I started teaching creative writing years before my pupils and the school administration knew that it would later become a subject called ‘creative writing‘. Between 1987 and 1989, at the Collège Saint Téfiné in Rabieh, Lebanon, I taught teachers the techniques of writing short stories for children. I had not yet published a novel, but I was writing texts and short stories that I published in literary magazines and cultural supplements. I think that this first interrupted experience - and I call it interrupted because the college was closed for a long time during the Lebanese civil war - was rich and full of creativity despite its brevity. Years went by before I began the second phase, which continues to this day. 

Iman Humaidan, born in Ain Anub Mount of Lebanon, studied sociology and anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She has published five novels and various short stories and written screenplays, all translated into international languages. Her novels give women a voice with which to tell their own stories. Her fourth novel ‘50 Grams of Paradise’ won the Katara Prize (Qatar) in 2016. She teaches Arabic and creative writing at European and North American universities and her creative writing course in Saint Denis university in France is the first course given in Arabic on creative writing. 

In 2007, after publishing several novels, I began teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa as part of the "International Writing Program", and the theme of the workshop was "Between the Lines". I have continued teaching here in this way, as well as at several European universities where I ran workshops for a short period. This varied experience prompted me to write and present a book in Arabic about writing, entitled "L’art d’écrire" (Dar al-Rawi, 2010, Lebanon), which contains the testimonies of seven Lebanese writers about their experience of writing. During my years of teaching writing, my own experience was not generally (with a few exceptions) aimed at producing long texts. The texts that students and participants wrote were generally short. There was no expectation that the young participants and adults on the course would produce a novel by the end of the academic year and then publish it. In my early years of teaching, I would have thought of publishing their texts, but my teaching experience, which has deepened over time, has led me to focus on other aspects, particularly the human dimension, and therefore on a creative change in the emerging writer’s view of themselves and the world, during and after the writing workshops. This is a complex process in which language is both a witness to this change and a means of demonstrating it. This is the primary and fundamental influence. Whether or not the young writer produces a novel is irrelevant. The creation of a long text or the writing of a novel must come later, after years of reading, discussion and criticism. During this period, the budding writer draws on the treasures of literature and becomes able to write in a variety of styles. Creative writing courses alone cannot guarantee this deftness. It’s a purely internal matter. This readiness and ability requires a long period during which the student acquires literary tastes and knowledge through in-depth reading.

The writing course is therefore followed by a programme of intensive reading of Arabic and world literature, with a selection of texts and words to be discussed in class. Intensive reading enriches students‘ vocabulary and encourages them to use new words in their own texts. Meaning takes on new dimensions and becomes more bold, more clear. It’s a complex, ongoing process of building students‘ self-confidence and their ability to use and arrange words in new ways - a process during which students put aside their fears. During this time, we see an evolution in style and relationship to language, so that words take on fresh meanings. It’s about creating images and new worlds for language and text.

Writing is as existential as doing. As with all the arts, one part is talent and the other learning and practice. At first, I concentrate on both parts with my students, but I often find that I also need to teach the basics of grammar and spelling, especially as many of my students don’t have a good command of the Arabic language. This opens the door to a wide-ranging discussion about the Arabic language, educational programmes and public policies in the Arab world, or in those Western countries whose universities do teach Arabic and Arabic literature and produce graduate students in Arabic literature every year. However, academic requirements mean that the thesis or research paper must be written in the language of that Western country.

In 2015, I started teaching creative writing in France and it was the first time that a creative writing workshop in Arabic was organised in a French university (Paris 8 Saint-Denis). It was a good experience for the students who were studying Arabic literature (in their second and third years) and who needed to strengthen their relationship with their mother tongue. Although they have specialised in Arabic literature, the thesis is written in French, for reasons mentioned above. The language in which we write is an important issue for Arabs living in a foreign country. I didn’t expect university students to adopt my course so quickly when I started giving the first creative writing course in Arabic. Today, creative writing is an integral part of the university’s academic programme and is taught every year. I still remember the reaction of the students after the first course: "This is the first time we’ve learnt literary writing in Arabic", said a 20-year-old student who was writing her master’s thesis in Arabic literature. I did find it strange, because there is no doubt that writing in the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative writing. And creative writing itself is an attempt to break out of silence. It is, in a way, a rebirth of man and an attempt to question everything that is taken for granted, to demolish it and then to rebuild it.

However, students‘ mastery of the Arabic language does not mean that there are no other problems, because writing spills over into all the human sciences, philosophy and politics, and reflects the thoughts of the novice writer and his vision of himself and the world. 

During my years teaching creative writing at the University of Paris 8 Saint-Denis, the level of fluency in the language varied among the students. There were students motivated by a desire to learn and discover and to write creative texts, students who came to learn but who had obvious linguistic weaknesses, and others who had a fairly good command of the language but who loaded their texts with phrases and expressions as if they had just come out of religious books, with all the cognitive reflection that these phrases have. It took a while for the students to understand that I was waiting to read what they had written, not what others had written, and that they had to create their own words, phrases and thoughts instead of taking phrases and expressions from religious books. Of course, they can use some foreign phrases, as long as they treat them with courage and creativity, breaking down their contexts, building on them and using them to create new meanings in their text and to support the story they are writing.

Obedience to texts over which the students have no control undoubtedly deprives them of one of the fundamental principles of creative writing, namely confrontation with the dominant language. Language is a means of expression and liberation, but it can also be a means of oppression, drawing a line between what a writer feels and what he or she says. It can turn into an enormous binbag of meaningless words and insignificance. What should we do in such cases? What should we do if some students, from traditional and religious backgrounds, are afraid to take up the challenge of rebelling against mainstream language and enjoying the pleasure of deconstructing it and building their own language? The role of the teacher is challenged here - they need to be able to go above and beyond simply the teaching of writing. It becomes a task that supports the liberation of the mind from its dependence on dominant and dominating power in language, expression and thought.

It is here that I turn to an urgent and necessary discussion of the relationship between language and religion. A closed religion, which treats language as if it were a dead body or a closed box, not only kills language, it also kills people. And it does so every day. I’m thinking now of the wonderful Syrian poet Samar Saleh, who was part of the creative writing workshop I led at the University of Iowa in 2008. Samar was a creative writer who returned to her hometown of Aleppo, where she was kidnapped by religious militias in 2014. There has since been no news of Samar.

Creative writing courses or workshops don’t just change the participants or the new writers, but also the people who run the course or workshop. It’s an ongoing process of interaction, in which we question if what we’re doing is right. If the Arabic novel as a literary form is evolving and changing, what can we say about work-shops and very recent writing styles in relation to the birth of the novel? It’s an ongoing process of training, of education in democracy (first and foremost our own, as teachers) and of expanding the creative space into somewhere new. At the same time there is the reluctance of the 'teaching‘ writer to pass on his experience to beginners and teach them how to write for themselves, in the belief that his way of writing is to write well, that his way is best. It is essential to avoid this mistake, otherwise what he is doing becomes an authoritarian activity not very different from the dominant policies aimed at constraining language and preventing any kind of writing that is different. The experience of teaching writing becomes creative when it begins with the critique of the 'I‘ and the belief that there are more creative ideas than the professional writer might propose. The role of the professional writer is to help the new writer refine and bring these ideas to fruition.

Creative writing is both a biography and a mirror. We have to start with the biography to get out of the dark tunnel and see ourselves. But there are many problems that stand in the way of learning to write. It’s not just a question of knowing how to write a novel or a story, but of knowing how to write a new sentence that doesn’t repeat or imitate what has already been written. One morning, a heated debate broke out in class between the students on the subject of women’s rights, status and personal status laws in the Arab world. The discussion became heated after a student named Mona read a story she had written on the subject of biography and autobiography. She was a mature student, having returned to university in her forties to study literature after deciding to write an autobiographical novel which she had started some time before but had not yet finished. In a soft voice, Mona told us her story of marriage and divorce, another marriage and then another divorce - each time, her husband had refused to allow her to train and prevented her from starting work. In her story, she went back to her childhood and teenage years and realised that every time she tried to fulfil one of her dreams, a man stood in her way and blocked her. The students‘ comments during the discussion were mixed. One of them attributed the man’s violence to his surrender to the teachings of religion. Real, lively discussions like this have given me a responsibility that goes beyond teaching writing techniques. It is the responsibility to oppose a 'standardising‘ vision of reality and the world, which is relevant to millions of people in the Arab world.

The text submitted by the Mona may not have met all the technical requirements of creative writing, but it did ask some profound questions about the reality of women in our countries. These questions showed a critical spirit and a desire to confront reality. And it would be difficult to describe writing as creative if it lacked criticism and confrontation. When Mona finished, I said to myself that I had succeeded, to a certain extent, in doing what I had been working towards: getting the student to speak without fear and to break down the protective wall between the idea and the paper, or between what was going on in her head and heart and what she was writing on the computer screen. The student said that this was the first time she had been able to write her story. She added that the topics discussed had given her the courage to read her text in front of her colleagues, and that was the most important thing. As she wrote, she returned to a particular memory that she thought she had forgotten. For the first time, she could express the pain that had accompanied her since she became aware of her femininity, and tell how her love had been punished, how her long hair, of which she was proud, had been cut off by her brother, and how he had locked her up in the distant family home where her old spinster aunt lived. Mona had started to tell her story and would not stop. The first part of the story was a chapter from an autobiographical novel.

I really don’t know whether we’ll ever see Mona’s novel in bookshops or whether she’ll become a famous writer and win prizes. The important thing is that, in her story, she brings her questions and doubts to the ears of the reader or listener, fulfilling the first condition of creative writing, linked to breaking the silence and overcoming fear, so that the conventional, the traditional can finally be called into question. Here, writing in the mother tongue can finally bring life back to the table for those who live far from their homeland, and encourages a reconciliation between the two places and the two languages. Life becomes more real and less conflictual. Indeed, the narrative is not just about telling a story, it’s about a wider and deeper discussion about life and violence and tyranny, about people’s dreams and loneliness (and that’s exactly what happened between the students after listening to the story). The result is a rethinking of our vision of the world, of interpersonal human relationships, of relationships between men and women. It is also an urgent and much-needed space for creation. The discussion that took place between the students after Mona’s story didn’t stop there. We stayed with the theme of women and men and Arab society for a week. We needed to discuss religion as an obstacle to women’s rights and language as a means of democratic expression. Questions about religion and masculinity and their relationship with society and people’s daily lives were raised by the female students and a small number of young male students. They successfully negotiated this minefield, avoiding potentially disruptive explosions, and the stories were able to flow.

Mona is an example for many young Arab women and men who experience different forms of oppression. Oppression that has repercussions on language and cuts it down. I see a different and distinct role here for creative writing, one that gives participants the confidence to know that what they have neglected within themselves and encircled within a wall of taboos and intellectual stuttering is worth saying, reading and hearing. Breaking and transgressing the ordinary holds unexpected possibilities. So it’s a testing journey, and the technical part, or style, is perhaps the simplest part - I’d even go so far as to say the least important (at least from my point of view).

Creative writing is, by its very nature, writing outside the models, outside the box. We see that it is not only a driving force for the production of creative literature, but that it also changes the way we look at ourselves and at the outside world. In my opinion, this is the most important result that can be achieved through creative writing workshops, otherwise writing is meaningless and the sacrifice of trees that are killed, processed and later turned into paper for novels in which there is nothing that touches the heart or soul is meaningless. Motivating young people to write creatively means encouraging them to ask questions that seem obvious and indisputable. It’s about challenging the question, asking it again and again, and seeing reality with new eyes, in which doubt and criticism are as present as creativity.

Sometimes, when I talk to my students, I wonder what would happen if those who live on the borders of civil wars or under occupation, or who have been or are now displaced, or who have lost loved ones and are living with death at every turn, or who have experienced and are experiencing trauma, were given the opportunity to write? What if they were given the chance to write about what they see and experience? Let me quote the title of a book by the Lebanese thinker Dr Ahmed Beydoun: "What they have learned, lived and tasted". What would this type of writing look like, what would its influence be on them and how would they see the world afterwards? Wouldn’t the world become a more peaceful and open place than it is today?