina, a Girl from Austria), novel



- (Tears and Lessons), novel



- (Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs English - Arabic), dictionary

- (Al-Zaad Dictionary of Arabic Synonyms), dictionary in more than 600 pages



Some of his English quotes can be found on quotes websites, Goodreads, blogs and books.







21 CENTURY CRITICAL THOUGHTA DIALOGUE WITH POST - MODERN VOICES











JSA: For whom the Pen rolls?



MB: The Pen rolls to express feelings and emotions inside. It can be admiring somebody or beauty, love for a woman or for life itself, or to express joy anger, frustration, sadness and pain. It can also be to express thoughts, defend universal values and share one’s experiences with the others. It is certainly dedicated to those who can read it and appreciate it. But many writings can also target general public. Most writings are destined to live for a limited period of time and a few of them will hold on and live in the hearts of people for generations and will remain there for anyone who would, over time, open the page.

JSA: What tempts you to write?



MB: Writing helps me reflect on my experiences, life, the universe around me, share my knowledge and experiences with the others and stimulate interest or action from them. As a reader, I benefit from the books which I read. Similarly, I believe that, as an author, I can also benefit the reader through my own experience and ideas shaped mainly in the British Isles. I live in the west and what I can see and hear here is completely different from what my colleagues can see and hear in the East. I can certainly make a positive impact.

JSA: What makes a work truly excellent and immortal too?



MB: Prose and poetry must express an ingenious imagination that is not within the reach of all humans. The ideas that the work expresses play an important part in that. They have to appeal to all people in all generations. Therefore, no wonder most successful books are those that promote common universal values that readers can appreciate through all generations. Great works require a great deal of attention and care. Today, authors rush to publish a book or more each year and they do not care that much about quality. How can such works become immortal?! Unlike these works realized in record time, and which can be copies of one another with nothing new, a full 17 years were needed for French immortal book (Les Misérables) to be completed and finally published in 1862. What makes Victor Hugo different from the authors of our era? Victor Hugo did not write to please a couple of judges and win a Literary Award and he was not interested in quantity. I believe that we should all learn from him and from other great authors who had a big impact in the world of literature.

JSA: What type of a sensibility is required for excellence in poetry?



MB: For excellence in poetry, we need an excellent perception of both our inner world and the surrounding world. We also need to be able to ask relevant questions and find logical answers that the reader can accept. It also requires good skills and an ability to express feelings and emotions which might be hard to put down in words.

JSA: How do you react to the great mass of literary writing on and off face book? Rather than excellence, these people focus on quantity, and some people write simply to gain a place in Record Books. Don’t you think they give the go by to excellence of thought and execution?



MB: Search for quantity instead of quality in literary works is one of the features of this era, which should be remembered as the “Literary Award Period”. The greatest and most influential authors and poets in history all wrote with freedom and spontaneity and they all wrote for the public. Today, authors and poets are more interested in pleasing Prize committees and winning literary prizes than winning the hearts of the readers and future generations.



I may have a different view about social media based on my own experience. In my opinion, social media provided opportunities for many marginalized pens to display their skills and reach large audiences. They would not have achieved this without social media in a literary scene controlled by dominant famous pens. Famous authors can afford to publish and distribute their works. They can also have them translated and subsequently can reach audiences around the world. New authors do not have such privileges. Fortunately, social media have made it easier for them to reach wider audiences across the world. I personally benefited from this. Thanks to social media, my English quotes reached all continents and they can be found today on well-known websites such as wisefamousquotes.com. But, I strongly believe that we should focus our efforts on quality not quantity and we should aim to impress wider audiences in the world not literary reward committees made up of a couple of judges. My advice for the authors and poets is “When you write, aim to please wider audiences instead of an Award Committee. A committee is a drop in the ocean whereas the audience is the entire ocean. Do not be content with a drop in the ocean. Go for the entire ocean”.

JSA: People think poetry is a remote art. Not every body’s cup of tea even to understand, because a poet, while writing, sometimes goes abstract, and his metaphors are too much for ordinary intelligence. How can we blend the two: excellence and understandability of the poem?



MB: Some poets believe that good poetry is poetry that contains difficult and complex phrases, which is a misconception. In my opinion, the poet can always write beautiful and interesting poetry in a simple way that facilitates understanding. The poet can combine good work with simplicity. Nowadays, people are busy with images, sounds, new gadgets and social media, and they do not have time or patience to read long or complicated literature. Research shows that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed in the brain at 60,000 times the speed of text. Therefore, if we want our writings to compete with imagery, we have to adapt to the new reality and try to attract the audience with nice and simple literature.

JSA: These days, too much focus is placed on printing of books, like Coffee Table books, with tempting titles. The visual poetry helps in grasping the meaning faster. But don’t you think a poet should be capable of creating images through his words? In the past, the masters had no such visual dimensions. Their poems created the magic. Today, I find that magic missing although there is a great supply of gloss and clutter. How do you react to it?



MB: Absolutely! “A picture is worth a thousand words”. I recently published an article in a top UK-based Arabic newspaper about the impact of imagery. I concluded from my research that human beings by nature respond better to visual information compared to written texts. Our brains have the ability to absorb images and videos more quickly than written texts. 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual and visuals are processed in the brain at 60,000 times the speed of text. Poetry is best enjoyed when the words are combined with images and beautiful sounds.

JSA: Where the poet tries to suppress his instincts, and is not free to say what he wants to say, he turns to metaphors and imagery. Do you think this suppression adds to the beauty of his art?



MB: Imagery and metaphor are important in poetry. They contribute to the excellence of poems and they help poets to explain ideas, describe objects and actions in a different way (that isn’t literally true, but helps catch the attention and imagination of the reader). I personally cannot imagine poetry without eye-catching imagery and metaphor.

JSA: Times have an inverse relationship with poetry. Best poetry tumbles out in the worst of times. If literary creation has fallen, or its quality has gone down, is it because the poet has chosen conformity to disobedience and free will?



MB: Not at all. I would not blame the poet. I would rather blame Literary Awards which have diverted attention from poetry. The novel takes it all. It has been the focus of attention. In the Arab world, more and more poets are quitting poetry and turning to novel-writing, driven by dreams of winning Literary Awards!



Poetry can easily regain its place in the future, if it gets the support it needs from the world organizations and if it gets its share of prestigious Awards.