FFWD Weekly
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Books by Trevor Klassen Malka Marom has emerged from the desert, and she is a study in charisma. She strides into her interview smiling with a naked ebullience, resplendent in a thowb – long tribal dress – knit for her by a Badawia, the Arab Bedouin women (the men are Badu) of the Sinai desert. Marom lived with them over two months a year for seven years. One of the Badawia likely gave her the elaborate pewter-coloured necklace which adorns her neck, and perhaps too the yellow headband about her temples. Her visitations with the nomadic Bedouins inspired her to write Sulha, her debut novel. Marom was born and raised in Israel, but later moved to Canada. She became a folk singer (her partner was Joso) and radio documentarian. Her successful career received critical praise and even included a Royal Command Performance in London. I wondered what drove her to the ostensible punishment to compose Sulha, a 14-year labour of nearly 600 pages. Once I heard her speak, however, I understood quickly that it was less a punishment than a labour of mad love. "I had to do it. It was a purging, a catharsis. The novel entirely absorbed me. I lost friends," she says in a thick Isreali accent, half joking and laughing heartily. Marom uses a wealth of body language as she speaks, waving her arms about with such exuberance when making a salient point that I fear for the life of my mini-recorder, balanced precariously near the table’s edge. Her voice is strong, throaty, its volume of sundry levels dropping and rising in accordance to her excitement. She is firing on all cylinders. The nearly universal praise of Sulha is reflected in Marom’s sparkling and surprised eyes. Her unpreparedness for the critical enthusiasm complements the uncontrived passages of Sulha. "Very little was deliberately constructed. I knew the story, but I wrote much of it on a very subconcious level. It was an obsession – it became my life. I studied Arabic to speak with the Bedouins," she says. "The book was me – it was written from a place deep inside that I could not articulate. I cannot do it even now. It was as though I was pregnant and had to give birth. And no more than you can choose what kind of child you’re going to have could I choose what kind of book I was going to write. It surprised me, really." I ask what she did, when she was not writing and researching, to unwind. It’s an idle question because she insists the book took over everything – not a meal went by that it wasn’t the main topic of conversation, nary a moment was spent focusing upon anything else. She is planning another novel, and says this one will be entirely different. "It will hopefully be shorter and have only two characters – a man," she pauses for effect, "and a woman." She offers a Machiavellian look and both of us erupt in laughter. "More than that I cannot tell," she says with a wry smile. She is tremendously busy. Her recording company, EMI, is re-releasing her folk songs. She finds it difficult to balance promotion with writing. "I have to be totally immersed to write. I can walk and chew gum, but I can’t write and promote." These pulling responsibilities are in a mild sense representative of sulha, which is one of the few words that means the same in Hebrew and Arabic: "a forgiveness; a reconciliation; a joining, repairing, making whole that which has been torn asunder – peace." Marom’s view on sulha is realistic. "Reconciliation is not all peace and love. It is learning to live with conflict, and all of us to a certain degree must do it."

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