The Mysterious Third River

Laura Bashrahil - Arab News

28 November 2008

Young writer catches Arab world’s imagination

Literature was her hobby; reading a lot made her passionate about being a writer one day. With support of the family, Nisreen Ghandourah, wrote her first novel in 2006.

Ghandourah is a 24-year-old Saudi who graduated from Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah with a bachelor’s degree in Management Information System (MIS) in 2005.

According to Ghandourah, when someone writes, he or she is contributing to literature, so it should be something really valuable and the writer should work very hard on the project. To her, “every word has a meaning.”

When the war in Iraq started, Ghandourah was inspired to write and she chose Iraq as her setting to reflect Saudi and Arab opinions alike on the war in Iraq.

Through three major characters in her novel, Ghandourah approached the issue of the Iraqi war. The characters were two Arab journalists that went to Iraq to

cover the war and an Iraqi who accompanied them. She used the dialogues of these three as a medium to project what people thought about this war.

“From a humanistic point of view, Arabs and non-Arabs all agreed on the same point of not wanting this war to happen,” she told Arab News.

The name of the novel “Al-Nahr Al-Thalith” which means “The Third River” in English, and is written in such a metaphoric way about Iraq. “I didn’t say it straight forward because I wanted people to think more about it,” she said.

Iraq is known as Bilad Al-Rafidayn, which is also called Mesopotamia (which means” land between the rivers”). Ghandourah, in her novel, added an imaginary river, which describes the novel’s name, “The Third River.”

“The third river is a river of tears. I said it’s tears because tears are water and water is life. It was symbolizing the pain that turns into hope,” Ghandourah added.

Her novel is not just her imagination. To her it has an important moral tale and lots of information about Baghdad. She wanted to expose readers to the city’s social life and traditions.

“We get to know about other countries by traveling, or when you meet people. Iraq has another situation because of the war,” she said. “This war was disastrous. Everybody was against it but yet it took place. The outcome of the war is a total failure. People are still suffering and terrorism still exists.”

According to Ghandourah “art loves the extremes.” One of her goals in writing is to create something new, covering areas that were not covered.

She has participated in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Beirut book fairs.

For the first time this year Ghandourah participated in the Arab Thought Foundation seventh conference in Cairo “FIKR 7” with her first novel, “Al-Nahr Al- Thalith.”

The Arab Thought Foundation is an independent, nongovernmental and international foundation. It is an initiative to preserve and promote Arab values. It is concerned with all fields of knowledge covering sciences, medicine, economics, administration, media, literature and arts, and exerts efforts to unify the intellectual and cultural action that advocates Arab solidarity, development and preservation of Arab identity.