Literatea is an interview series which brings together prominent and emerging voices in African writing, editing, publishing, translation, marketing, distribution, and retail to discuss the craft of bringing African storytelling to the continent and the rest of the world. From award-winning novelists and poets to literary agents and editors, from indie publishers and booksellers to prize juries—Literatea pours the first cup and stirs the conversation.
In this conversation about creation, re-creation, identity, and belonging Youssef Rakha talks about the costs of being a writer, and the possibility of mercy when all things have been said, written, and done.
Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. His first two novels, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles, appeared in English in early 2015. His latest book, The Dissenters, is available from Graywolf Press. He has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach. He founded and edited The Sυltan’ѕ Seal: Cairo’s Coolest Cosmopolitan Hotel, a bilingual online space. Youssef’s writing is featured in many web and print publications including The Atlantic, BOMB, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times. Frequently anthologised and translated into many languages, he has written widely on Arabic literature and Egyptian history, and his books have appeared in French, German and Polish as well as English and Arabic.
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RÉMY NGAMIJE: Let’s start here: who do you have to become in order to write?
YOUSSEF RAKHA: There are so many generative answers to this. I think the first thing to say is I had to be someone who becomes. (Less and less as I grow older, fortunately.) I am someone who grows insanely attached to things—people, habits, views—and then has to wrench themself free of those things in order for life to go on. And in that violence, every time, I become someone else. In some ways writing is paying homage to the person I was before that violence, a person who will now have died. This is not something that was immediately apparent to me until relatively recently. It’s hard to imagine anyone willingly choosing to live like this because it’s so difficult, it can only really happen in the presence of trauma—sometimes trauma makes it happen, other times it causes trauma—and it also means you don’t sit still long enough to accumulate much material or moral real estate anywhere.
In recent years, I happened to connect with more than one person my age who went to the same school—if I knew them then, I had totally forgotten them—and it struck me, it actually amazed me, how much they still lived by the strictures of that school’s community at that time: the class markers, the value system, even the speech patterns. It was almost like they’d been asleep for the last thirty years, but they hadn’t been. They just hadn’t changed as much. In time you learn to stick with the people you love, that happens, though it takes you a lot more effort than other people. But, yeah, this is the most crucial thing I had to become to write: a serial revenant.
To have access to the ghostly, magical, dread-filled spaces where people develop an identity or a personality or whatever, or lose one: I need that to write, to inhabit characters and imagine worlds, but also to care enough about a person or an experience or event to spend that kind of time on it.
And, from being someone who becomes, other answers to your question emerge. I had to become a self-aware (secular) Arab-Muslim, just because this is my subject in the broadest sense. I had to become the survivor of the Nineties literary scene in Cairo, then of the January Revolution, then the Facebook inquisitions that cancelled me for breaking with the revolutionary party line (even though there was neither a party nor an ideology!).
I also had to become the owner of a body who wanted to use it, of course—but you already know all about that.
RN: “…this is the most crucial thing I had to become to write: a serial revenant.”
That is a novel way of phrasing it—that in order to write you have to become someone different each and every time; nay, survive that process of destruction and re-creation.
Most writers have hinted at this possibility, but they almost always allude to their process (their reading or writing routines, their quests for focus, and the physical spaces they inhabit as they create). Your necessary violent transformations remind me of the Mongane Wally Serote novel title: To Every Birth Its Blood. I refer to it now because it seems to encapsulate, in a brief way, what you hint at going through.
YR: Well, it’s not something that happens every day. But to every birth its blood indeed—totally.
I’d say it’s happened once every five to ten years since my mid-teens: a realisation or an encounter forces you to reinvent your inner self, your identity, even if your outward persona stays intact. And that thing will enter into your literary practice if it doesn’t actually dictate it.
When I re-embraced my Muslim identity in my mid-twenties, that produced The Book of the Sultan’s Seal. When I stopped believing in liberal democracy in the wake of the January Revolution of 2011, that produced The Crocodiles and then Paulo. The Dissenters, my latest book, came out of the arguably even deeper depersonalisation of feeling betrayed by my cultural-political milieu. I was in the second half of my thirties by then, and Paulo was being read idiotically as some kind of “counter-revolutionary” manifesto rather than a work of the imagination. I’d put on a huge amount of weight, too. All of a sudden I felt old. I’d finally realised how dim the prospects were for my work in English translation—except for moments of political turmoil, when a usually mediocre book or author will be picked up to perform a pseudo-journalistic function, almost no Arabic books get any attention in English; it’s as if this part of the world doesn’t produce literature at all—and this must’ve contributed to the general sense of hopelessness.
RN: There is something disappointing about one’s literary work being read to serve, as you put it, “a pseudo-journalistic function.” In this respect I think Arabic works and works from the African continent share a similar fate. Unless they speak to some contrived “moment”, so many works are unnoticed because they are not in conversation with whatever has been deemed the most important talking points of that time. I think this is why the plurality of publishing platforms on the continent is important, to shape the nature of the conversation on our own terms. We will come back to this later, though.
YR: The Western approach to African and Arab writing—indeed, to African and Arab life—is something we have to come back to.
But it was the idea of having to put out another Arabic book, having to talk to inimical Egyptian intellectuals, that encouraged me to embark on an adventure I’d been toying with since long before The Seal instead: to do a Great Egyptian Novel in English.
So, in this case, to write, I had to become an English-language novelist!
It’s the only other language I can write in, but I had never sought it out to write a novel. But it wasn’t easy to find a publisher even after I was done. And, while I waited, another traumatic transformation took place. It would produce an Arabic book about the tenth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, the Shakespeare of Arabic literature: twenty poems and a personal essay in response to his work. That was my first major concession to mortality, when having been a very heavy smoker since the age of seventeen I finally stopped, then lost a lot of weight, and started swimming laps, all while reading Al-Mutanabbi every day.
Becoming a non-smoker and a sportsman after the age of forty, joining the multitudinous ranks of Arab writers who engaged directly with Al-Mutanabbi, and going through an earlyish mid-life crisis in the process—I can’t even begin to describe how difficult all that was. But it happened while I was writing and rewriting The Dissenters, which had been prompted by another transformation altogether.
So you see the way becoming leads to writing isn’t a simple or one-to-one relation. Like everything else it’s complex and messy, it’s mostly unconscious, and operates on many levels at the same time.
RN: How sustainable—is that the right word to use—is your process, though? And what does it mean for your body of work?
I guess I am asking how many of these painful rebirths you can endure, how long they take, and how often you can become who you need to be in order to produce your work.
YR: It’s sustainable, in part, because on the outside, in my dealings with the world, I’m actually a very conscientious, habit-bound person. Not quite a control freak but I need a certain amount of efficiency and predictability, I need to know what I have to do when and to get things out of the way as fast as possible. In some ways that’s the opposite of the changeable, unreliable, mercurial ghost I am as a writer.
You know there is this quote by Genet (and Genet is one of my early gods, but I think I read this line in Arabic): “Writing is the last refuge of the traitor.” Or something to that effect.
And it’s true, contrary to the current tendency to presuppose that writers are meant to be benevolent ethical agents, to write well I think you have to betray people you’ve known in some sense. You have to betray yourself, your own privacy and wholeness as a human being. You have to let versions of yourself go. So the way to make living as a writer sustainable is to pretend to be loyal when all the while you’re actually working for the enemy. To be a sleeper agent in your own life.
RN: A “sleeper agent in your own life” is probably one of the best descriptions I have encountered about what it means to be a writer. There is truth in the quotation and your interpretation of it: the gradual betrayal of one’s self, the shedding and sharing of privacy, and the eventual disappointment of those around you.
But is that all it means to be a writer? I am thinking about a writer as an ordinary person and the complex, layered roles such a person will have to meaningfully play to be a part of any group or society.
Surely the relationship is not all extractive, is it? If, ultimately, there are all of these betrayals, there have to be some kind of responsibilities that make such intimate betrayals worth it, or justified.
Does writing give nothing back to the agent?
YR: Of course the relationship of the writer to society is not all extractive, although I’d rather replace “society” with “humanity” here—the humanity that is literate in that language—because despite all pretense to the contrary we know societies are ugly, evil things, don’t we?
RN: Oh, that we do, friend.
YR: Perhaps communities can be okay, but that’s not the same thing. At this point in my life I don’t feel answerable to a society any more than I do to a nation or a religious establishment, to be frank—but anyway!
In a sense I think there is more fellow feeling and commitment to our shared humanity in the betrayal than there could ever be in a sincere interpersonal relationship, whether to an individual or a group, especially, of course, to a group, which can be restrictive and peremptory in much more horrible ways. And that’s because you’re hopefully connecting with many more people over a much longer time. But even if you have just one reader or if people are aware of you for only a few days, there is a kind of indirectness or dispassion, a kind of fairness borne of anonymity as well as cerebral and aesthetic imperatives, that surpasses what we are to each other—what we can be. It’s also because there is a discipline there, a sustained practice, which even in its least “committed” variations sustains a sense of accountability.
As to what writing gives the sleeper agent back—man, that’s hard.
Writing has given me everything I have, especially my sense of purpose, and I’m grateful for that. But, regardless of the way it has kept me from belonging fully to anyone or anything, I could’ve had a much more prosperous, comfortable life had I chosen another profession.
RN: I think most writers are aware of the opportunity costs of being a writer; they become quite clear early on, and they grow higher and higher as one grows older. I remain committed to the calling because I am not sure I could do much good doing anything else. Productive, yes. But purposefully productive? No. I guess this is the path and this is the way.
YR: I mean, there is always a chance that a given writer will get the Nobel Prize and that’s not a bad outcome as far as careers go, but the rest of us—the vast majority of us—struggle to make ends meet even as we celebrate our small triumphs. It’s not an easy life.
RN: Which mode of writing demands the most from you, fiction or nonfiction? Personally, I find fiction more extractive and nonfiction more constructive, if that makes sense, so that at the conclusion of some writing project I feel different. At the end of a story I am so tired, and at the end of an essay, I feel energised. Is this the same for you?
YR: Actually I think it’s the opposite for me, which is fascinating. I mean, both fiction and nonfiction are draining and satisfying in different ways and of course to varying extents, but I find that when I’m in the groove of a fictional project—usually a novel—things tend to happen more effortlessly and I tend to have a little more fun maybe. That’s the case even though (or because) I tend to be less clear about where I’m going compared to when I’m writing nonfiction. It’s as if there is something easier about being lost.
I think there are two reasons for this. In an essay I’m often speaking in my own voice, not that of a character, and this burdens me with the question of who I am and who I want to be to the reader. In an essay I’m also trying to say something more directly but I don’t want that to make my saying it less appealing, from an aesthetic or literary standpoint, and sometimes that’s very difficult.
Conclusions are a different story, though. For me that has to do with the size of the project and how long it’s taken me to complete it. There is always a sense of relief and, if you’re happy with it, also a sense of fulfillment. But there can also be a strange emptiness afterward, if you haven’t already started another project. You can feel lost and useless.
RN: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time to avoid that directionless feeling at the conclusion of one work? How do you choose which project to pursue in terms of the economics of writing (paid work versus a novel that you have to sell later)?
YR: I used to—until I realised that was infinitely less efficient. Now it’s more like I have multiple projects open and ready to work on, so once I’m finished with one I can move onto another. But if I want to get anything at all done I have to focus on one thing at a time. I’ve always had to do things like copy editing to earn my living, that doesn’t really change, so if there are factors other than my inclination or current obsession that determine which way to go in terms of my own work they’ll be temporal rather than economic: deadlines, or people keen on a certain thing within a certain time frame.
The good news is that as I’ve grown older I’ve been able to get paid for work that I actually want to do: translating Truman Capote, for example, or writing a film script, not to mention Postmuslim, my book of essays about Muslim identity and personal emancipation, which I’ve subtitled “The Liberal’s Grief Journal”. That’s very encouraging.
RN: “The Liberal’s Grief Journal”. Hahaha. Should I pass you the sword for your own seppuku?
Postmuslim is a good place to segue into the next part of the conversation. What about nonfiction writing, especially in the essay format, provided the necessary form or structure for you to grapple with the questions at the tip of your pen?
YR: I think the seppuku has already happened as far as being a liberal is concerned. I should add this subtitle is provisional—it might change by the time the book comes out—but it’s essential to what Postmuslim is about.
The essay form seems ideal because, unlike a short story, for example, an essay doesn’t require a storyline or an equivalent unifying factor, but at the same time it gives you arguably even more space to experiment with language and character.
I think of essays as occluded poems. They have the same effect, or should, of giving you an intense experience that isn’t or isn’t primarily the effect of storytelling. The essay is no less fictional than the story in my view, but it’s a fictionalisation that tries to appear real in a straightforward way, a fictionalisation that acquires its distance from the facts through form. In this way it enables me to be as politically explicit as I want to be but also as lyrical as I want to be, sometimes even in the same breath.
RN: When coming to that collection, what were you grappling with as a) male b) Egyptian c) writer who happened to be d) Muslim and why did the essay present itself as a way to explore those converging or conflicting identities?
There are other identity markers that we could list, of course, that would take us from A-Z, but let us focus on those.
YR: These are some seriously brilliant and difficult questions, though, so let me try and respond point by point. But first it’s important to say the Postmuslim thing, which has been with me for over a decade, hasn’t been one project—not until a year or two ago anyway. At first it was my novel The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, which is an Arabic canon-inspired book with a fantastical and speculative premise. Then it was a weekly column in the English-language newspaper I work for, and that column was polemical—a critique not just of neoliberalism and empire but also of the politicisation of Islam that seems to go hand in hand with imperial and colonial oppression even as it sets itself up against it. The current project, which is more extensive and I hope closer to the heart of the concept, is more akin to memoir. It has every kind of essayistic writing but the through-line is my life and the way I make sense of it, less belligerently than in that column, less fantastically and also in a less Arab culture-focused way than in The Seal, with wonder and sorrow, endless sorrow, even if it expresses itself humorously too.
(a) As a male, as a middle aged heterosexual male, I think I was grappling with seemingly unrelated issues—unrelated to Muslim identity as such, although of course everything is related to everything—but, for that reason, it’s an interesting thing to think about. At around the time I started writing The Dissenters, when I deleted my Facebook account and stopped smoking after nearly a quarter of a century, I started to seriously reckon with what it meant to be a father and a husband—maybe for the first time—and to take on more and graver household and parenting responsibilities. This made me think about my father, who in terms of his home life and my upbringing was more traditional. That doesn’t mean he was a misogynist or a sexist—in a lot of ways he was actually very progressive, even a feminist—but let’s just say, like practically any Egyptian man born in 1932, he was gender role-affirming, indeed parasitical in his relations with my mother, not that she minded much, and he didn’t take part in my day-to-day care. That is one spring of the grief in the subtitle, though: losing my father less than a year before 9/11, when I was young and lost and erroneously thought I didn’t need him; knowing, too, that, by the time he died, he was a committed liberal himself, having renounced his Marxist youth.
Another sense in which being male came into my critique of neoliberalism is the way a particular discourse about male-female relations and sex was being imported via the internet as a kind of addendum to the Arab Spring, which, despite possible good intentions, seemed to completely miss the point. It would take a whole monograph to get into the details of why I think that, I would need to explain women’s issues and sexual freedom issues in the Arab world, how different everything is from the West and why. Suffice to say I was really, really sick of Arab liberals speaking or behaving on the premise that if it happens in America then it must be positive and right and we should ape it as it is, without the least consideration for significant social-economic, cultural, legal, and historical differences. Sexual mores weren’t the only area where this happened, needless to say, and it struck me as colonialism all over again: black skin, white masks, and so on. It seemed very sad that a significant portion of the supposed vanguard should voluntarily be globalisation’s fifth column, whether they were aware of it or not. I happen to believe that, despite having failed to assimilate modernity in many ways, Arab Muslims are actually light years ahead of Westerners in terms of inter-personal relations and the ability to interact safely and intuitively in meaningful ways, the ability not to be so hopelessly alone all the time, and so completely dependent on material value for psychological survival. Why we need to destroy what remains of that and enforce micro-identity-oriented rules designed for a radically different social-moral setup, rules originating in Protestant northern Europe rather than the Islamic Mediterranean, and rules that will only ever speak to a tiny proportion of the population anyway, remains totally beyond me. Sexuality is not penicillin, it is not mobile telephony. It is hearts and minds as well as bodies. It is one of the very few things left we can call our own.
(b) I think being a self-aware Egyptian of my generation—and by “self-aware” I mean somebody who doesn’t take what they are for granted, somebody with enough informed access to other cultures and enough openness to difference to actually ask questions about what it means to be or belong here now, what follows from being who they are and who they are not—that’s an excellent standpoint to observe and analyse the discontents of the utterly barbaric civilisation we live under. I mean the West, yes, of course: utterly, stomach-churningly barbaric. Human life probably always felt fraught and insecure, but I don’t think man-made armageddon was ever quite so real as the present barbarism has made it, and the original liberal democratic dream of a humanity that meaningfully transcends racial and religious divisions has never felt more like an imperialist lie.
But, yeah, being Egyptian now enables you to see the world from a critical perspective, and hopefully to talk about present-day humanity meaningfully. Because although it is the very eye of the “Middle East” storm Egypt manages to stay relatively calm and stable on the whole—at least up to now, and it’s not as if this doesn’t have a steep moral price—so unlike a Libyan or an Iraqi, for example, not to mention our decapitated astral bodies—the Palestinians—someone like me can experience the horror without it destroying their life or forcing them to seek refuge where the empire that divested them can reject them as intruders. Illegal immigrants. The nerve of those people, the nerve! I might not agree with or approve of my government but I’m grateful for the fact that it enables me to go on living and bringing up my children in a safe and relatively functional state knowing that this cannot be taken for granted, not now, not in this part of the world, not under the reigning barbaric world order.
Of course being Egyptian is an endlessly compelling question in all kinds of ways, and infinitely more interesting than being German, for example—[RN: The shade!]—if you have eyes, no matter where in the world you are. My pseudo-academic essay “Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy” is an attempt to ask some of the attendant questions. But right now I’m in the thrall of this idea of a kind of historical Noah’s ark, surviving because you’ve been politically loyal to the powers behind the stormy armageddon destroying the world around you—your own people—which have use for your loyalty.
(c) A writer in this context is little more than a witness, a witness who can give testimony in a way that’s captivating and resonant as well as honest. Postmodernists might object to the idea of honesty but I think that, even—especially—when you understand that truth is relative and that there are competing accounts of the same reality, honesty is paramount. It doesn’t mean factual sincerity any more than it means ideological loyalty. And please don’t let anyone tell me that ninety percent of utterance in the supposedly anti-ideological West today isn’t in fact litanies of ideological loyalty! Honesty means something else.
Anyway writing is a job. You start out with all kinds of illusions about it but that’s what you eventually realise. It doesn’t have to be as risky as being a journalist in the West Bank, for example. But it doesn’t have to be as boring as being a bank clerk either (which for a lot of Egyptian writers I know, believe you me, it is!) In the end it’s a way to make a living, and to live while doing it, hopefully with some sense of purpose and personal pride.
You know that Roberto Bolaño quote?
RN: Alas, no.
YR: “Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick, and then there’s no other choice but to write.”
RN: Some truths truth too much.
YR: That they do.
(d) Of course this is the principal subject of the book and, in some ways, inevitably, it’s also what all my writing is about. The question of being Muslim. A Muslim who came of age in the Nineties, in particular: I was 25 when 9/11 went down. It has always seemed to me that something changed after that. Something had been happening since the Seventies and especially since the end of the Cold War, a change in the way Islam was perceived by Muslims themselves as well as Westerners: from a compatible or competing civilization to a kind of (universalist) political program, from a broadly inclusive and variable mode of being to an ideology.
After 9/11, two things happened. It became imperative to be with-us-or-against-us. If you weren’t an Islamist, that is, you had to be a neoliberal, and opposing the barbarism of the West meant supporting political Islam. (Cf the Palestinian cause, for one very obvious example: to be against Israel is to be pro-Hamas. This is not just disinformation or a semantic trick. In political terms it really is very hard to oppose Israel without at least condoning Hamas, and that is a truly catastrophic thing if you’re pro-Palestinian but believe, as I do, that Hamas is almost as detrimental to the cause as Israel itself.) The second thing is that “Islam” became a narrow, exclusive, and superficially identifiable phenomenon—even “moderate” as opposed to “radical” Islam (as if it’s not one of the world’s greatest civilisations but some kind of dangerous political orientation!).
And the worst part of that is, when you define it in that way, you hand it over if not to radicals like Bin Laden then to “moderate” Salafis who deny not just the reality of living in the modern world but the incredible richness and diversity of true Islamic history itself in favour of an absurdly anachronistic behavioral code and a reductive, delusional worldview essentially hating non-Muslims. These people become your model Muslims, the paragons and exemplars of Islam, and it’s hard to think of anything worse that can happen to your identity. Now for me what it means to be Muslim is to be aware of all that, able to reckon with it, make sense of it, and continue to live without either playing along or rejecting your identity altogether. This is what I’m all about.
RN: These answers are so well-rounded and clear they close many loops by themselves. Amazing way of thinking and seeing.
Let’s stay on the idea that writers must be honest, and that, as you say, honesty is important because there are multiple competing realities of what is true. In “I, Ghost“, in which you write searingly about the West not caring about anything except its own preservation (by any means necessary) what would be your antithetical opposite and could you, as a writer, be able to identify it and call it out?
I mean, would Youssef Rakha know when Youssef Rakha was being dishonest within his own craft (for many reasons, of course, for money, for survival)?
YR: I hope so.
I want to think that Youssef Rakha would know when Youssef Rakha was being dishonest and have the ability to intervene in any text, but I think the choice of “I, Ghost” is a particularly good one because it’s relatively easy to see the possibilities of dishonesty here.
If he was, for example, to (1) pretend that the West and Westerners are anywhere as ethical or humane as they always claim to be, many of them having had the nerve to critique his own views on the future of the Arab world on ethical grounds, or that he still trusts the liberal-democratic model that his former comrades continue to presuppose is the be-all and end-all of political struggles, or that White/Judaeo-Christian anti-Arab/Muslim racism is not a core part of the problem; (2) conflate his categorical rejection of political Islam and anti-semitism with the suggestion that he denies the Palestinian right to resistance, but also if he were to conflate his support for the Palestinian cause with condoning any kind of holy war, or if he were to pretend that the colonial violence the Western entity that is Israel-America-Germany+ is waging on Arab Muslims and Christians in and around Palestine is not a holy war; or, (3) claim that he has had an easy time interacting with the West or Westerners, especially as a young man when he knew far less about the way the world worked, and again as a writer trying to find room for a non-Western perspective in the West-dominated global discourse…
There is a very particular Western and Arab Spring activist discourse that presupposes the moral high ground even though the only function it has served in practice is to bring about collapse and catastrophe, and Youssef Rakha would be dishonest if he pandered to that discourse or suppressed the sheer rage it induces in him.
Other examples of dishonesty might include keeping sex out of my fiction, writing to the standards of a perceived zeitgeist (in the Gulf-dominated Arabic literary award scene, for example), presenting my subjects and issues in identity-branded form. That kind of Youssef Rakha might’ve been significantly more successful on the surface, but if the work is dishonest, what’s the point of success?
If I have to be (relatively) dishonest for money and survival, I will do it outside of my craft and—so I tell myself, at least—as much as anything for that craft’s sake.
RN: The idea of Noah’s ark resonates with me. I think it is why I am making more time to read. Because I feel as though “time is running out” and maybe—just maybe—the answers I seek for the questions I have about myself, my community, my country and continent, and the world are out there somehow.
If your writing is to go on the ark, it has to come two-by-two, no? Who, in your opinion, is the companion essayist and novelist that you would bring with? I am thinking of this essay—”How Youssef Rakha Found New Love in His Own Language“—and its possible influences and the other writings that could be invited onto the ark.
YR: That’s a great way to approach the question of influence, which is always an incredibly difficult question both because there are always too many influences to cite and because the strongest influences are unconscious. There are, of course, the books I encountered early on, some of which I specifically mention in “How Youssef Rakha Found New Love in His Own Language”: Beer in the Snooker Club, Story of the Eye, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, That Smell, the first few collections of short stories by both Youssef Idriss and Yahya Taher Abdullah.
But there are also later love affairs: the poetry of Sargon Boulus, especially the collection whose Arabic title translates to Lantern Carrier in the Night of Wolves, anything and everything by Roberto Bolaño but especially 2666. I would also endeavour to bring along the prose of Al-Jahiz, the verse (with commentary) of Al-Mutanabbi, the histories of Ibn Iyas and Jabarti, Lolita, and three or four novels by Philip K. Dick. I’m sure I’ve forgotten two thirds of my essential sustenance—never mind—I think this should be enough to keep me alive for as long as it takes.
Speaking of that GQ Middle East piece, by the way, I was devastated to pass the Academiyya bookshop the other day and find it totally gutted on the inside, no longer bearing any sign. My way into “portals to unexplored regions of space” will be no longer!
RN: While you were doing all of this writing, you also ran Sultan’s Seal: Cairo’s Coolest Hotel, a literary portal that published an eclectic list of writers. I count myself as one of the writers who was lucky enough to have a story staying in the hotel. What on earth possessed you to do that—start a literary magazine? That’s a particular kind of madness.
YR: It’s a beautiful kind of madness and, even though I was eventually forced to desist, it’s something I remain very proud of. Too bad it couldn’t be an ongoing success story! There’s actually a whole chain of events as to how it happened. Part of the disillusion that followed the January Revolution of 2011, for me, was realising how everything in the Cairo literary sphere was bound up with personal relations. People paid attention to each other’s work only if they knew each other personally. And promoting yourself or taking up space as a writer meant doing so first as a literary homeboy, a Facebook avatar, or a cafe regular. That was the paradigm, and it went along with a sort of tribal attitude to being a local writer: as long as we’re loyal to each other, socially and politically, it doesn’t matter what we do.
I was getting very frustrated with this not just because I wanted a real community where there was accountability and genuine literary criticism—I wanted a guild or a union, however informal, where I could provide and expect to be provided with sincere, objective support for what I did, not for who I was—but also because it seemed to defeat the object of writing itself: if what I write doesn’t exist until I tell you about it at the cafe, or on Facebook chat, then maybe we could forget the whole thing and just get together to shoot the shit.
Anyway, starting this space online—propped up at various points by my friend Carol Sansour and the venerable C.C. O’Hanlon—was my way of shifting the paradigm, or at least demonstrating that another web-based paradigm was possible. Instead of the tribal homestead where loyalty counted for everything and no one discovered anything new, I’d establish a cool bilingual hotel where brilliant people like yourself—but also a whole host of very young Egyptian writers who’d had nowhere else to submit their amazing work—could come and stay on the strength of their texts and images alone. No one had to know anyone outside of the creative contribution being made, and no one was published because they knew someone else.
And because I’d been lambasted as “cosmopolitan” for my anti-Islamist position, I made a point of naming it after a real Cairo hotel from times past; that’s where the logo came from, too.
It was a one-man show though and I just couldn’t sustain the workload, and that’s how it became an archive.
RN: This origin story pretty much encapsulates a lot of what literary magazine founders go through. It is not surprising that the same animating desires that led to the creation of Cairo’s Coolest Hotel can be found in Doek!‘s as well. Connection, community, creative freedom, and avoiding cliques—all of these things I can empathise with. So too with the stresses and challenges keeping such an initiative going.
Which brings us back to the question of African and continental Arabic literature being viewed as a monolith, as our stories being little more than explainers for unfamiliar readers.
Writing clearly isn’t the problem because we have so many good writers. So, then, it must be the absence of long-standing institutions that nurture and push our narratives forward. Methinks that is the missing piece from our respective and communal structures. What do you think?
YR: Absolutely. I agree on all counts. It’s a difficult question, however, because when you have a pseudo-Soviet legacy of centralised, state-funded cultural production you realise that institutional support doesn’t always translate to the good things you’re thinking of. Nasserism arguably obstructed and paralysed Egyptian culture, and not just because it co-opted it for ideological purposes: when you remove the element of competition—profit, or some other form of value—culture turns into corrupt bureaucracy, it becomes Kafkaesque, it pushes people away. That is all over now, thank God! But—and I speak for my experience of Egypt and the wider Arab world—what commercial drive has replaced state support is quantitatively insufficient and qualitatively very limiting, as you might expect.
Anyway, the absence of effective long-standing institutions reflects something graver and more profound than lack of money or initiative, because even when we’ve had the financial and organisational wherewithal to institutionalise, we’ve still tended to cling to Western structures, we’ve always sought to reproduce Western norms and practices, as if we can’t trust ourselves to develop our own models, to exist outside the overpowering shadow of our former colonisers.
Not that the material conditions of our lives enable us to summon said wherewithal on any scale, but I think the deepest root cause of the absence we’re talking about is the fact that certain, small populations practically own the world, control its economics and technology, and by extension hold a monopoly on discourse, including literature.
The question then becomes how we as individuals or small communities can generate and sustain a discourse that serves us, enables us to network among ourselves, gives us our own spaces and outlets, and—perhaps most importantly of all—lends those spaces and outlets the moral as well as hopefully the material weight that makes them not just widely read and admired but a sufficient target for an ambitious writer as well.
RN: Your latest book, The Dissenters, will be your latest English-language book. For me, as someone who does not read Arabic, I will get to read you without a translator, a linguistic middle-man, if you will. How did the process of writing this book, in this other language that you are so easily comfortable in, differ from your previous works?
YR: I’ve already published a collection of short stories and a long essay written originally in English. Neither, admittedly, feels as significant an event in my career as The Dissenters, although I’m as happy with the latter book, Barra and Zaman, as anything I’ve ever done; I just wish it didn’t have to be published as an academic monograph, although that’s okay too.
The Dissenters feels like an event, in part, because it has the backing of a major literary publisher, but also because as my first sustained effort at a work of fiction in English it is a kind of debut, a starting-over, and I think one way it differs from my Arabic novels—there are only really two, if you think of The Crocodiles trilogy as a single work—is that it went through a much longer genesis and, toward the end of it, had the benefit of a thorough editing process. I often wonder how much The Book of the Sultan’s Seal might’ve benefited from a sensitive, intelligent editor—in the original Arabic.
RN: God bless editors everywhere!
YR: I’m not sure what else to say about this. I’m aware of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s views about writing in the language of the coloniser, but to me English is the language with which I commune with Asians and Africans and others in a similar historical situation with whom I do not share a language or a literary tradition. Like you!
RN: Two of my favourite writers, Leye Adenle from Nigeria, and Ondjaki, from Angola, say that once you learn a language it is yours.
YR: English is as much my language as Arabic, it is also the de facto global language—the way Arabic itself once was, when people like Jalaluddin al Rumi or Maimonides wrote in it as well as their own Persian or Hebrew; and I think one creative challenge—and one difference from Arabic, where the challenge tends to be accommodating the diglossia—was to invent an English that truly reflects the Egyptian experience. The way people talk and the way they live, which they do primarily in the Egyptian vernacular, had to come through in generally intelligible English. It seems right and fair that you should be able to read me without a middle man, as I am able to read you. But for me the exciting part of this is that you will also hopefully be able to read Egypt as it really is without the need for “translation”, whatever that means.
RN: Sometimes, I think of our work in the African literary space as a struggle, a relay in which one generation of writers fights the good fight and passes on the baton to the next. In such times, I find comfort knowing that I do not have to know or solve everything—someone else will come along and do a better (or different) job, they will be able to take the struggle further and ease the burden for the next writers and literary practitioners.
One of the things I love about your writing is how you are willing to unflinchingly look at the world and your role in it, but to also provide avenues of softness—light, ephemeral moments that colour the harshness of the world in gentle hues. I am thinking of the auralgraph you sent us from Cairo in November, 2020. I guess my last question is this: what is the role of gentleness in these trying and harsh times?
YR: As writers in these geographies, we complement and complete each other across generations, absolutely. We hand over the question across place and time; even when we’re not aware of it, we do. And it’s true, that eases the enormous, utterly debilitating burden of confronting reality, looking it in the face, because you feel you’re not in this terrifying fight alone. You have legions of writers behind and around you, backing you up, lending you their skill and their power.
But all these military metaphors aren’t really helping with the idea of gentleness, are they?
I should say I was really moved by the soul correspondence involved in that auralgraph, being asked to do it and then doing it, as if I was sending my ghost south to find a home with you.
RN: It is one of our most streamed auralgraphs. So many listeners and readers have connected with it.
YR: But gentleness—it’s really a total mystery, or so it sometimes seems, considering it is impossible to conceive of outside the scope of that same cruel reality.
I often think of mercy, which is a primary manifestation of God in Islam. I often think that when all is said and done—once the apocalypse has gone down—mercy is the only real virtue, the only virtue that matters.
Perhaps there’s an equivalence there, because of the countless things that literature makes possible, being able to see beauty and fellow feeling in the midst of the horror has to be near the top of the list for me.
It wouldn’t mean as much if you had to turn away from the horror before it could manifest.