Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, Part 6: Haunting as Inheritance

Episode Topic: Haunting as Inheritance

How does language haunt the displaced? Join Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, and Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora, as they explore “linguistic slippage” and the “untranslatability of the self.” From post-revolutionary Cairo to the Arizona desert, discover how spectral forces beneath the English language shape modern identity. Listen in for an essential interrogation of life in the “in-between” spaces.

Featured Speakers:

• Hannah Lillith Assadi, Columbia University School of the Arts
• Noor Naga, Alexandrian writer

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This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance.

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Transcript

1 0:00

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to everybody who's joined us online. Um, welcome to the Initiative on Race and Resilience and to tonight's Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance event. Um, come on in, there's more chairs. Um, featuring Noor Naga and Hanna Lilith Assadi, who is here. I'd like to begin by thanking my collaborators and by acknowledging our generous sponsors, um, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, which is director, directed by Professor Mark Sanders,

Welcome

1 0:30

where our series is housed, um, the Institute for Social Concerns, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Graduate School, the Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grant Program, the American Studies Department, the English Department, and most importantly, the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. I'd als- al- also like to thank Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series in Boston for collaborating with us. Welcome to all of those who are joining us online. As most of you probably already know, the aim of our series is to bring global Anglophone writers of the Greater Middle East, North Africa, together with American writers of color, and to spotlight books that address questions of exile and displacement. I'm grateful to our authors today for accepting our invitation. I'll introduce them briefly so that I can spend more time talking about their novels. Noor Naga won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and the Ar- Arab American Book Award for her novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English. The novel was also shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Hanna Lilith Assadi's Sonora won a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize. Her third novel, Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming in 2026. We are joined today by my colleague, Francisco Robles, who is an assistant professor of English, Latino studies, and gender studies here at the University of Notre Dame, as well as the co-editor of Post-'45 Contemporaries. His book, Coalition Literature, is out this March with Stanford University Press. Woo-hoo!

Novels and Language Ghosts

1 2:32

Both Sonora and If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English explore the haunting silences of displacement and document the ruptures of self, time, and place that are inherent to experiences of migrancy. These novels are written in English, but they are imagined in multiple languages, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French. While reading, I had the distinct feeling that these other languages existed as spectral forces beneath English, that these multiple other languages were disappearing into English while English was also always on the verge of being subsumed by them. This linguistic slippage or ghostly invasion, though hovering out of view beneath the plane of the visible sentences, is meant to be palpable, is in fact one of the central dramas of the novels. The experience of watching languages and the selves that are attached to them collide and disappear into one another is at once unsettling and clarifying. Unsettling because the reader becomes witness to the porousness of the characters and to the ways in which the absence of cultural and linguistic fluency can at times result in a diminished command over the self, in a kind of despairing search for belonging that exposes the characters to violence. Clarifying because both novels are lucid in their efforts to make evident the turbulent confusion of hybrid identities, of half belonging to a place, not being safely cordoned off from the wider world by the clear boundaries of a singular national identity or by the imperviousness of monolingualism. Reading Naga and Asadi's work brought to mind Cathy Carruth's Literature in the Ashes of History, in which while tracing vanishing histories in the context of the wars of the, of the twentieth century, she writes, "At the site of this disappearance, however, we can recognize the persistence of language or a writing that emerges precisely as the archival resources of meaning and tradition slip away." Very early on in Noor Naga's novel, we are confronted with the female narrator's linguistic angst. At the airport, passed from window to window in search of the right entry visa, she writes, "All the other Egyptians glared at me as I moved apologetically up the queue. I wanted to explain that I was one of them, that I had been in line earlier and paid my dues, but my Arabic..." The sentence ends with an ellipses. Those three suspenseful dots contain the burning absence of belonging and the feelings of defenselessness that ensue. She's constantly being grilled. Why are you going there? Why are you coming here? The novel, true to those animating questions, takes the reader here and there. It is told in three distinct sections. The first traces the burgeoning relationship between an Egyptian American girl and a boy from a rural town outside of Cairo in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. The second follows the dissolution of their relationship, and the third folds over the first two, creating a kind of hall of mirrors in which we see the story we have just read being workshopped back in America as a memoir. All throughout, Naga writes deftly about questions of gender and racial belonging, about how the binary racial codes of whiteness and Blackness along which American society is organized does not translate neatly or at all onto other geographic realities. In fact, it is this essential untranslatability of the hybrid self that ushers in the novel's stakes, the death of the boy. And yet from the purview of her peers in workshop back in America, her grief over an abusive boyfriend is incomprehensible and even offensive. All of the nuance flies over their heads, and what we are left with in the end when the workshop leader turns to Noor, the character in class, essentially handing her the mic, is her stunned silence. The novel ends with that, with the total absence of speech. In Asadi's Sonora, the main characters, Ahlam and Laura, move from Arizona to New York City. In the Arizona sections, the indigenous nations of the greater Sonora region and the violent history of colonialism are a constant presence. A series of mysterious suicides occur in the desert, as though the land, rancorous and retaliatory, were avenging itself. The Arizona desert also becomes a portal through which Ahlam experiences the desert of Palestine, from which her parents, her father fled. This fluid spatial architecture gives expression to Ahlam's sense of perpetual loss, and underscores the multidimensionality of her identity as an American-born daughter of an Israeli mother and a Palestinian father. Asadi writes, "I understood later that the place my father was from had disappeared into a new name, or an old name, and that it was easier to say that he was from the Holy Land." In contrast to her father, Ahlam's mother never speaks about her past. What we know is that she was disinherited for marrying a Palestinian man, and that this severance activates an implacable silence in the marriage, rendering the world incre-increasingly illegible to Ahlam. A crisis of translation ensues. Unable to integrate the oppositional forces of her heritage, she drifts through the various spaces of the novel, somnambulant and semi-conscious, as though she were floating through an underworld. The theme of absentee parents, of homes beyond reach, of literacy and illegibility are echoed throughout the novel. Ahlam carries her father's stories. She inherits his bewildering grief, and in the absence of historical accountability, weaponizes that grief against herself. The novel, which is as much about female friendship as it is about the violent incursion of politics into family life, is told in elliptical form, with chapters repeating themselves, August, February, April, August, February, April, as if time were one continuous loop replaying itself until finally, once Laura tragically dies, we get October. We see Ahlam and her parents standing next to Laura's father by the coast in Mexico, about to spread her ashes into the sea.

Time Language and Silence

1 8:59

Both of these novels unveil the psychospiritual pressures of belonging to a stateless nation, or to a nation in flux, or to two or more diametrically opposed nations. The scope and scale of the characters' consciousness fluctuates as they translate themselves, as they be-they become aware that the translation is always incomplete, a certain fluency, frequency of their character failing to make it across the divide from one linguistic register to another. Time too becomes a palimpsest. The subjective perception of its passage shifts depending on the language that is being inhabited or felt. These novels are as much about historical time as they are about geological time and subjective time. While I was reading them, I could hear the Algerian theologian St. Augustine asking, "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him to asks-- who asks, I do not know." Even though I am a writer and language is my material, I find it to be-- I find language to be just as mysterious as time. One could ask, "What then is language? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." That's the gift of both Sonora and If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English. They lean into the mystery of language, into the resonant silence between words. Unbridled and sonorous, exacting and precise, they invite us to interrogate our relationship to language and its capacity for transforming our consciousness. So welcome, Hanna, and I think, uh, Kyla just went downstairs to get Noor, so right on time.

Speaker 2 10:53

Toni Jackson? It's okay, I see this So each writer is gonna read for a little bit and then we're gonna have a conversation

Speaker 3 11:04

Um

Speaker 4 11:06

Does this... There we go. Can you hear me? Okay. Um, that was so beautiful. Thank you. Can we commission that to be on the front and back cover of my book, and then nobody has to read what's inside? Um, thank you so much for having me here. It's, it's a real pleasure. Um, I'm just gonna read from the beginning of Sonora, so I don't think you need any context. I also haven't read from this book in a very long time, so I'm just gonna, you know, remember how to read from it. But, um, yeah, it, it came out a while ago, so it's nice to revisit. But forgive me if I stumble. Okay. "I see us in the dusk beyond as we once walked in a land wrought for ghosts. The coyotes' silver coats marring the dark. We walked despite their weeping, unrepentant and desolate. It was only at dusk that the land was thronged by spirits, the wind in the brush, a moan, a song. My memory of it is folded into one long night, one melodic collapse into the blue-black bigness of the night sky. From the canal, we returned home, my father and I saying nothing at all, through a brief and feral silence until streetlight. It was August when we first arrived, the month of monsoons." The carpet was thick and scratchy and a stained maroon. The blinds never quite closed, so the rooms were always pierced with angled sunlight. Smoke, Turkish coffee, and cat shit pervaded the apartment. We always had a male Siamese blue point, and when one died, we got another, and they were all named Sharmut, the Arabic word for whore. When my father wasn't driving a taxi, he sat in the after-school hours, a cigarette in one hand, a glass full of ice and vodka in the other, watching battles roar in deserts on the other side of the planet. My mother worked the night shift at Denny's, the only restaurant in what was once a small town, and as a secretary for a dentist during the day. To relax between shifts, she retreated to the bedroom and watched aerobics tapes, never quite fully following the moves, resting on the floor at the first sign of sweat. Every day, my father and I walked through the desert to and from the elementary school. In the morning, guiding us silently were Laura and her father. Though we never spoke, it was established that we follow the path they had carved before we ever arrived. Laura's father always wore a sombrero. They never seemed to notice our following them. They never turned around. In stretches, my father yanked me from walking too close to jumping choya, triggered by even the breeze, resulting in an entire arm or limb smothered in spine. I never paid attention to the threat at every step. I was always watching Laura. She wore sandals every day, her magenta skirt blew in the brief wind. It was ankle, ankle length and tied at her waist with string because it was too big, and it was not just that the color was her favorite, but the item she would miss forever once she had outgrown it. We all had one. That magenta skirt was always violent beside the dull brown surroundings, but the rest of her, her skin, her hair, was brilliant beneath that sun. She was all caramel, luminous. She walked without fear, as if she were made of the desert vegetation, made of cactus, made of dirt. I yearned to know her even then. Nothing else was of interest on those walks. The sky was always blue, cloudless, our skin, no matter the month, hot to the touch. Sometimes I became lost in the fancy of a fairy tale tied to the articles of clothing, caught in the branches and beneath rocks, a single dirty sock, an abandoned shoe. The desert, so dead, was always littered with our leftovers, evidence of the living. I do not remember how many months we trailed the path of Laura and her father, but I remember the morning the entrance we had used into the desert was blocked off by orange signs. There were three construction workers sitting with cigarettes in the shade of a palo verde. Laura and her father were nowhere. A police car with its siren lights going pulled up beside us. The officer rolled down his window, asked if we needed assistance. "You know where you are, sir?" My father shook his head and pulled me close as if my body were a shield. "We used to walk here," he muttered. A year or so later, the cacti were removed for the scaffolding of the high school Laura and I would attend. Before there were any windows or floors, there was a flagpole. The football field was finished first. The workers slept beneath the bleachers, the only shade that remained. It was an ugly view, all that steel rising up against the mountains. My father said it would never be finished. I hoped that he was right. I was never a girl who yearned to grow up. Some nights while my mother was at work, my father and I took drives in the taxi he called his Battlestar Galactica. The engine softened the coyotes' howls. One of these nights, we drove by way of a dirt road that rose up into the Superstition Mountains. On the drive, one arm out the window with a cigarette, my father spoke of other deserts where he once lived, deserts populated by gazelles, undulating dunes guarding hidden djinn, where beyond us only stick figure saguaros stood. He played the classical station on the radio as the soundtrack for his stories until we passed into the range, where it became too quiet to have music on, even in the car. "There is treasure here, piles and piles of gold," he said when we entered the mountains. The Arabic moon, a crescent, was a sliver on the horizon. Venus blazed below. My father grew quiet, at last humbled by his present setting before embarking upon a new story set in the desert in which we found ourselves and featuring the range we soon would become stranded in. He told me of the Lost Dutchman, who on his deathbed had given his nurse the secret directions to a hidden gold mine in the Superstitions. "Maybe we can find it," he said, "and when we do, everything will change." I stared out the window, looking into the black range for some glint of gold. "When you're rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it," he said. "Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend." A few minutes later, the engine died. The view we had had of the night sky was now blocked by a veil of mountain. The lights of Phoenix had disappeared miles back. "Are we lost?" I asked finally, watching my father on the hood of the Battlestar, waving for reception on his foot-length mobile phone. "Go to sleep," he said. I pretended to sleep as he smoked his Parliaments, finishing one, and with each extinguishing bud, beginning another, surrendering only when the dust had risen so thick it covered the stars. My father jumped into the car and closed the windows. Everywhere there was thunder. The sky was torn asunder and purple, and there was the rain, thick on the windshield, thick on the steel of our Battlestar. I know that I hadn't fallen asleep when the sounds of the storm dissolved into a chorus of voices, their screaming emanating from within me instead of without. I know that it was not a dream when I saw Laura. She was just outside our window, dressed in a charcoal gray cocktail dress. Mascara streamed down her face. Her hair had lost its dark luster, turned ashen. Her body was still her girl's, her body was still a girl's, but her face suddenly that of a woman. She was tied upside down from a saguaro cactus, crucified by way of her legs rather than her arms. She began to swing as the wind picked up, the dust rose. She was weeping, her eyes prosecuting wide. "Soon you will be blind," I wanted to say, but the wind was so bellowing and the sand so swirling between us, it was difficult to tell which of the two of us needed the warning. My father shook me, and I came to. He was speaking in Arabic, reading verses of the Quran over my forehead. I was covered in sweat. "I feel cold," I said. "It was just a dream," my father said. I'll stop there. Thank you.

Speaker 2 19:45

Can we give a warm Middle Eastern welcome to Noor? Woo! So what's your part? Can you read?

Speaker 5 19:56

Okay. I didn't know I was reading.

Speaker 2 19:58

Oh, you didn't? Okay.

Speaker 6 19:59

So you can just- No one told me, but I can read if you want. Oh. I borrowed a book from someone. Um, hmm. Well, we'll, we'll let you eat your cookies first. Yeah. Um, maybe I can just start with my first question, and then you can settle in a little bit and- Okay yeah. Thanks for- Um, we're so glad you finally made it. Okay. I'm

1 20:18

sorry

Speaker 6 20:18

it was such a, such a difficult journey.

Speaker 2 20:21

Just like Zoom.

1 20:23

Oh, yes, of course. I mean, I wasn't saying anything im- that important.

Writing Between Languages

1 20:27

But, um, so I wanted to talk about this question of language. Uh, Noor, I was just saying that the, the novels are written in English, but they are felt and thought of in multiple languages, and that the other languages seem to be, like, subsuming English, um, or disappearing into English. And there's a quote from, um, the book, uh, Azadi that says, um, by Arundhati Roy, that, uh, says, "I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was. What was, is the politically correct, culturally apposite, and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write? What is it like to write in English?" And I just kinda wanted to open that up to both of you and see where we land.

Speaker 2 21:16

No. No. Give her a second.

Speaker 4 21:20

Is this on? Yeah? Okay. Uh, what is it like to write? Just recovering from my... I mean, English is my only fluent language, unfortunately. I mean, I grew up hearing Arabic quite a bit, um, but I don't have a choice, so that's an easy... Sorry, it's a really short answer. Do you have to go now?

Speaker 5 21:43

Okay. Okay. Um Yeah, I don't know. I, I think that, um, both of these... I think that all languages kind of have, um, have a certain kind of texture, and they dictate in some ways what you can say. And I think it's m- maybe harder to see that if you've got the one language, but if you move a little bit back and forth, it's, it's always kind of amazing to me, um, who I am in Arabic, which is I become immediately much more conservative. I become my grandmother, actually. Um, yeah, and much more sort of domestic and, um, traditional. And I think it's, it's partly, but also sort of more emotional. Um, so for me, strangely, lang- uh, Arabic has always been the language that I've, um, loved in, and I've never loved anyone who doesn't speak Arabic. Um, yeah, so I think that, that... I think it has something to do with it being sort of a, um, one of the early languages, so it sort of, for, in me, in my, for my life. So it, uh, it reminds me of sort of all that intimacy of, you know, talking to your, your brother or your sister when you're a child and the kinds of arguments that you have and, um, language around cooking in the kitchen and, uh, you know, how do you reassure someone when they're hurt and they're crying. All of that happened in Arabic, so it's a very emotional language for me. Um, but also I think that when you're... I mean, I'd be curious to hear what it's like for you. Uh, I mean, I also write in English. I don't write in Arabic, but it's, but I'm, I'm curious whether you struggle with feeling, uh, observed in English in a way that, um, or, you know, it, it sort of opens up the narrative and there's all kinds of, there's just all kinds of problems with it, and there's so many stories that I think you can write, uh, sort of in a different language that then it controls who can read it, and then there are certain assumptions you can make about who your reader is, and you can skip over certain things. And, um, there's a feeling with English, because it's so global, you have no idea who your reader is, and so you almost have to kind of hedge your arguments a bit more. Um, but maybe you have thoughts on that, either of you or you.

Speaker 4 24:09

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, um, yeah, I mean, I think we, we kind of can't control how we're read, and we know that we're being, like, siloed by, right, based on identity or name or appearance, right? Or, you know, the subject matter. So there's, there's that even if I am writing in English. But I do think even though I have never been fluent in Arabic, sort of being immersed in it and growing up in it, like, there is something that seeps in. I mean, just what you're talking about, the emotion that you've only loved in Arabic. I think that's so interesting because there is a way in which it's just a more, like, I ha- I hate to say this. This is a little bit mean to anyone who does- There's like a little bit more of a loving language. Like it's a little bit more expressive and, um, and there's a musicality to it that's like even if I don't have it fluently, which is, I feel a tremendous loss about actually every day. Um, but like it's still in me somehow I feel, you know, even though I don't, I can't access it, um, on the page. Um, and I don't, I don't know what that is. Like, yeah, how that- I actually think- It's like in my blood somehow.

1 25:15

Yeah, I think you do access it on the page. Like to me it felt like the cadence was coming through, but not just that, but the elliptical form of storytelling, the kind of, you know, f- the fragment, you know, the way that time operates in the novel. Um, it's not linear. And I think that those are all part of like the Arabic literary tradition. Um, maybe it's just from being... You know, I do think that the languages that we don't speak but that we grow up around haunt us in a way, in a good way, not necessarily in a bad way, or that it can feel like this grief that's really like a frequency is missing, right? Um, yeah, so it's a constant companion. Yeah. Thank you for those answers, Francisco.

Speaker 7 26:01

Well, um, I'm gonna, I, I wrote a bunch of questions, but I'll skip to one that I think is actually maybe following up on this, which is, um, I think this is something for both of you a bit. Um, at one point in your, in Sonora, uh, Hanna, you write, "There is a body of history ever atop us and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two we are crushed." I was thinking about like language is actually operating in a similar way, um, even the sort of discourses that we use to explain ourselves or to understand the world. So, um, to me that was a spatially very interesting moment 'cause, uh, what does it mean that history is atop you and then there's, uh, memory within you? Um, and then we are between them somehow. So I wanted to have you think about that. Like where is that middle space located, or even if, um, the way that you two have been talking about negotiating language or history or culture, um, can you speak a little bit more about those between spaces or those middle spaces, or even just- Where do you imagine the we, uh, there? It's just a very cool moment in the novel.

Speaker 4 27:02

What is the soul? Um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think, yeah, I, I, I think I struggle with this a lot, and I think probably everybody on the planet does in their own, uh, respective way, right? I mean, we're sort of, like, born into a set of circumstances, an identity, a town, uh, it has its weather, it has its politics, it ha- you're born into a class, you know. Um, and you are these things, you know, they're a part of your makeup, but, you know, you are also a sum of your experiences and all the ineffable things that also make you. And sometimes, you know, the, the external is just crushing. You know, it's, it's crushing to kind of find a space to... for your soul. I'm, I'm, I'm not trying to be, uh, facetious here. I'm being serious. But I think that's maybe what I meant. Again, I wrote that paragraph a long time ago, but I'm glad it still works. But yeah, I don't... Yeah. What do you think?

Speaker 5 28:04

You ke- you keep doing this.

Speaker 4 28:05

I keep... We're both, we're both answering the questions, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 28:09

Um, I mean, uh, I mean, uh, m- I think I understood your question a little bit differently, so I'll answer it the way that I understood it. But I was more thinking about what does it mean to sort of be an in between, uh, in between worlds, you know? Um, and I guess maybe just because I was thinking about these two languages and moving between them. Um, and I think that because I am someone who lives in two languages, but also between many worlds and is often, um, assumed to be kind of a local in different spaces where I have just arrived, um, I think that, um, I'm very interested in how when you're coming from a certain culture or language or just environment and you move to a new space, the kinds of things that you notice are not the kinds of things that a local in that space notices. You're, you're surprised by the wrong things, and you're, um, you know, totally blasé about things that are surprising. Um, and so, uh, yeah, I think that, like, m- most of my work is in some way about what it means to kind of be an outsider and different levels of, of outsider and how we, um, as groups, uh, sort of protect our in-group status by excluding other people and all this kind of competitions for authenticity that I think is, um, sort of very alive in the sort of identity politics of our time. So, uh, yeah, so that's kind of what I'm most excited about in terms of the in between.

1 29:47

I wanted to ask a question about the, just the role and the theme of silence in both of the novels. So I'll read two quotes, um, if I can manage. How am I gonna do this? Will you keep your

Speaker 5 29:59

finger there?

Speaker 3 30:00

Yes. Thank you.

1 30:01

Um, so in, in Hanna's book, um, this is about, about the chara- the narrator's father. "When his family left Palestine, he was smuggled out in the night in his mother's arms at four days old. 'Silence is my first memory,' he would say. 'My mother had her hand over my mouth to muffle my cries. What baby is not allowed to cry at birth? That is silence. That is real silence. Do you see how lucky you are? A child in America, no war, just peace and prosperity and a beautiful big desert to play in.'" "This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing form makes fools of us both." So it's also about the narrator's father. "We're pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go. We were both more convincing Egyptians in New York than we'd ever be on this side of the Atlantic. There, I had enough Arabic to flirt with the halal guys and the Yemenis at my deli. At school, identity was simple, my name etched in hieroglyphics on a silver cartouche at my throat. I could say, 'Back home, we do it like this, pat our bread flat and round,' never having patted bread flat or otherwise. But here I keep saying I'm, I'm Egyptian, and no one believes me." I thought that was just the way that she's silenced, uh, or silences different parts of herself or activates different parts of her identity in these spaces. I was just wondering if you guys could-- At what point in the writing process did you maybe think about the, the theme of silence, if at all?

Speaker 5 31:50

Okay, fine. You take that one. You take that. Um, yeah, I think that, um, part of what, part of how silence operates, at least in, in this particular novel, is that, you know, um, it's one of the first, uh, indicators of where you're from. So, and I guess it's true for most places, but I mean, I'm sort of thinking specifically about how in Egypt people can, they can just read you. Um, and, and it, I think it has to do with how the economy works. So because so many things don't have fixed prices, if you, if you bring home a plumber or you go and try to buy mangoes, the price is gonna depend on who you are, and it's gonna depend on how you speak and what you look like, and people are really amazing at reading you, and they c- they can sort of pinpoint you exactly. They can say, you know, "Yeah, yeah, y- y- you're Egyptian kind of ethnically, but you grew up in the Gulf," for example, versus you grew up in the States, versus they, they can sort of read you. Um, and my, my theory has always been that it's, it's because they need to capitalize on that, um, which is how people get, kind of get so proficient. But, but yeah, one of the things I was so interested in with this particular character is in her effort to blend in, um, you know, she can sort of get away with it so long as she keeps her mouth shut. But then as soon as she opens her mouth, her, her Arabic is a betrayal of the fact that this is not her native tongue. Um, so was kind of, I was kind of interested in how, um, in how much information we are communicating when we speak that has nothing to do with literally what is being communicated, um, but all that kind of, uh, extraneous inter- information. Um, and there's a wonderful, um, organization called Forensic Architecture. Do you know them? Yeah, they do all this amazing work. Yeah, but they, they, um, uh, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the, the sort of artist and founder of this organization, um, uh, talks so often about how, um, in sort of police interviews and in all of these different legal cases, oftentimes when people are being interviewed, um, there's information that is being used against them based on how they're speaking. So they might be asking him something and the, the questions are relevant, you know, like, "Where do you live?" Or blah, blah, blah, whatever. But actually what they're listening for is, um, is the accent, and then they can tell if he's lying or not, and then this could be used as evidence against them in court. So there's, there's all these ways in which kind of, um, h- how we speak, uh, can be really incriminating and dangerous, um, and I'm really interested in that. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 34:41

Um, yeah, it's interesting to hear that passage once again. Sorry, my, my lack of familiarity with my own novel, but I-- 'cause I've been thinking about, you know, in the last year and a half just I'm, I'm the, a mother of two young children, and I've been, like, thinking about the mothers in Gaza, like To have to, as their babies are crying, you know, like, just in addition, like I... That just, like, haunted me, you know. I just kept thinking, you know, like, as this was happening. Um, so anyway, that passage sort of just, like, called to mind, like, something that has just, like, on, been on my mind. Um, but in terms of just, like, silence as a motif, I feel like, you know, the desert can be at once a very quiet place and also a very loud place. But, but and, you know, the, the book sort of transpires across New York and Arizona. But one of the things, I had spent some time back in Arizona, um, you know, as, uh, at the end of my father's life, and I played this video, like, on my phone. It was just a, like, I was just in New York. Like, it was a video, I was somewhere in New York, like in a yard or,

Speaker 6 35:51

you know.

Speaker 4 35:51

I don't... And the background noise coming up on the video was so loud because there's just this constant, like, constantly, you know, sirens somewhere and, like, planes flying. Like, and it was just, like, it was, like, sort of, like, amazing to me to hear that. Like, and I think there is, like, s- maybe something about the silence of certain spaces versus sort of the inhabitants of other places in the book. And now sometimes even when I'm in my yard, and I live in, like, a relatively quiet part of Brooklyn, I think, but sometimes I just close my eyes and I'm like, "Oh, my God, it is so loud here." I mean, there's just constant noise and, like, um, what does that mean that I require that maybe, you know, as a, as a person? But I do definitely think it's something that's interesting, and I think just as writers we know, like, just like poets, like when to use blank spaces and when to use silences and when to, like, break out of a scene, and I think it's just, it's an important tool.

Speaker 7 36:52

Yeah. One of my sisters lives, like, right next to the BQE, and it's unbelievable. Uh, I- It's insane. That

Speaker 4 36:57

is

Speaker 3 36:57

insane,

Speaker 7 36:58

yeah. I, I can't, uh, I just can't spend much time there. Uh, I mean, I love being there, but it's also just so unbelievably loud.

Geography Landmarks and Setting

Speaker 7 37:04

Um, this question is, um... So I, I wrote a lot of my questions, um, for Hanna based on, uh, this novel plus, uh, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, so-- which is, uh, her second novel. But then, um, I think a lot of these questions I wanna pitch to both of you anyhow. Um, so one of the things that is really remarkable, and I think, um, this speaks a little bit to, or I hope it follows up on, uh, Azarine's question just now, but this is, broadly speaking, how do you both understand geography and landmarks as shaping forces in your novels? And I don't mean just, like, setting or place, but, like, geography and landmarks, because there's a very, like, specific or concrete or clear imagination of space. Um, sometimes you give particular places, sometimes you name them, sometimes you name specific, like, say, roads. There's a lot of, like, uh, mountains and roads in Sunra, for example, or in, uh, The Bells Are Not-- um, so The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, there's just, like, uh, the s- the limits of yards or beaches or houses, um, gardens. Um, but this is a tendency that, um, at least, uh, Hanna, in your writing, is wonderfully estranged by the perspective from which your characters observe these places and spaces. Like, they're noticing these very specific places, but they're either moving, or they're, like, at the limit of something, or it's dawn or it's dusk, or there-there's a window. Um, they're moving around, they're on edges, they're between spaces, they're walking around, they're in cars. They're just never, like, stationary almost. So there's-- It's both this mixture of movement and, like, circling and spiraling, but also just places that are so clear. Um, so could you talk a little bit about, um, the imaginative limits of perspective? I think maybe this is, I hope, following up on these questions of history or of silence or of language. You know, novels are perspective driven, uh, in so many ways, uh, and they're observation driven. But it seems like in many cases, uh, you're working at these limits or you're thinking about these limits, um, as affordances, but also sometimes as things that are maybe in the way.

Speaker 4 39:07

Yeah. I mean, so I, I'm really, like, obsessed with, uh, twilight, which it's right now about that nice color outside. So I think, and it's sort of this, like, liminal time of day, and so there's no, like, it's, there's no wonder why so many of my books operate around that time of day 'cause I like the palette. Um, but I think, like, to answer your question more seriously, I mean, it is, like both my first two books, um, sort of like pretty much operate within set landscapes. I mean, in Sonora there's two and, and The Stars Are Night About... Yeah, Belles. There's also actually a little bit of New York figuring in there too. Um, but the characters are never quite at home in them despite the deep familiarity with them 'cause there's always a sort of like exilic or diasporic, like, relationship to these lands, and there's like this love for them that feels like home, but isn't quite home. Um, and I feel like that's sort of, you know, like in some ways the human condition. Like, you never feel as much of, like, an Earth being until you're up on a plane and you're like, "Oh my gosh, get me down," you know? "Get, get me back," right? But there is a way in which we don't belong until we leave, and so maybe that's part of that, um, impulse as a sort of like, yeah, sort of exilic approach, uh, to, to setting. Um, and then, like, in my third novel, which nobody here has read, but I'm thinking about a lot, like it was, it's very different because the character has to move across so many places in the course of the novel. And so it was interesting for me to, like, look back on and, like, to see the places that emerge and feel, like, really, um, lived in versus some of the places feel less lived in, you know? And it, and I think, like, I had more, um, there's more to compare to there. So yeah, it was an interesting experiment to not just set a character in a place and go, you know? Um, but I don't know if you... Yeah.

Speaker 5 41:10

Um, yeah. I think, I don't know. I, I never know what to do with questions about setting as a choice. Um, but also I think a lot of the way that the questions that people ask, um The questions that people ask writers, I find it often very hard to articulate why, why certain craft choices have been made. So for example, with setting, I mean, at least with this novel, the entire plot doesn't work if it's set anywhere else. So you... It's almost like I, I will often get questions that say things like, "Well, why isn't, why doesn't this novel include anything about New Cairo? Why did you set it downtown and everything is so grimy and ugly?" Well, it's the only place that these two people would actually be able to intersect and have this kind of relationship. They would never be able to if she lived, if she lived even, even, you know, I'm talking like two kilometers north into a slightly different neighborhood, they would never have been able to meet. Um, and if they met, it would mean something different, you know? And so, um Yeah, I think that there's so much about writing that is actually very predetermined. Um, and I'm thinking of kind of George Saunders who says, "If I create a character in enough detail, it actually creates plot." Um, and I, I think that way about everything. I sort of think once you start, you're really problem-solving. You know, if, if this character's gonna meet this character, it has to happen in this way. Then, and then so if she's from this place, then she's dressed in this... And then after a while, you're not really making any choices at all. You're just kind of following along and trying to hope you don't break anything, you know? Um, so yeah. So I, I often s- struggle with that, with that question, but, um, yeah, I hope that's an answer.

1 43:02

Yeah.

Perspective Desire and Empire

1 43:03

Just based, um, off of what you just said, uh, one thing that was really fascinating to me in both novels is that there really isn't a protagonist, and that's such a different sensibility from maybe, like, white American literary tradition or, like, literary realism, where we always have to be rooting for, like, a heroic or, you know, catastrophic narrator. But in your book, Noor, you actually switch points of view back and forth between the boy from Sobrakhit, is that k- and the girl f- you know, the Egyptian American girl. And your book is told from the perspective of, um, Ahlam, but really it's, her consciousness really only exists and is activated by her relationship with Laura. And so they're deeply, like, relational books where the focal- focalization is on, on the relationship, not on a singular person. And to, to kind of expand on that, I found the, the sex scenes in both novels to be so, um, such, like, intimate explorations of the dangers and, like, perils of imperialism and the ways in which they shape and form who we desire and how who we might desire, um, could be bad for us, but might authenticate a part of us that we feel has been rendered invisible through migration. So there's one section where I wanna read from Noor's book that, um, because she didn't get a chance to read, and also, like, her language is so precise, and I thought it's such, like, a- searing examination of this question of desire and empire. Um, so she's, she's-- There's the two characters that are named are her friends, like Sami and, and, um, Reem, and it's after the relationship with the boy has disintegrated in part two. Um, so she's gone, gone to see her friends after a while, and, uh, she says, "I introduced him to Sami and Reem at Reem's house party." So the... She introduces the boy. "Naturally, they were..." Sorry, William, which is a different, a different, um, guy that the character is intimate with. "Naturally, they were impressed, his British accent being what Sami aspires to be, and his shitty French giving Reem plenty of opportunity to tease and correct him. They put on a good show. 'So white meat's the flavor now?' Reem yelled drunkenly in Arabic. She was rolling a joint on the back of a book while I watched. Having discovered that Sami had lit my first cigarette, she was eager to claim another first for herself. 'You've had your fill of dark meat already? I'm no drumstick, but if you wanted an ethnic experience, I'm Egyptian too, born and bred. My grandfather is even from Aswan. Tell her, Sami,' she yelled. But she was in a good mood, and so was Sami." So I thought that was so interesting, like this is after the relationship with the local b- rural boy has ended, and she, uh, sleeps with this British guy named William, and she feels like she's growing taller again in English, and she's funny again. Um, but I love this take, like it was so spot on.

Speaker 3 46:14

Um,

1 46:16

yeah, so I don't know if you guys wanna speak to all of those questions

Speaker 3 46:23

I think the Zoom's gone,

Speaker 5 46:24

yeah Okay. Okay. Well, I don't know what the question is, but I will riff. Um, I, I think that, um, I think that this, the question you're asking is about how, um, there's so much politics actually in who we love and how we love them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, um, I think I've always, I've always been so interested in that actually at the expense of, like, genuine romance. Somebody was asking me recently, "Why don't any of your characters actually love each other? Why is it always that they're sort of at like, you know, at war with each other through sex or through love, and it's always a way of kind of jostling for something or getting something that you need?" Um, and maybe it's sort of a cynical view about human relationships, but I, I sort of think there, there is so much about who we choose that is inexplicable to us. Um, and it's only, it's only really sometimes afterwards that you can look back and, and understand what kind of, what the pattern was or, or why at a certain moment you kind of turn to a particular person. Um, but I do think that at least at the, the sort of central dynamic in this book, um, you know, each of them, uh, was feeling disempowered in some way. Um, so the girl, uh, really wants to be Egyptian- Yeah you know, and she's, she's sort of... And I, I hope it's not too hard on her. I mean, I, I hope the book isn't too hard on her. I do sort of sympathize, and I do understand this kind of, um, intense longing for belonging. Um, and you know, she's on this great quest, and she's gone across the world, and she's really trying to, um, she's trying to find herself in this, in this new place, you know. Um, and it's hard, and she doesn't, and she's not able to sort of fully read what's going on. And so for her, uh, he's a sort of, uh, a native experience, and he can sort of bring her in, and he can, he can make her a sort of insider by proxy, um, by kind of being her guide. Um, and, um, and likewise for him, uh, you know, he's in a sort of moment of defeat. He's, he's very unemployed. He's very, very impoverished, and he also has these addiction issues. And, you know, this woman comes along who, um, you know, if she had been raised in Egypt, this relationship would never have happened 'cause a woman of her class would never sleep with someone like that or have a rela- It would never have hap- But she doesn't understand the rules, and she's coming from New York where there's a very different kind of understanding of how class operates. Um, and race is really the big thing. So, so, so I'm really interested in, in sort of, um, in those, uh- Uh, I guess exploitative sort of dynamics, these undercurrents that are, um, running through especially relationships in which there is a sort of something a little bit unconventional. They're not from the same world. I often kind of think, "Well, what's going on there?" You know, what are they each getting?

1 49:36

Yeah, it's so interesting because she says in part one, like, as he becomes progressively more abusive and violent, "I would never put up with this in New York City, but this version of me in Egypt, um, is like accepting this somehow." And I think there's one of the driving questions is like, is it racist to say that you have to be sexist in order to be Egyptian? I mean, it's so... It's such a difficult question to fully answer, but I think the book grapples with it really beautifully. There's also a lot of like sex scenes in your book, and some of them are violent, but you really describe the aftermath of the sex scenes, which is so interesting and, um, I don't know if you... You don't have to speak to this question if you don't want to, but I thought that there was a lot of like the grief was driving those choices too.

Speaker 4 50:23

Yeah, I mean, I, I'll just briefly say, I mean, I think something in your introduction sort of about like the, the, the inability to find oneself sort of turned into, I don't know, you said something about a self-destruction, right? Um, I can't, I can't say it as beautifully as you did. But I, I think there's something about desire and, um, and which, you know, this sort of like temporarily, right, the boundaries dissolve between, um, the lover and the beloved, right? And there's something really compelling about love or about obsession, um, especially for somebody who doesn't want to be themselves, right? Or doesn't want to have to be stuck inside of themselves. So, um, certainly like that plays a role in this book, but in my work as well, you know, I think. And I think with Laura, like what you said, that her consciousness is sort of activated by her. There's a way in which the sort of boundaries between them keep dissolving and then reforming 'cause it is sort of the primary love story of that book. Um, even though it doesn't, you know, it's romantic, but not quite sexual maybe in one instance, right? So, um, yeah, I mean, I think, I, I think I'm interested in, in like this sort of like Rumi Sufi way and that sort of like love as a sort of, um, um, method of dissolve, you know, dissolution. Um-

Speaker 7 51:55

Yeah, that's actually, um... Some of the things that you just said, Hannah, uh, remind me there's, um... So the character Laura, that's not her given name, right? We're told at one point. So there are two questions I'm gonna ask here. One is, um, about the sort of like mixing, doubling, or confusion in your work, but then also, uh, Nur, in the way you were talking even about how there are sort of two selves based on the language. Um, so maybe about this, like, two-ness and what that does to the, like, act of narration. Uh, like, what does it mean to have, like, different versions of yourself that maybe can focalize or think about narration? So in Sonora, there's this moment where Alam's father calls her by her mother's name. Uh, and it's always when he's, like, half awake or half asleep. And actually, her mother does the same thing. She calls Alam by, uh, her father's name, uh, when she's, like, half awake, half asleep. Uh, they're, they're, they're always dreaming, uh, it seems. Or not always, but they're often dreaming. Um, so the, the novel also has this sort of, like, present tense anchoring narrative, and this is where a lot of that confusion happens. But, um, at one point, Alam, uh, is called Ariel by her father, uh, pri-primarily because, um, it's, it's in a moment when he's trying to keep her safe, but then also she uses it as a sort of, like, pseudonym throughout the rest of the novel. Like, she will call herself Ariel, or Laura will call her Ariel at certain points. It seems like it's a passive-aggressive sort of needling that, like, friends do. Uh, she'll sometimes be like, "Oh, Ariel," um, to her. But then we find out that, uh, you know, on her birth certificate, Laura's name is Sonora Galvin. Uh, so that was, I think, really interesting. So can you speak about this a little bit, like the sort, these sort of doublings or these sort of two-nesses? Um, maybe it's about just to sort of, like, maybe straightforwardly think about what it means to be split-

Speaker 3 53:36

Yeah

Speaker 7 53:36

by competing forces, or maybe there's something else. And then another question I'll ask later is about, like- devouring and home. Uh, 'cause you talked a lot about, like, desire just now, so yeah.

Speaker 4 53:45

Yeah. I mean, I think, like, there's a, a political agenda in my doubling, right? Like, you know, so many mountains, so many landmarks in the, in Arizona where I grew up were, have indigenous names, but they're called, like, the McDowell Mountain Range, right? Like, that's what's on the map. Um, you know. Is it the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America? You know, like, but so, you know, like na- you know, like names are incredibly political projects, and they're, you know, a part of disappearing people. And so, you know, part of that doubling is, like, you know, my speaking to that in some way or my commentary on that in some way. But on a more just, like, autobiographical level, like, my dad would, like, I guess, is it code-switching? I don't... He would, like, use different names sometimes depending on who he was around and, like, if he thought that being Palestinian would not be okay in an environment or, you know. So, and, you know, his name was Sammy, so it wasn't, like, super. But I, you know, so he sometimes-- And he grew up, you know, he spent a lot of time in Italy, so he would, he had this pseudonym that he went by, um, that was Frank Leone. And his, like, best friend also had a pseudonym, and they sort of, like, did this thing, you know. And I, you know, it's a little bit problematic probably, but it was also could be funny and, uh, so I think I was sort of using that. And then just, like, I don't know, I always, like, sometimes I call one daugh- I have two daughters, one daughter by the other. You know, that's just, like, you're in a sort of rush or a blur. But, um, but really it was about the sort of, like, how we erase names, and what we're really doing is erasing peoples, um, which is part of that. Um, and Laura sort of her real name being, you know, one name for that desert. But do you have anything on this or?

Naming Power Imbalance

Speaker 5 55:32

Um, well, the question I always get about the names, um, is why doesn't the boy have a name?

Speaker 3 55:39

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 5 55:41

Um, well, she's given my name in the end

Speaker 3 55:43

In the end.

Speaker 5 55:44

Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, I don't know why I brought up that question 'cause I actually hate the question, but I just thought that is the question that you would ask, you know. Like, that is where we're going. Um, but yeah, I think, I think I, I think I agree. I think that it's, it's an in- it's a powerful thing to name someone obviously, and, and it's also quite pointed when you don't. Um, and frankly, I wanted to sort of, uh, create a little bit more of a power imbalance and so, um, you know, because the book is so much about kind of knowledge production and who gets to tell what kind of narratives and then where those narratives are packaged and resold, um, and then how different markets kind of encounter them, um, I was sort of... It, it felt, it just felt really correct that of course, uh, things are gonna end so badly for this boy and, and on top of everything, he's not even given the dignity of a name, um, which felt, I mean, you know, write, I, I sort of write in an extremely linear way without really knowing where I'm going. Um, but I sort of felt right from the beginning when these two characters kind of intersected and I didn't fully understand what was happening, I sort of thought, "Oh, this is going to end very badly, and I know who it's gonna end badly for," even though there's a sort of danger that they're passing back and forth and they're each dangerous to the other person in a different way. Um, but it, it, um, ultimately the sort of the, the access that comes with being American and speaking English and having a way out, being able to leave Egypt, which is something that, um, I mean, the way that Egyptians talk about Egypt is like there's inside and there's outside, outside being anywhere outside, you know. But, like, there are so few people who can leave, you know. And so just by virtue of her, they're both kind of newcomers to Cairo, but by virtue of her having flown from the States and having an American passport, it means that she, she'll, she's gonna be fine, you know. And he's, um, m- much more precarious even though he's the one who's in the country he was raised in, and there should be some kind of insider protection there. Um, but there, uh, there isn't, not, not in this particular situation. Yeah.

1 58:07

I have no idea what time it is. Does... Can anyone tell me? Okay, 6:30. I'll ask one last question, and then we can open it up to the audience. Um, so, uh, in both of the books, there's obviously, you know, politics, the politics of the Egyptian revolution. There's the politics of, um, Palestine and the occupation of Palestine, and then there's also 9/11 happens in, uh, Sonora. So I just wanted to read two brief excerpts and maybe talk about how, like, these books where the politics are just there, like informing everything, but they're not being explicitly named or explored or-- It's a, it's a really interesting choice. Um, so in, in Hanna's book, it's the father talking. He says: "You are right. That is because I don't understand English. I am an alien. I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies. The Middle East is like a black hole," he said, his eyes red, stoned. "Maybe they should have left me in the road on the way to Damascus. Maybe I would have been mistaken as a Jewish baby. That would have been better, much better. Then you would have been a rich little girl, and I would know all the right words to the songs." And then I'm really interested in, like, the question of, of drugs and the Egyptian revolution and how long the Egyptian revolution went on for and how it's still kind of an ongoing struggle, um, and then the way that the protesters had to document everything themselves. Um, and so the, the boy is also, like, a photographer, but his camera has stopped working. Um, he himself hardly slept. Back in 2011, a single line could keep him awake for three days. The drugs were passed out with the sandwiches and water and vinegar and yeast. Boys as young as 12s w- were emptying cigarettes in order to stuff them with warmed hashish, loose tobacco, or else begging to lick the wrist of someone else, um, had snorted off. He says nothing makes for revolution like cocaine. Um,

Speaker 5 1:00:16

yeah, I think, uh, so part of, partly, uh, the s- the setting, um, in time is really important for this novel because it's, it's 2016, 2017, which is actually just far enough after the revolution that it's, um There were sort of a, there was a few years of energy initially where people were excited, lots of, um, Egyptians who lived abroad came back in the hopes of kind of rebuilding the country. Um, and, um, by 2016, 2017, we had the sort of our financial crisis and the Egyptian pound dramatically devalued kind of overnight. Um, and, um, and it was only really then that people understood how the revolution had failed, um, and that it wasn't going... That this was the new reality and things were not going to improve, and this wasn't a sort of transition period, and actually things were only gonna get worse. Um, and so it was, it was, um... I don't know. For me, it was a sort of pivotal moment, um, for my generation, which would have been the ones who were involved in the revolution, um, because they, they... At, at that point, you've, you've lost too much. You've got too many people that you know, that you love, that you care about who are in prison, and they're not coming out. And, um, and so it's a sort of moment where it's a moment of defeat, and it's a moment where you, you, you... I mean, the expression that people use is like, "I, I broke up with the revolution." Like it was, it was a love affair, it was a dream, it was a moment, and I'm, I'm done with that, and now I'm, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna look after me. I'm gonna live my life. I'm gonna try to do the best I can in this economy. I'm gonna try to leave if I can. Like it, it used to be there was a, there was a time when it was a sort of political move to say, "I'm gonna choose to stay. It's a shit show, but I'm gonna choose to stay here, and I wanna s- I wanna see this out. I wanna see what I can do. I wanna contribute. I don't wanna be part of the brain drain." Um, and it... People don't talk like that anymore. Um, but this 2016, 2017 was really, um, the moment when all of that changed. Um, so yeah. So I, I think, you know, it's the, the revolution is kind of backdrop to the novel and it's, um... Uh, and, and it's, it informs so much how these two characters interact with each other because the girl's sort of big crisis is that she comes too late and she's missed it, but she's not just a little bit too late. She's years too late, you know? Um, and she sort of watched it on TV, and now she's coming to this place and, and she's got all these ideas and everybody else is completely jaded. Um, but also there's this guy who, who because he was so involved and sees himself as on the front lines and also associates the revolution with his own kind of personal, um... I mean, this was the time when he was the most professionally and financially fulfilled and felt like a real somebody, you know? Um, and so he's able to kind of live through that by telling her about it, and, and that's where he draws all his sense of kind of self-worth from. Um, and it's exactly the thing that she's self-conscious and insecure about. So it's-- So I'm, yeah, I'm constantly kind of interested in how it's, it's sort of exactly this particular tiny little insecurity that matches so perfectly with somebody else's tiny little, you know, um, ego attachment or whatever it is that creates this kind of really perfect storm. Um, but yeah

Speaker 4 1:03:58

I forgot the question. No, I think, I mean, yeah, there's politics. Yeah, there's lots of politics, like steeped into the, uh, that was the question about the politics of the novel. Yeah. And I think like, um, you know, um, I was born in this country, you know, I am an American, you know, I am, I'm many things. But I think like the, the, the, the monster I'm contending with is this, this country. And so per- for me, um, setting it in the Sonoran Desert and a landscape in which so much had been erased, you know, was to contend with the genocide and the displacement that happened here. And even though it is, it, it is speaking to Palestine, um, of course, you know, that was the, I think in, if I have to like condense the politics of the novel into one thing, it would be actually about America. Um, so I'll just leave that there.

Speaker 3 1:05:01

Yeah. Thank you. So we'll open it up to audience questions. You can pass the mic around

Speaker 8 1:05:17

Uh, hi folks. Thanks. I'm here. Thanks for, uh, these really interesting points. This sort of last, uh, discussion of 2016, 2017-ness, um, had me thinking about, uh, Devika Rege's Quarterlife, which I just finished reading, which is also set in this 2016, 2017 moment, right? Um, and I was thinking about maybe a generational shift in, uh, politics, what I'm maybe thinking about as like, uh, millennial novels, right? Like what does it mean to write, uh, from a generation that has now ascended the, you know, we're now, we're here now, it turns out in the literary world. And so maybe a question is about what you consider yourself to be generationally in terms of where this fiction is living, uh, who its interlocutors are. Uh, what I thought was very interesting about sort of, uh, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is it's sort of like form-breaking quality feels, um, generationally different from other sort of like going back kinds of stories, right? So there's like a, a formal reckoning with what is possible with the, with the novel. Um, so that's one way in, but I was just wondering if you had thoughts on this generational question.

Speaker 5 1:06:35

I mean, I think that the Zoomers are not yet publishing. Like, they're, they're, they're working their way in now, but I don't know that... I think I would need another 10 years to be able to speak to kind of how the novel as a form is, has changed from my generation, which would be a Millennial, um, to all the young people coming up. I don't know, I don't know what the sort of, um, what the concern would be, um, because Yeah, I guess I'm, I'm, I'm thinking of this in a sort of unfair way because all of the young people that, uh, whose writing I read are my students, and so that's a very different kind of relationship and they're in a, they're in a different place. Um, but yeah, I think that there, there is a particular form that like the post-colonial novel or the going back novel, um, you know, the diasporic return, the great diasporic return to the homeland. Um, it, there, there are certain tropes and it, it tends to be, um, you know, there, there are sort of versions that worked and were sort of iconic, um, at the time and then I think, I think it takes a long time for people to realize they don't have to do it in that way. But there are these tropes where, you know, like, I don't know, after Salman Rushdie, like every novel set in South Asia for a while ha- often fell into, um, certain, uh, yeah, certain tropes. Um, yeah. What do you think? H- do you have thoughts on-

Speaker 4 1:08:11

On, no. I mean, uh, yeah, gen- Zoomers or Gen Z? Is that what... Yeah. Um Yeah. I mean, I'm sort of interested in Gen Z. I, yeah, I d- I, I, I al- I also don't... I do think there was a time, I mean, I will just sort of, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I feel like there was a time where there was an expectation of, like, writers of color or writers of certain backgrounds that they had to write this particular sort of novel. Like, that was at the publishing industry expected, and I know that was, like, a lot of the response to Sonora 'cause Sonora was published in 2017. And when it first went out, it was, I would say, it was out, it went out to publishers, I mean, I think it was 2015 or 20, yeah, 2016 maybe. And it was always like, "Well, it needs to be more this," you know? And it wasn't doing that, you know? And so I do think it's maybe there's more room now, you know, that, um, yeah, that's, that's the way I would answer that. Like, maybe there's more like, oh, you know, these are real people. Yeah, not just mascots.

Speaker 5 1:09:18

Actually, if I can, if I can add on to that, I think now that I'm thinking about your question a little bit more, I think that actually what's happened is that when, when we were sort of coming up, we were, um, dealing with a lot of kind of post 9/11, like, uh-ness towards Arabs and towards Muslims. And so a lot of the literature that came out of that period was doing this, we are human, you know, we look at us, we're just like you. Um, and it took a long time for, I think that that wave is, is dead now. But there was a long time in which the whole point of, um, minority characters, but specifically Arabs and Muslims, was just to say, "Look, we're not terrorists, we're human beings, and this is," you know. Um, and so I think that- Yeah, I think we're in a place now where we're no longer, um, writing in this sort of reactionary, uh, and sort of defensive way. Um, but it took a long time to feel safe enough with the audience that you could do that because even, um... I mean, even a nov- like, even this novel, which I, I really didn't feel that I was doing that at all, um, you know, talk, talking to the center, but I still get tons of Egyptians who are very uncomfortable with it 'cause they say, "Why do you make us look so bad in English, in English to these, to these people who speak English? And now they're gonna think Egypt is this horrible place." And I said, "Well, I'm sorry." You know? Like, you know, it's, it's this idea of you're airing our dirty laundry and, and that's the kind of thing that if you did it in Arabic wouldn't be a problem, but doing it in English and exposing yourself. Um, so I think that I... my hope is that we're sort of at a place where we're no longer writing in that reactionary way and we can just trust our audience to be intelligent and not racist and do, like, a little bit of research if they don't understand something, and then we can tell stories that, um, yeah, are just more, uh, true and less didactic

Speaker 3 1:11:27

Thank

Writing For Yourself

Speaker 3 1:11:28

you. This was a really interesting conversation. Um, I, I, I wondered who you were writing for, and subsidiary question, are your novels translated into Arabic?

Speaker 4 1:11:43

Okay. Um, who am I writing for? I think, uh, you know, I think, like, it changes depending on the book or the project in some ways, like an audience or an imagined audience. I mean, in some ways I'm always writing for myself, right? Like, I have to, I have to do something. It's, that's the urgent, you know, first reader and first writer. It's always... And then, you know, but there are, like, more generous impulses involved in that too. You know, like this last book that is not out yet, I wrote in the aftermath of my father's passing, and in many ways it's for him, although he won't read it in the way that we, we hopefully we will, right? Um, but I think like, yeah, it's for me ultim- you know, as the first, and then, you know, hopefully we have more audiences than that. And then, uh, Arabic, no. N- not, not yet translated.

Speaker 5 1:12:39

Um, my Arabic translation is coming, but the problem is my, my friend, I wanted my friend to do it and my friend wanted to do it, and then it's my friend, so I can't be like, "It's been two years," you know? So he keeps being like, "After the next book, after the next one." This is what happens. Um, but anyways, um, yeah, I think, I think it's, I think it's true. I think we are writing for ourselves and, um, and me and, um, Adeline, yeah, we were having this conversation also yesterday about just the importance of being able to, uh, hold onto yourself as the first reader, um, and make aesthetic choices that, that you like, that you really, that you actually like and believe in. Um, and I think it can be difficult to do that, um I don't know. I mean, we were talking about it in the context of MFAs where you're getting all this sort of very premature feedback about something that's still kind of developing. Um, and often feedback is things like, "Well, I would like to see more of..." You know? And it's like, well, it's not about you. You know, it's not about what you want actually. It's about what I want, and that's, that's... You know, and it's so hard to sort of hold onto that, I find. Um, but, um, but I, I think that that's kind of where a lot of the, a lot of the magic happens. Yeah.

1 1:14:04

It's just, it's really interesting to, to tie the two questions together because I think that, like, the responsibility was on us, the burden of, like, making the reader feel safe with this kind of whether... And before, before 9/11 it was, like, the literary tourism of, like, take me to this country and show me around demand. Um, but then it was like, "Oh, you the terrorist. If you're gonna give me a narrative, make me feel safe as the reader." But I think that now it's sort of shifting to, well, what does it mean to be safe when you're writing, and to, like, just be with yourself and not have the privacy between you and your work be punctured? And then to give a story that is actually about lived lives and not, um, representative lives, right? Which are so much more shallow and, um, yeah, like closed systems. But I think we have another question. Yeah.

Speaker 9 1:14:57

Hi, sorry. I'm behind the pole, so you might not be able to see me that well. Um, and sorry if my voice shakes. I'm nervous. You're both, like, really great authors, and I, like, feel awkward speaking. Um, I guess my question is that both, uh, books deal with this, um, question of identity, especially in, you could see in gender and culture. And as a 20 s- some- 21-year-old. I was about to say 20-something. 21-year-old coming up in the world where it's, like, a great divide on gendered ideas and cultural ideas, what would you want, I guess, my generation to take from these novels and to, like, use into everyday life?

Speaker 5 1:15:42

Oh man, I, I mean, we were also talking about this, but I feel very stressed on behalf of the young generation because I, I mean, I don't know about you, but when, when we were learning to write, uh, you know, MFA programs and undergraduate creative writing programs were not this like machine that they are now. And so, you know, you, you were doing it on your own. You were reading, you were writing on your own, and you had a lot of privacy to sort of develop. Um, and I, I feel, um I don't know the sort of the way that MFAs, to be perfectly honest, well, I don't, I don't know if I wanna be perfectly honest, but, but what I'm gonna say is just that, um, something about the way these programs work is they create this, like, professional trajectory. You know? You do the creative writing classes at the undergrad, and then you apply to the MFA, and then you do the MFA, and then you start querying with agents and, and you, you can sort of like imagine this, um, this career path. Um, whereas actually the sort of like the learning curve and the arc that is required m- might not align with that at all. Um, and I think personally, I found workshops extremely frustrating, not for the reasons that are, you know, indicated in part three of this book. Not at all. I had actually wonderful classmates and wonderful instructors. I didn't have any kind of problematic, microaggressive, uh, you know, peers. But, um, but I do find that, that if you're working on a, a big thing, a novel in particular, they're... it's not well-suited to the workshop. I mean, workshops are great for short stories. They work for poems. They don't work for big structures at all, at all. It is disastrous. I mean, it's terrifying to me the fact that people have to bring in, you know, opening chapters and chunks of their novel and say, "Well, what do you think?" And I think, "Oh my God." You know, you, you generally I feel like for my generation, we had so much privacy to sort of to work through that very, very, very slowly and not show people until we were ready. And of course, you have to get feedback, and I think it's really important. But just, um, I, I, I think... I guess what I'm trying to say is you, you might be in these programs, and you might think, "I don't have it in me." And it's not that you don't have it in you, whatever that means, it's just that this process might not be a- aligning with where you are or what it is you're trying to do. Um, and I find that sort of scary, so I'm stressed on behalf of you all. Yeah.

Speaker 4 1:18:28

Yeah, I mean, I just to take the question a little bit beyond the MFA in terms of like generational advice, which is a big no. I mean, it's just a big question, and I appreciate it. But I think to like use your word privacy, I feel like there's just so much pressure just on all of us, but especially on young people to like perform themselves on social media, like perform whatever it is they feel like they should be performing, and I feel like that's like really dangerous. I mean, I, I'm a older millennial, I think, at this point, and like I have to catch myself that like impulse to do that, to like perform something for who. And like I really feel like Like retreat and privacy are like good words to sort of meditate on and just remember that, like, the only audience that ultimately matters is your own. So that would be my advice, and I'm trying to, try to follow it too.

Speaker 10 1:19:25

Okay. Hello, I'm back here. I have a few questions, but I'm trying to, like, find out how to wind them together. So the first question is, like, obviously there's similarities or somewhat similarities between your books, but you have very different covers. Yeah. So I was kind of wondering, like, what the process was behind, like, choosing the cover for your book, and then also specifically for If an Egyptian Can Speak English, I was wondering what kind of made you choose to... I've only gotten through, like, the first part, but, like, the questions for different, like, starting each kind of like paragraph-ish thing, like, with a question, um, what made you kind of like decide to do that? And then tying back to kind of the answer of, like, being a different person in different languages, and I think you kinda said, like, you feel a little bit like your grandmother when you speak Arabic. Um, whether, I guess, that can be-- 'cause I've kind of heard, like, different ideas in terms of this. Like, for example, like, my parents are Nigerian, and so, like, the Igbo that I know is, like, from their generation, and so I wonder if that kind of has to do with, like, who we're learning the languages from. But so those are, like, the three kind of questions, but yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 1:20:41

I'll, I'll just briefly take the covers one, Cynthia. I mean, you don't get to choose your own cover. I, I mean, they give you options, or they'll give you something, and you'll be like, "No." Typically, I don't know. I mean, sometimes you can offer something, but I feel like the publisher is in control. At least that's been my experience. But I feel very lucky. There ha- there was a few options that I were, was given for my previous two novels that I didn't like, and then we went back, and then I ended up liking both of them. That's all I'll say about that. I don't know if you had a different experience on covers.

Speaker 5 1:21:14

Uh, yeah, I chose my covers. You did? Yeah. Oh,

Speaker 4 1:21:16

beautiful. Okay.

Speaker 5 1:21:17

Yeah. I mean, I, I, um, I love this, uh, painting 'cause it's an Orientalist painting, and it's by, um, John Laжмите Jerome. Um, and it was, uh, commissioned by this New Yorker, this, like, curator for The Met. So I just thought, "Oh, well, that's..." And it's of a, well, it's of someone who's a Bishari warrior who could be Egyptian, but also could be Sudanese. But I choose to imagine him as Egyptian, and then it's perfect. Um, so I was really excited by that. Um, but, um, but the, the questions, uh, in part one, um, are actually derived from, uh, I had a mentor, um, Otto Quayson, who the way that he taught literature was that you, you had to kind of read the books and then you'd- you, rather than writing a sort of reflection on them, you had to write questions. And, um, and he was a, a very scary scholar, and he wanted intense, serious questions. This was... You wrote, like, three pages of one question. So, um, so I sort of, um, began to use this as an exercise in my own writing, where if I was trying to understand what is it that I'm writing, I would translate it into a question as a way of understanding, like, what am I exploring here actually? What am I circling around? Especially because I don't... The way that I write is, uh, intuitive and, um, like I said, I don't really plan things out, so I'll sort of start off with something and then not quite understand, and then... So it, it started off as a, um, as an exercise for myself, and then, um, very quickly I started to like the relationship that is possible between these questions and the different vignettes. Um, and then because I committed to that structure for part one, it's actually the reason that I've got the footnotes in part two, and it's the reason the entire part three is what it is, is because I sort of committed intuitively to this sort of aesthetic, um, choice that doesn't make any sense but felt really, um, beautiful and interesting to me. Um, and that meant you can't do that for the entire novel. It's tedious. So when you switch to part two, what are you gonna do? You need... If you just drop it, you've got something that's unbalanced. So this is kind of what I meant with the problem-solving, is like when you commit to very tiny decisions, everything else is a matter of problem-solving to make the whole thing whole. Um, so then you get the footnotes, and then in part three, how are you also gonna get another, uh... You know, it's gotta be something slightly outside of the text. So you can do marginalia, for example. You can have the text and then have little notes on the side, but it's too close to the footnotes. So then what if it's a script? Then you can have, you know... So that's, yeah, that's how I work with form.

Speaker 6 1:24:10

Hi. Um, so thank you so much for, uh, your talk tonight. Um, so I guess I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit to kind of this idea of transnational identity, um, and also, uh, maybe like third spaces in the context of displaced people or diaspora, um, and how that kind of lends itself a little bit to chipping away at that Arab identity. Um, so for example, my family's from Syria. I'm Arab American, um, and now I have a lot of family in Turkey after the civil war. Um, and I feel like, you know, now-- and, and interestingly, my last name is actually Turkish, and when I go to Istanbul, they always ask me, "Oh, well, do you know that your surname is actually Turkish? Are you Turkish?" And of course, because of the political climate, I don't wanna say, "Oh, no, I'm Syrian, actually." Um, and so I just kind of say, "No, I'm American." Um, you know, and then now because I visit family in Turkey, people are learning Turkish now instead of... You know, I don't even speak Arabic fluently. Um, and so I don't know if you guys have any commentary kind of about how, uh, that grappling with different identities and also kind of on top of that, maybe having family who's displaced, um, and feeling like you belong to more than two spaces.

Speaker 5 1:25:13

You're the Palestinian. This is you.

Speaker 4 1:25:15

Oh, no, I, yeah. I feel like you just articulated whatever I would respond to you with. I mean, like, you just articulated your own answer to your question beautifully. I mean, yeah, I, I think, uh, you know, all of us, we contain multitudes, right? Like, we exist in so many places, um, at once. But it is, it is so hard to, um, you know, like part- I feel like particularly in the past, I mean, it's always hard, right? There's always something awful happening. But in the last year and a half, for me, sort of like bearing witness to what was happening in Palestine and being in New York and sort of just the cognitive dissonance between, like, seeing things on my phone and then, like, being with my kids in a line to get coffee. And I think, like, being somehow, I mean, we're, we're all connected, you know? But being in some way, like a few degrees closer to atrocity or, um, it-- I don't know. Like, I don't know how to answer it, but I think it's very hard. You know, I think it's not, it's not, like, really hard. It's not like existentially, like, physically survival, you know? But, like, there's something, um, spiritually difficult about it, and I don't have a good answer. So I think you have a, you had a better answer.

Speaker 6 1:26:36

Do you have any?

Speaker 5 1:26:37

Um, I, I think my, my context is just a bit, is a bit different. I mean, when I, when I think of third space, I'm thinking more You know, I, I mean, Syrians and Palestinians right now, you guys have a lot in common in that, you know, y- there's a, a- an exodus of people, and everyone goes to different places. And then w- and it's not a choice, you know? It's different from Egyptians emigrating, where it's like you're, uh, you're very lucky. Do you know what I mean? So, so I think I don't have personal, uh... My family's not structured in that way, and our relationship to, um, to Egypt and to sort of leaving home, and I'm also not-- I mean, I grew up in the Middle East. I didn't grow up here, you know? So I don't have the kind of-- And I grew up in Dubai, which is, which is the, what I think of as, like, the definition of third culture because you're not this sort of neat bifurcated identity of I'm Iranian American or I'm British Pakistani. It's not, it's not this division. It's more so you live in a place where you n- can never, uh, call it home, and there's no, like, passport or citizenship that you can get. So you live there saying you're Egyptian even if you were born there and you've never been to Egypt. So, you know, Palestinians who are born in Pal- in, in Dubai are like, "I'm Palestinian," never been there. You know, you know, so, so it's, it's a... And then, and then you, but you also don't have any connection to the place where you live. Do you know what I mean? So it's not like you're half Emirati and half Egypt. No. You're just kind of this, like, floating alien, and wherever you go, you can kind of blend in. Um, and, you know, there's almost no one from my graduating high school class, for example, in Dubai who's still there. And where did they go, you know? Some of them went back home, but some of them went, went onwards. Um, and also, yeah, anyways, this so, so my, my understanding of third space and third culture is just a little bit different.

1 1:28:45

I think, is there one question in the back? We'll, we'll have that be our last question.

Speaker 11 1:28:53

I kind of want to, to follow up a little bit on, on that question and, and to what Noor was saying earlier. Um, there was a writer a couple of years ago who posted something on social media sort of deriding like, uh, the diasporic novel, right? It was like, you know, go back to, I won't say the writer or where they were from, but go back to the, the place and like understand it better. And I think it's interesting having each of you sort of be from, from those different sort of experiences. Um, and I wondered if you could speak to any of that tension or if you feel there's no tension at all between the idea of kind of the diasporic novel versus, um, that novel of kind of, of lived experience in the place and in the culture, and whether or not that, um, presents any issues also in terms of even thinking about some of the grosser parts of this business in terms of like marketing or publishing and, and how that works.

Speaker 2 1:29:52

Okay.

Speaker 5 1:29:54

Okay. I mean, I, I do think that, like, to tie it back to the first question we had about hopefully how some, some of the, how the industry's changing, I think, I think when I was younger, there was a much, um... I mean, the way that identity politics worked, um, was that there was a lot of, uh, like I said earlier, kind of jostling for authenticity, and there was this kind of hierarchy, um, uh, I think where sort of, you know, Egyptians who were writing novels set in Egypt versus Egyptian Americans, for example, who are writing novels set in Brooklyn or, you know, wherever, New Jersey or whatever. Um, like, I do think that there was a kind of, um, just a hierarchy of authenticity created, and it created a lot of anxiety and, and, and a, a lot of this is responding to kind of, you know, really, um, problematic demands of the industry to, like, give us the safari story or what did you call it? The literary tourism or like, you know, take us on a safari. So, so people ended up kind of performing, you know, you felt a, a, a need to sort of perform, you know, whatever identity that you can claim, and it became a sort of like, I don't wanna say weapon, but it became a thing that you kind of held onto, you know? And whatever you had, if you were queer, then you were, by God, you were queer. You know what I mean? Um, but you, it couldn't be a sort of casual thing because it was also what made you marketable. Um, so I think that we're, like, letting go of some of that. I think we've let go. Uh, I have, like, am happy that we have let go. That's what I'm gonna say.

Speaker 4 1:31:39

Y- I mean, how do you, and like I think we've let go a little you know? I, I think it's still there. I mean, in, within the industry, like maybe you and I who, who really wanna like, uh, but yeah, I mean, I think it's, and I mean, as for me, I guess up until this third project, I, I, I, I didn't write a book set there, right? So, um, my, both of my previous novels have been entirely set in America, and I guess so I don't know. Yeah, I didn't feel like I had that choice as a, a wr- a writer, um, until the third book. So we'll see what I'm getting into. Yeah

Closing Thanks Credits

1 1:32:19

So thank you both so much, um, for traveling Thank you and for finally arriving. And I, I have a couple things to say. First of all, I neglected to thank our wonderful coordinator, um, Aria, without whom none of this would be possible. She worked so hard. And I also wanted to thank our wonderful graduate student affiliates, um, Kyla Walker and Spencer French.