An interview with Leila Ghorbani

Hiyam 

February 15, 2023 - 18:3

In its time, war is a cruel, violent, and destructive phenomenon, yet this destruction is sometimes not era-specific.

Literature may be a weapon in all of those cruel times, but the benefit of literature is that it transcends time.

Leila Ghorbni, the author of "Hiyam" said that this novel captures the actual atmosphere of battle while highlighting the role of women in it. She added that jihad is an act of society. The fact that women participated in the war by providing support and supplies was clear evidence that the Prophet (PBUH) and Imam Ali were in favor of women participating in jihad.

She pointed to the reason for writing the book and said: “In our interactions with the committee for the missing martyrs when I was a university student, I met people my age who had not witnessed the war but had sustained significant scars from it. That's when I made the decision to write this book, which serves as an example of those people.”

Ghorbani talked about the book's writing process and said that "Hiyam" includes eight chapters, is written in a fictitious form, and has very basic but lovely prose.

According to her, in this story, the interpretation of the character's thoughts has been avoided, because she wanted the strong point of this novel to be the language of common understanding and be free of misleading complications.

The author claims that she avoided interpreting the thinking of the characters in this story because she wanted the book's strongest aspect to be its use of straightforward language free of confusing complexities.

When asked about the name of the book, the author explained that "Hiyam", which means mania and excitement in Arabic, was chosen because the protagonist, Sara, is a prime example of a person who, in search of the sweetness of love, finds herself in the depths of the world's most bitter phenomenon—war—and experiences a strange love.