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SONALLAH IBRAHIM would get us a quantity of books from a popular area and there would be books on magic, religion, physiology, etc . . . They were a great source of culture for us. Was there something that attracted you to cinema that you were later able to incorporate into fiction? In the sixties there were very active art, literary and cinema movements and this had a great influence on me.There were movies that affected me a lot, such as Kazan’s film on Zapata and the films of Lelouche and the French NewWave.The new kinds of expression in art, cinema, theatre, sculpture: all of those were tremendously influential for us. For me personally, there wasTheTimes Literary Supplement, for example, which was important and there were always new things coming out, such as spontaneous writing – how someone could sit in a coffee shop, take the newspaper and write what they saw in front of them, read and poke a hole through the paper and then use what was visible through the hole. There was this kind of immediacy to the creative process and the search for new forms. Who would you cite as your major literary influences? I think Ernest Hemingway was influential for me, for the simplicity of his sentences and his precision.There was also an Egyptian novelist namedYahya Haqqi who cultivated what he called scientific writinga sentence had to be precise and the information correct and simple. You know, that sort of direction. Then, every adventurous literary experiment, especially experiments in form and technique, which broke with convention, had an influence on me.There are dozens of things that are hard to remember. Do you feel you succeeded, in any particular novel, in achieving what you were aiming for? Are you prouder of any specific work than the others? Or would you prefer not to say? That is a very difficult question to answer because it is not possible to say . . . I mean, I always feel that I could have written that particular novel in a better way so I try to do so in the following novel, which means that it is a never-ending process, never-ending. 50 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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P h o t o: P a ol aCr o ci a ni BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 51

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SONALLAH IBRAHIM

would get us a quantity of books from a popular area and there would be books on magic, religion, physiology, etc . . . They were a great source of culture for us. Was there something that attracted you to cinema that you were later able to incorporate into fiction?

In the sixties there were very active art, literary and cinema movements and this had a great influence on me.There were movies that affected me a lot, such as Kazan’s film on Zapata and the films of Lelouche and the French NewWave.The new kinds of expression in art, cinema, theatre, sculpture: all of those were tremendously influential for us. For me personally, there wasTheTimes Literary Supplement, for example, which was important and there were always new things coming out, such as spontaneous writing – how someone could sit in a coffee shop, take the newspaper and write what they saw in front of them, read and poke a hole through the paper and then use what was visible through the hole. There was this kind of immediacy to the creative process and the search for new forms. Who would you cite as your major literary influences? I think Ernest Hemingway was influential for me, for the simplicity of his sentences and his precision.There was also an Egyptian novelist namedYahya Haqqi who cultivated what he called scientific writinga sentence had to be precise and the information correct and simple. You know, that sort of direction. Then, every adventurous literary experiment, especially experiments in form and technique, which broke with convention, had an influence on me.There are dozens of things that are hard to remember. Do you feel you succeeded, in any particular novel, in achieving what you were aiming for? Are you prouder of any specific work than the others? Or would you prefer not to say? That is a very difficult question to answer because it is not possible to say . . . I mean, I always feel that I could have written that particular novel in a better way so I try to do so in the following novel, which means that it is a never-ending process, never-ending.

50 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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