Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

We have barely sat down at Smooch Café in Fort Greene, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Swedish author and playwright, preempts my opening line: Should we do the interview in English?

The question seems inevitable coming from an author whose work has centered around language in one way or another since his debut novel One Eye Red took Swedish critics and readers by storm in 2003. A master of words who has created his very own language: Khemirish – a playful mix of Swedish, Arabic, French, English – has now been carefully translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles in Montecore, his first novel to be published in the US. So specific is his language that he doesn’t think his first novel can even be translated for the American market.

Now, however, we decide on English, despite our common nationality and the fact that Jonas Hassen Khemiri isn’t so fond of his English self. As he put it at a reading in Dumbo earlier this year: “I always feel a little bit like a nerd when I speak English.”

Nerd or not, since then he has received not only a write-up in the New York Times for Montecore, but also an Obie Award, the prestigious off-Broadway prize, this May for his play Invasion!, which had its U.S. debut in February. (It has also premiered in South Korea.) Directed by Erica Schmidt of The Play Company, Invasion! had an early fall revival in New York at The Flea Theater in Tribeca. We spoke in September, during this run of the play.

Invasion! The Play Company production, Photo Credit: Carol Rosegg

Interview

via Folkteatern Göteborg

Katarina Matsson: Since your name is new to most Americans, let’s start from the beginning. Who is Jonas Hassen Khemiri?

Jonas Hassen Khemiri: I’m a 32-year-old granola-eating, theater-thinking Swedish writer who’s here because Invasion! re-opened at The Flea Theater – and to do some talks after the show, to sit in the audience and be very nervous, and to meet with people like you to do interviews. Then I’m going back home to Stockholm for the premiere of my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare (“Apathetics for beginners”).

It sounds like your attention is a bit divided?

It feels like my brain is in Sweden and my body is here. Hopefully I’ll make it through the day brainless! But I like to be reminded that there’s always this phase of nervousness before an opening. I remember when I had that with Invasion! – even though it was quite a long time ago.

Invasion!, your first play, premiered in Sweden in 2006. It deals with identity and the power of words. At the center is this elusive, almost magical name – Abulkasem – that takes on different meanings throughout the play. Is Abulkasem a playwright, a contradictory fundamentalist, a dorky guy in a bar, a hiding refugee – or all of the above? How do you think the piece has translated to English and specifically to an American context?

It’s difficult for me to say, because I’m not American enough to be the judge of that. According to the reactions of some of my American friends it seems like it has translated quite well, or very well, into an American context. We had some doubt whether or not to move [the play’s setting] from Sweden to the States. Now it’s set in the States. We felt that we had to do that in order to make the play immediate. This is a play that moves very fast. We did readings trying to keep it in Sweden, and it’s interesting because people had a much easier time to just laugh off the questions of fear and inequality that the play deals with, and not realize that it’s actually a play about their country also.

But when you won the Obie Award in May, the award committee said your play had “help[ed] us see ourselves, as Americans, more clearly.”

That sounds very nice. I’m happy, because it is a play mainly about fear and about how identities, individual and collective, are being constructed through vague senses of threat. [It’s also] about language and how language is used to manipulate people. That is a subject that has kept coming back in my writing in different forms.

Where and when did your interest in language start?

I think it comes from my background. Growing up in a multilingual family, and being around people who’ve been discriminated against because of their lack of language, you realize the power that a language gives you. I’ve always been in a luxurious position. My Swedish is perfect; I’ve always been able to choose between different levels of Swedish. I think that’s why these themes interest me.

What I’m doing now is quite different from what’s going on in Invasion! – or from anything I’ve done before. It’s difficult to talk about, because I don’t really know what it is. But in my new play, Apatiska för nybörjare, these themes of language and manipulation also play a big part. It begins with a national trauma in Sweden. I guess it’s even more related to the construction of a national identity. It’s actually a comedy about these apathetic refugee kids, a dark comedy. It deals a lot less with the kids than with how a national identity is constructed through the use of external elements.

One similarity between Invasion!, the new play, and a lot of things I’ve written is that they’re all trying to investigate the speed of words; how words can be transmitted very fast and how words can change meaning.

There’s a recent example that I find very interesting. Qaddafi in Libya used to call his opponents “rats,” and Assad in Syria called them “germs.” When the rebels gained power there was a tweet from Syria saying: “We the germs of Syria, salute the rats of Libya.” That tweet got a huge spread in a matter of minutes. But I also thought it was interesting that “rats” and “germs” were the terms being used to de-humanize, because they’re also something that’s extremely difficult to stop. They can spread anywhere and they will definitely outlive us. That sense, that we live in a contemporary time where words are being spread and manipulated so quickly, is something that I find a lot of inspiration in.

Yes, linguistic change is a very big part of our society. Speaking of national trauma, the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 recently passed. The consequences of the attacks are apparent in Invasion!

Yes, in some ways. But I think that reading is more defined in the American version than in the French or German ones. I was never thinking explicitly of 9/11 when I wrote it. But that’s also what’s cool about writing theater, that my words can be amputated from me and put in a new setting. I’m not even in control of the actual translation, these are Rachel’s words, the translator’s, my words have been transmitted through her. And all of a sudden they start meaning something that I can’t pick up on. I’m very happy that people seem to like them, but I’m not sure I understand the reasons why people like them.

Sometimes the audience laughs at very peculiar places and I don’t understand what that means, especially politically. It wasn’t until I was here the first time that I realized it was literally performed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. And that added something to the play. The loss of that power I, as a playwright, have is actually something I really like. The feeling that “wow, I’m not in control of my words anymore, they can just mean anything,” that’s what the play is about. How a magical name is just being amputated and moved, almost like a relay baton.

These themes of language and names are also very present in Montecore, your second novel, published by Knopf in the US this spring. You constructed the story like an e-mail correspondence between a son and a man claiming to be his missing father’s best friend. Together they try to write the father’s life story, which becomes as much a clash between realities as between languages. The result is both humorous and heartbreaking.

That work is a lot more personal. It’s about the trials of writing the story of a missing father. And that story is quite, well, reminiscent of my life, to say the least. It’s a book that plays around a lot with the biographical facts of my life and then tries to show the fictionality – and the impossibility – of summarizing a life in a book.

There are definitely links between Montecore and Invasion! because both projects end in a situation where the real, authentic person – be it Abulkasem in Invasion! or Kadir in Montecore – is very hard to capture. There’s something very fleeting and impossible in the ambition to capture a life. Another similarity between the two is that the emphasis [placed] on the way that people fantasize about the missing person actually tells the story. The fantasies that they use in order to conjure an image of this missing person tell the story of who they are. So we’re never in a position where we get to know their real selves, but through their fantasies we get the contours of who they are or who they would like to be.

A lot of your work also centers on racism and a sense of in-between-ness. Growing up in Stockholm, with a Tunisian dad and a Swedish mom, did you feel any prejudice?

It’s one of those things that is difficult to talk about, because it easily becomes very victimizing. But I think that Sweden, despite a lot of Swedes’ feelings, is a country like all other countries. We have problems with discrimination and racism and homophobia and whatever. Growing up, it was much easier for me to try to put myself in an eternal underdog position. But things didn’t get interesting until I realized the [number] of situations where I was in a power position, where I was in fact in line with the power structure. Be it reading feminist thinkers, or my perfect Swedish, or growing up in Hornstull in Södermalm in Stockholm, an area that is typically middle class. The realization that I, in many settings, am enjoying privileges that I hadn’t seen before. I think my writing changed a lot when I realized that it wasn’t the underdog position that made me a writer; it was the interest in what these structures make of people.

Then came questions on how to deal with that power, what to do with it. The feeling of being powerless is something a lot of my work centers on. How can we use language to manipulate ourselves out of a world where we feel powerless? I think that’s one of the red threads through all my work. The way a lot of my characters use language to block out the real world is very similar to what I’ve been doing my whole life. Words have been my comfort zone. But there’s also a kind of sadness to that. It has always been easier for me to write about life and politics for example, than to actually take part in a more practical way.

Yes, you’re very good at standing on the outside, looking in. But writing about life is also a way of taking part.

Yes, I’m hoping to show the complexities of life. I like a lot of writing that’s completely different from mine too, but this is my way of attacking things. I’ve never been very Brechtian, you know, it’s not my style to try to inspire class struggle or give an easy answer.

How did you find your language, your voice?

I’m not sure I have. I keep wanting to find new voices. I think that at one point it would be lovely to feel like I found a voice that felt like mine. But that’s based on the idea that I would have this authentic voice inside me, and I don’t believe that’s true. I think I consist of the sum of the multiple voices I’ve invented so far, and hopefully I will be able to invent more voices as I go along.

When you started writing Montecore, you heard the voice of Kadir, the missing father’s friend who employs a very special language, a mix of French and Arabic directly translated into Swedish (with a lot of laughs as a consequence!). Is that often how your writing project starts, with you hearing a voice?

Yeah, it’s quite audio-related. It feels like I hear voices. Which also sounds like I’m crazy. I remember when I was a kid and I heard writers say, “you have to listen to the voices.” I thought they were crazy and bullshitting me. But everything that I’ve written, that I’m remotely happy with, is something where the voices have taken over and made it work. With the new play, too, the voices took over. For me, the most enjoyable phase of writing has always been to just lean back and listen to what the voices are telling me.

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that you’re a very good playwright and that you would find playwriting easier than writing a novel.

Definitely. I didn’t think about it until recently, but a lot of writers that I find inspiring are often writers who change back-and-forth between writing prose and plays. Cortázar for example and P.O. Enquist, they are both very voice-driven. One can argue that all writers are voice-driven, but I think that the writers that I really like are more concerned with trying to find rhythm or an internal order to a certain voice, rather than to transmit a certain story.

Someone asked me if a good memory is important to becoming a good writer. I think a lot of writers that I like tend to be more focused on having a good rhythm than on having a good memory. I’ve never been very impressed by writers who try to impress me with their good memory. You know what I mean?

You’ve told me before that you’re sort of face-blind. Do you think that has made you more audio-centered?

What I’ve heard is that a lot of people who have a really bad sense of faces are really good readers. I don’t know if I’m just saying this to comfort myself and if my source for this is Fox News or something … Maybe it’s just a feeling that if you’re bad with faces you need to read a lot of words for things to make sense. Or maybe it’s the fact that you read so many words that you become obnoxious and uninterested in people’s faces, haha. I don’t know what it means.

But I’ve always been very audio-focused. I dare you to one day meet me without these (he lifts the headphones that hang casually over his shoulders). You will never have seen me without my headphones since I was maybe 12. I literally don’t think I’ve stepped out of my apartment without them; I always, always have them.

Why?

Because I constantly feel the need to add something to boring, everyday life. It’s not enough to just walk down DeKalb Avenue and enjoy the sunshine. I need to have that perfect “enjoy the sunshine”-song to make it, you know, extra. It’s very internal. It’s my feeling of being in the very right position, of being where I’m supposed to be.

But it’s also a way of putting a filter, a distance, between yourself and the world.

Exactly. In a way it’s making the outside world count less. You can say that you add something to life by adding a soundtrack, but at the same time you’re also blocking a lot of things out. Maybe that’s what I’m kind of doing in writing. You have to block out certain things in order to be able to continue with this strange job.

I understand that your writing process is also very intense and solitary?

In periods, yes, but they’re also the phases I enjoy most in life. Every time I enter a phase where I know that “Wow, I’m going to be just writing the next couple of months,” that’s one of my happiest moments. I’m very happy now too, but I think those moments are the reason why I keep doing it. Like at the beginning of the summer when I realized that I had four months of just entering into my brain and trying different weird stuff out.

You also distance yourself geographically. You write a lot about Stockholm and Sweden, but you travel to all these big cities – Paris, Berlin, New York – to do it. How come?

I see myself as a very provincial writer. I’m not the kind of writer who has social, anthropological ambitions to go somewhere else. My memories and my background are extremely important for my writing. I think I was reminded of that when I came home from Berlin after spending two years there. I realized the amount of inspiration that I always get from memories. I used to have this strange idea that I could go anywhere and just make stuff up, but I don’t think I’m that kind of writer.

Further Links & Resources

credit: Linus Sundahl-Djerf

• Visit Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s website – Khemiri.se – for more information on his plays, fiction, lectures, links to what inspired the work, and more.
• Interested in exploring Khemiri’s writing further, but your Swedish is a bit rusty? Consider picking up a copy of the English translation of Montecore from your local indie bookseller.
• Watch a short video about the original English debut of Invasion! at The Play Company in New York, here.
• Read the New York Times profile of Jonas Hassen Khemiri from September, which describes the Obie-winning play in these terms:

If Caryl Churchill, Franz Kafka and Ali G were to goof around one night and play their music too loud until the Department of Homeland Security came knocking on their door, they might emerge (eventually) the next morning holding something like the script to Invasion!

So you may have heard about this little thing happening on Wall Street (and in L.A., Boston, Phoenix, San Diego, Chicago, Cincinnati, Berlin, Paris–oh, just read the list here). What you may not know is that the Occupy Wall Street protestors have a library of their own. Reports GalleyCat:

As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now explore the library online and watch it grow.

Currently, the makeshift library counts 390 books.

Well, that was on October 11–the library now stands at nearly 2,000 over 3,000 books. There’s lots of what you might expect from a protest movement: People Vs. Profits II: The United States And the World, by Victor Perlo; Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen; and The Communist Manifesto. But there’s lots more too, from The Aeneid to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia to all the Calvin and Hobbes books, including The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. (Although, okay, Calvin and Hobbes may be more attuned to the Occupy movement than we think.)

Several authors have personally come out in support of the Occupy movements, too. On October 19, Naomi Wolf was arrested during a protest in NYC. Author Lemony Snickett offers advice to the 1% in the form of “Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance“:

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. [...]

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

(Via.) And lots more writers have voiced their support on OccupyWriters.com, offering their reflections on the protests so far. Francine Prose, for instance, had this to say:

In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.

Why are so many writers aligned with the Occupy movement? Maybe it’s just because writers tend to be well in the 99%–haha–but in alll seriousness, I think there’s a deep affinity between writers and protestors. Writers tend to be interested in the plight of the underdogs, in calling out unfairness, in speaking out even if that speech will be futile. What do you think? Why have writers around the world joined the Occupy movement?

The following interview with Mr. Saeed, who currently teaches Arabic and Arabic Culture at DePaul University in Chicago, was conducted via telephone and email over the course of several weeks in March and April of 2011.

Interview:

Stephen Morison, Jr.: Could you describe where you are from in Iraq and tell us a little bit about your family background?

First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest in me, and I appreciate deeply the interest of Fiction Writers Review and its readers of contemporary novelists, poets and short story writers. This delights me. I wrote a novel about my childhood and my city environment. A novelist friend, Alan Salter translated it into English for me and it won the prize in translation at the University of Arkansas. This novel, entitled The World Through the Eyes of Angels, will be published by the University of Syracuse in the fall. I was born in the city of Mosul, one of the oldest cities in the world, which was built at the same time as the city of Nineveh. Arab writers accurately described Mosul more than 1300 years ago. These writings mention a market that partially remains to this day, and in which my father had a shop. Mosul’s population was comprised entirely of Arabs who practiced different religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In that time, all religions fraternized as one family, not like today, when everyone wants to kill everyone else. Living in the city depended on agriculture, so the city depended on rainfall. The city became very poor because the rains did not come every year, and when it did rain, it was not enough. In the summer when the harvest ended, people flocked to the city from the surrounding villages. These people included Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Aramaic, Hebron, Shabacs, and Yezidis and they came to sell their crops and shop in the city.

The climate in Mosul is divided into four seasons, each exactly three months. There is a cold winter in which temperatures drop to freezing. The spring is very beautiful and mild. Summer reaches ninety five degrees, followed by a temperate fall. Thus, Mosel is called “the mother of two springs.”

Our ancestors in Mosul engineered a plaster which was stronger than concrete. They used this plaster to build the highest minaret in the world in Mosul, more than nine centuries ago. Seven centuries after the minaret was built, it began to lean to the east, so severely that people thought that it would fall. The minaret has remained leaning this way for over two hundred years, thus the origin of Mosul’s nickname “The Humpback.” Mosul is also the only city in Iraq that used alabaster in its architecture. The city is also famous for its cuisine, including unique types of pickles, sweets and sausages.

The Humbacked Minaret - Mosul, Iraq

Where were you educated?

I attended secondary school in Mosul, then the University of Baghdad, which was a very significant time in my life. I was such an avid reader that by the age of twelve I had read all the novels, collections of stories and history books in Mosul’s public library.

What writers were you exposed to as a young person?

Before completing high school I had read most of the authors whose work had been translated into Arabic including Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, Melville, Poe, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Chekhov and others. In addition, I read the works of Arab writers including Naguib Mahfouz and Tewfik al-Hakim. I enjoyed reading modern translations as soon as they were published. I often read at least three hours a day, books by both Arab and non-Arab writers.

What motivated you to begin writing? When did you begin writing?

My writings were motivated by conflict in the world, the disparities between wealth and poverty, strength and weaknesses, oppressed people versus an arbitrary system of government, knowledge and ignorance, the old and the new, the constraints of customs and traditions versus liberation. I saw that conflict usually meant that those who are strong are victorious and those who are weak are defeated. I found that it was not always possible to speak your opinion frankly in life, at the risk of severe punishment. I found, however, that in the act of communicating by writing one can be free. If you are unable to resist evil in life, you can resist it through writing. Likewise, if you witness hunger and you cannot help the hungry, your pen can create a perfect world where people do not stay hungry.

Writing is an alternate world trying to solve the puzzle of man and his actions. One can attempt to answer questions through writing which seem intractable in life.

What most motivates me to write is the evil, brutality, and destruction inherent in the human spirit, questions about why we persecute each other, why we wish to control each other, why so many live lives of hunger, war, and injustice. All my writing is around solving this puzzle. This makes me feel weak, sometimes like I am nothing, because I feel that only politicians can answer these questions, not thinkers and philosophers. Politicians have an abundance of tools to help them make decisions and answer questions: money, power, agents, systems, and on and on.

The second part of the question, when I started writing, is delicate. At first I was not familiar with writing essays; I wrote stories and novels only, but I wrote articles after that, I summarized or commented on them. I first began to write in school at the age of thirteen, when my teacher asked us to write about a new topic every week. The subjects were traditional, such as describing a village, a natural sight, specific weather, and I thought these topics boring, so I decided instead to write from my imagination. I would write stories or summaries of books that I had read before. This infuriated my teachers, and they punished me. This is why I failed in my Arabic class as a boy. I did not, however, fail other topics like arithmetic. I was faced with some fortunate circumstances during my last secondary school year when a talented poet named Shathel Taqa came to teach our Arabic class. He chose a topic and asked us to write about it, but I did not adhere to the topic, as usual. Instead I summed up the last novel I had read, and assumed I would be punished, as usual. To my surprise, he gave me the highest grade in the class and told me, don’t adhere to the topics that I give, write what you love. That was the starting point of my writing.

How do you define “success” as a writer? What were your first successes as a writer?

When I write any novel or short story, I feel like a man whose horse is participating in a race with lots of other horses. I always feel very concerned, and often I fear that my horse will fail or fall apart before it reaches the finish line. The comments of some critics make me feel at ease. I feel comfortable with my degree of success as a writer. Serious critics and avid readers lead to success, and it seems those are few in the Arab world. For example, if a writer occupies a senior position, or he oversees a magazine or newspaper, many critics will praise his work regardless of whether his work deserves it or not. In return, he will allow them to publish in his newspaper or magazine. My first success as a writer was winning a short story prize in Mosul when I was eighteen. The newspaper was called Fata al-Iraq.

What was it like to be a writer in Iraq when you began your career? Was there a government-sponsored writers’ union in Iraq? If so, what role did it play? Were you a member? How independent were writers permitted to be in Iraq?

It is a struggle to gain notoriety as an author in Iraq. In the Arab world, if you want to publish a book you have to pay for its publication, or contribute to it. There are few publishing houses that will publish a book at their own expense. Getting your work published in a magazine or newspaper depends greatly on your relationship with the editor or the owner of the magazine. In Iraq, for example, an author was only allowed to publish a book if he or she was affiliated with a government party. This was the case in the era of Saddam and after. I have not been allowed to publish anything in Iraq from 1957 until now. All of my books have been published outside of Iraq in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE, and Egypt. I submitted a novel in 1970 entitled Rue Ben Barka, however censorship prevented its publication. I finally published this novel in Egypt in 1984, then twice in Jordan, in 1992 and 1993. A friend of mine submitted my book in a contest at the Ministry of Information in Iraq, and after some months it won the first prize. When the authorities discovered it, however, the book was banned and they canceled the delivery of my prize. I had been prevented from publishing until recently. The Writers Union in Iraq had supported Saddam’s regime and now supports the new authorities.

How has the experience of being a writer in Iraq changed as you have grown older?

My experience has been very painful. The coup authorities destroyed two of my novels, one of which was published, the second of which was a manuscript. Both these novels were lost while I was imprisoned for one year and one day.

I also lost three novels because I was arrested or had run away for fear of arrest. Censorship has prevented all of my novels from being published in Iraq, so far. I must publish my work outside Iraq at my expense. The publishing cost is high, because I have never belonged to a political party in Iraq. The government has made it a point to distort my reputation, which puts me in a state of permanent hostility. What hurts me is my constant feeling that I am in a lasting state of siege, and I feel I will likely die with fear, and that destroys my nerves.

What caused at least two of your novels to be banned in Iraq?

As I said earlier, not two, but all of them. As I mentioned, I was not able to publish any fiction books or short story collections in Iraq, because I did not belong to the party regime. Since the year 2003, I have been prohibited from publishing in Iraq because I announced that I am against the death penalty, ransom killings, and the displacement of innocent people and the stealing of public money.

When and why did you leave Iraq?

I left Iraq in 1985. They wanted me to cooperate with them and forced me to sign papers stating that I would be put to death if I were to ever open my mouth to criticize the regime. I returned in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I was working in Dubai at the time and my work frequently required me to visit Iraq. The government began to harass me in 1994, so in 1995 I moved my family permanently to Dubai. I have not seen Iraq since.

What writers have influenced you in the past?

Books that have impacted me considerably include, A Thousand and One Nights and Tales of Arab Heritage Before Islam. These novels translated life and intellectual depth into Arabic. In my view, the novel is real life, not what we see in reality. Reality without human feeling is dead, but literature brings back life. Look at ancient myths; they turn creation stories into something similar to animals and imaginary objects of light, water, mud, spirit, and devils. Our long journey began with nothing and ended with rockets sailing around the universe.

Who are the other writers you most admire today?

I admire many novels. I think that there are many good novels, but no one writer wrote everything well. I think it is enough for a writer to have one or two good works. Some of the writers I admire include Naguib Mahfouz, Marquez, Kafka, Turgenev, Graham Greene, Herman Hesse, Mishima, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Yasunari Kawabat, Jose Saramago, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hemingway and Steinbeck. I do not enjoy all of what they wrote; very great books are very few.

Can you describe your writing process? For example, when you wrote I Am the One Who Saw (Saddam City) did you begin with an outline? Did you utilize character sketches? Did you incorporate personal experiences or nonfiction stories? How long did it take you to write this book?

Yes, I created the outline or “skeletons” of the novel before I started, and then I wrote point by point. If I encountered an obstacle or difficulty, I stopped and worked on another story, since I’m always working on several novels at the same time. I began writing the novel Daughters of Jacob in the year 1973 and I completed it in 2006. I had been thinking of I Am the One Who Saw since the time when I was arrested, and I started writing it one week after they released me. So as not to forget the details, I completed it in six months, but bad luck struck this novel when censorship in Syria deleted two perfect chapters. I didn’t consider it a healthy novel, it was sick, and when it was selected by Dr. Ahmad Sadri to be translated into English, I told him that this work of fiction is disabled and incomplete. I asked him to choose another of my stories, but he insisted. When the company changed the title I suffered a lot, because I had been inspired to choose the title that I did. I said to myself, it will fail completely, but the readers loved it in English and Arabic, which I didn’t expect.

What is your opinion of the current American involvement in Iraq?

Before the intervention in Iraq began in 2003, a reporter from Chicago’s Channel 11 said to me, “You are opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein; no doubt you will support the U.S. intervention in Iraq.” I replied, “No. Intervention means warfare, and the war does not worry whether it kills innocents, children, the elderly, the sick or women.” Now you ask me the same question. I would like to tell you, I am a peaceful man, against violence, I want to see all the countries of the world abolish the death penalty, and the whole world live under a democratic system, with philosophers and intellectuals organized and elected by the people instead of corrupt politicians. A wounded child crying is a stab in the heart to everyone who creates war.

What do you think of the protests and uprisings that occur in the various countries of the Middle East today? What do you think the impact of these protests will have on the lives of writers in Iraq and the Middle East?

Perhaps the best news I saw and heard was that they changed the systems of Egypt and Tunisia in a peaceful manner, and this is what pleased me most, but unfortunately things went wrong in Libya. I hope that democracy prevails in Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and I hope this also applies to Iraq, but I want from the bottom of my heart to change the situation in Syria, precisely because I know the suffering of the people there, I visited Syria more than twenty times. I described people, who are suffering there and the situation of prisons in my last novel, Ashshahena, or, The Truck, which was published in Cairo in late 2010. The torture of prisoners in Syria is worse than it was in Saddam Hussein’s era.

In your opinion, is it acceptable to speak of Iraqi literature as a national literature (distinct from Jordanian, Syrian and Saudi literature), or should Iraqi literature be taught and discussed as a part of Arabic literature as a whole?

I feel that the literature of each Arab country like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon should be taught in public schools in all parts of the Arab world. They should be taught as Arabic literature, but they should say this poet is from Iraq, and this novelist is Egyptian, this is how they describe works from the region in all Arab magazines and newspapers. I did not read in the fifties or sixties the so-called literature of Iraq or Egypt, but critics in the seventies and eighties began chanting in newspapers, magazines, and undergraduate studies terms like: Literature of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, etc… I think that this phenomenon will be reinforced. There is a similar condition to it, in the countries of Latin America. There is Columbia’s distinct literature, Mexico’s literature, and Cuba’s literature, regardless of the language.

How have the political movements and conflicts inside Iraq in the last fifty years affected Iraqi literature?

The political movements have affected literature in Iraq more than any other Arab country. In the forties and fifties literature was affected by left-wing movements: communism, socialism, peace movements, etc. Then it changed. After the sixties, the biggest political influence was the Baath Party, and a large portion of writers repeated what that the Baath government said. The Party would withhold enormous rewards—the equivalent to ten times their salaries—if they did not write what they were told to write. The writers who did not support the Baath party, like me, were prevented from publishing and stayed in the shadows so nobody knows them.

What projects are you currently working on?

I recently finished a novel about the bombing of cities during the Iran-Iraq war. At that time I was in Basra, and the Iranians bombarded Basra every day with dozens of bombs. Iraqis bombed Iranian cities in response. In both countries, civilians were falling dead, and the ones who didn’t die were suffering. Ahmad Sadri, the interpreter of my novel I Am the One Who Saw has read it and has told me he will translate it this summer. I am putting the finishing touches on another work of fiction that occurs in the sixties, which I wrote in 1991.

How do your students at DePaul University compare to the students you knew in Iraq?

Of course, they are different. Here students grew up with freedom and peace, so you see those good, spontaneous, light-hearted, honest, and non-complicated minds. I love them also for being outspoken and innocent. They adopt positions that are anti-war and anti-discrimination between religions and races, and this always pushes me to ask myself: Why did such torture happen at Abu Ghraib? And why do we see the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The students in Iraq live under severe psychological pressure; they are afraid of death, threatened each moment, and so reluctant to express what they feel and afraid to show their opinions openly.

What are your hopes for your former students and friends back in Iraq?

The last time I was teaching in Iraq was in 1981. I had transferred to the main teaching department and was responsible for curriculum and official books. I had to oversee the development of writing of some of my ex-students. Some of them had become famous writers, but they unfortunately were Ba’athists. They had begun writing reports to Security about me and continued to attack me in print after I left Iraq. These attacks continued even until last year. In 2010, one of them attacked me in eight different articles in an Iraqi newspaper. My experience with them was so bad. They never invited me to any of the large number of literary festivals which have been held in Iraq since the sixties. Even now they behave this way because I refused to cooperate with the current Authorities.

What do you hope the future holds for Iraqi writers in the near term?

There will be no change in near term. Current politicians have imposed these classifications on Iraqi writers:

A – Literary collaborators with the former regime, who should be killed or prevented from publishing.
B – Writers who support the current ruling religious parties, and who enjoy tremendous wealth and are permitted to publish anything they’d like, no matter how trivial or superficial.
C – Writers who oppose both of the two regimes, who are mostly outside Iraq, like me.

To illustrate this reality, the writers who support the current ruling religious parties in Iraq issued a list of more than thousand writers who should be killed because they cooperated with Saddam’s regime. As a result of this, some were indeed killed, while others fled.

I have written several articles in Arabic newspapers published in London and websites that reject this bloody and dark trend, but my writing is used against me. My name has been added to other lists of writers who should be killed. Since the occupation began, I have wanted to visit Iraq one last time. However, I’m hesitant to go back there because of these lists. Literature in Iraq will not flourish unless it can be removed from beneath the power and the control of the regime. Even now, writers in Iraq depend on state aid to publish their work. They are poor, and cannot afford publishing’s costs inside Iraq or abroad.

Do you see the circumstances in Iraq changing in the next five years?

I am kind of optimistic, and I would love to see things improve in the future. It does not matter if it takes two years or two decades, but I want to see Iraq be rid of the influence of domination and the behavior of the religious parties and the criminal supervision of their militias.

Religious parties have destroyed Iraq, they’ve looted its wealth and have led the country to the bottom of the corruption in the world. They have stolen by force a fortune of more than 500 billion dollars, while at the same time 42 percent of the Iraqi people live by picking through trash. Still, I have great faith that Iraqi literature can be on an equal level with literature in other countries after Iraq overcomes these criminals and their influence.

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Jess Row was named one of the 20 “Best Young American Novelists” by Granta, and is also the author of the story collection The Train to Lo Wu. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Awards. Charlotte Boulay spoke with Jess Row in his office at The College of New Jersey.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: When did you become interested in fundamentalism?

Jess Row: Well, September 11th had something to do with it. Until then I don’t think I had really thought about fundamentalism, and certainly not as an aspect of my own work or something I would want to write about until September 11th. I was still really wrapped up in a more optimistic view of globalization and of intercultural relationships and in a sense fundamentalism wasn’t really on my radar. For one thing, I had been living in Hong Kong, which is the last place on earth to locate any kind of fundamentalism except in a very sort of sub-stratum way because it’s such a mixture of cultures. My first book was about Hong Kong. It’s very commercial, it’s very mercenary, and in some ways there are many darknesses associated with it, but religious fundamentalism is not one of them. Also, I was very immersed in Chinese culture, and in some ways Chinese culture has fundamentalist elements, like in any culture, but religious fundamentalism is very foreign although not entirely unknown. Chinese culture syncretizes three different traditions. In contemporary China there are some aspects of fundamentalism such as Falun Gong, but it really wasn’t on my radar until 9/11, and then I started thinking about it very intensely. The first story I wrote in the book was “The World in Flames,” which is not a story that has anything specifically to do with 9/11, but it was my first attempt to work out my ideas about what a fundamentalist world view feels like. It was the first bubbling up of an interest in religious violence. And it’s set in Thailand, because I still had an attachment to narrating stories set in Asia, so it was trying to bring those two things together.

What were you doing in Hong Kong?

I was teaching English at Chinese University in Hong Kong.

I think “The World in Flames” is such an interesting story because for so much of the story the character of Samantha seems so unsympathetic. She’s lying to the man she’s staying with, she’s there under false pretences, and then there’s a sudden turn at the end of the story when she becomes completely sympathetic. When you were living abroad, did you ever find yourself in those situations where what you thought was happening was not at all what was actually going on?

All the time. And I could never have written that story without having had those experiences. I had experiences like that in Hong Kong, but even more so when I traveled, of being in a situation and not really understanding what the situation was, and I got into some very dangerous situations because of my own naïveté or my own lack of understanding of what was going on around me.

I was reading on your web site about your fascinating conversation with Claudia Rankine. I was wondering if you could talk about other authors you see dealing with the issue of race in interesting ways. Obviously your book is very much about racial identity, and how we deal with those different identities. Who else are you reading who is dealing with those kinds of issues?

In some ways the reason I wrote that piece is that frankly I wish there were more writers [dealing with race], and especially more writers who come from a normative or a majority experience (and in the case of the United States that’s obviously the white experience) and I wish there were more writers from that background writing about race. It’s a longstanding concern for me, but in terms of the writers I’m reading these days who are doing interesting things, I think Chimamanda Adichie’s book of stories called The Thing Around Your Neck, that I reviewed for the New York Times is a really interesting example because she’s from Nigeria and her first two books were these long and not entirely conventional novels about Nigeria’s recent history, and in some ways they touched on very familiar developing world themes of the victimization of women, and other not uncommon themes. Her book of stories is much more about the experience of being an immigrant writer and being in the US under the guise of various identities, and it’s about being a woman writer in Africa and in the context of world literature. And her attitude toward these things is very sharp and satirical and a little bit throwing the naïveté and the presumptions of the world around her back in its face. I really like that about her. I really admired that the collection was sharp and sarcastic in that way. There’s one story in the collection about a woman at a writer’s colony in South Africa, and the head of the colony is this very arrogant, complacent, older, white South African man, and the way this young woman experiences that environment of condescension and tokenism, and then the way she walks away from it is very powerful, and it’s not something that’s talked about very often.

One reason I really liked what Claudia Rankine wrote and what she did at AWP is that I think there are a lot of racial politics in the world literary community that’s not being talked about publicly, and that needs to be discussed more publicly.

Especially the issue of who gets to write about race.

Who gets to write about race, and from the point of view of the critics, who makes decisions about prizes, and conferences, and best-of lists. There’s a kind of ferment right now in literary culture about the exclusion of women, and the fact that statistically speaking it’s still true that fewer women are being published. I think you could extend that to considerations of non-white writers and find similar issues. And the astonishing thing is that we live in a literary culture that seems to be incredibly diverse, and to have voices coming from all directions. It seems to be a very unbiased and cosmopolitan space, but I think we need to check ourselves, and ask whether that is a superficial appearance or whether that’s really true on a deeper level.

Danticat, Credit Jill Krementz

Edwidge Danticat is a writer well known for her stirring and insightful stories about Haitian life. Her novels, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker, are praised as much for their cultural specificity as for their poetic universality. Critics call her Haiti’s literary voice, and Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists in 1996. She received a 2009 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, so one might even say that some have even called Danticat a genius. But no one would have pegged her for a noir writer until now.

Though not commonly associated with genre fiction, Danticat was a natural choice to edit Haiti Noir, the most recent volume in Akashic Books’ groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. The author speaks widely and often about Haiti, not only of the issues facing her countrymen abroad and at home, but also of her fellow Haitian writers. She includes many of these emerging and established authors in Haiti Noir. Moreover, it’s hard not to think of Danticat as a noir writer after reading her story “Claire of the Sea Light,” which is included in the anthology. Classic elements of noir—mystery, misfortune, even a graveyard—emerge masterfully from her powerful prose. “Claire of the Sea Light” is a remarkable story in a collection with many other extraordinarily nuanced tales.

Danticat was nearly done with editing the collection when, on January 12, 2010, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake, an unimaginably destructive natural disaster that was followed by widespread suffering, flooding, and a cholera epidemic. At first, the editor worried that the stories would no longer seem relevant, but after adding three pieces about the earthquake, she found that Haiti Noir actually offered a unique portrait of the country before and after the disaster, snapshots of moments and places not often seen on the nightly news. What is more, the collection truly entertains; it is dark, surprising, and even funny. In the book’s introduction, Danticat confesses:

I can honestly say that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in Haiti right now, I have never felt a greater sense of joy working on any collective project than I have on this book . . . Each story is of course its own single treasure, but together they create a nuanced and complex view of Haiti and its neighborhoods and people.

The editor’s joy will certainly be shared by her collection’s readers.

In addition to being an acclaimed novelist and the editor of Haiti Noir, Edwidge Danticat is a prolific writer of short stories, published in more than twenty-five magazines and journals and collected in the National Book Award-nominated Krik? Krak!. She received the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones, and her many other awards include a grant from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. Her moving memoir Brother, I’m Dying received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written several books for children, including Eight Days: A Story of Haiti, which tells the story of a seven year-old boy trapped in rubble after the 2010 earthquake. Her recent essay collection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, is an extraordinary manifesto that will be appreciated by both immigrant and non-immigrant artists. Beyond her prolific work as a writer, Danticat has taught creative writing at both New York University and the University of Miami. She lives in Florida with her husband and children.

The following interview was conducted by email during May 2011.

Interview

Carolyn Gan: How did you come to edit Haiti Noir?

Edwidge Danticat: Johnny Temple from Akashic Books called me one day and asked me if I would edit Haiti Noir for the publisher’s noir series. I was already a huge fan of the series, having read many of the books, so I jumped at the chance and said yes.

Haiti Noir features new stories by well-known, emerging, and even a couple of unexpected writers, including Mark Kurlansky. How were the stories collected? Were there authors or particular perspectives you sought out, or did the submissions shape the collection?

I’d like to think of the book as a kind of party. Most of the writers are Haitian and live in Haiti, but others are Haitian writers who live outside of Haiti, in Canada, Berlin, and the United States. We decided to also include two Haitiphile writers, Madison Smart Bell and Mark Kurlansky, who know Haiti well and have written about it extensively. The writers in the book range [in age] from early twenties to early seventies. There is a broad scope of experience represented. I did seek out some writers whose work I already know, and some other writers came to me via friends, particularly the younger writers. Marvin Victor, for example, was recommended by an older writer who had been his teacher. Now he has a hugely successful novel, Corps Mélés, that was published by a prestigious house in France. We got him just in time before he was huge, and he is going to be really huge among the next wave of Haitian writers.

You say in the collection’s introduction that only a few of the included authors identify themselves as writers of noir. Your own work is not typically classified as such. Are you a reader of noir?

I am a reader of noir…not an obsessed one, but if I see a name I recognize, I go at it. The beauty of this series is that it brings new writers to noir, so it’s always fun to see what they come up with. I think people have said that my work is dark, which would be the literal definition of noir, but they might not call it noir. It was interesting to see, though, how much the writers wanted to jump in and try this. It was like having an assignment, coloring outside of the lines, for them.

Themes and images repeat throughout the collection. Unreliable electric generators, for example, buzz in the background and even appear as a plot point in Kelly Mars’s story. Magic winds its way through many stories as well, especially Marie Lily Cerat’s fantastic “Maloulou.” Are there aspects of Haitian culture that are inherently noir? Or that can be understood more clearly through the lens of the genre?

I guess there are aspects of Haitian culture that you might call noir or that lend themselves easily to the genre. The police investigations that are always ongoing and may never really be solved. The mystical elements of Haitian life, class difficulties, and conflicts. The writers, I think, made great use of those elements and more. In one of our earlier reviews, someone listed all the similar tropes, including Comme Il Faut cigarettes. It was interesting to see where many of the stories overlapped.

In Josaphat-Robert Large’s hair-raising story “Rosanna,” a particularly philosophical neighbor says that “[i]t’s almost impossible to discover what’s behind a mystery in [Haiti].” Do you agree?

Unfortunately that’s often true, especially in terms of solving crimes.

In April 2000, one of Haiti’s most famous radio journalists, Jean Dominique, was assassinated outside his radio station. At the time he was a friend of the president’s, yet his murder still remains unsolved. I guess one other way to say it is that it is very easy to bury a mystery under even more mystery in Haiti.

You include your mesmerizing story “Claire of the Sea Light” in the book. Was it written especially for the collection?

Thank you. It’s part of a longer book I am writing about how a child’s disappearance affects an entire small town in earth-shattering ways—earth-shattering in the sense that as the people of the town remember their last interaction with the child, they realize that they are all connected in more ways than they knew. It’s one of those tricky books, and it has a different ending than the story, but that story is the first chapter of that book.

“Claire of the Sea Light” is structured in reverse chronological order, which adds so much suspense. What inspired that choice?

I love playing with time in fiction. That’s somewhat noir inspired. Noir film inspired. I wanted to go back and forth in time but focus on one day, this girl’s birthday. Because her birthday started out so tragic—her mother dies in childbirth—she is never allowed to be happy. The entire plot of the book also happens in one day, in one night, really.

Do you always write fiction in English? How have your first two languages, Creole and French, affected your writing?

I moved to the United States when I was twelve. I speak French and Creole and write both, but I have always written creatively in English. It’s not even a commercial choice as people sometimes think. It’s just that when I got here and started writing, I started writing in English. If my family had moved to Spain around the same time, I would probably be writing in Spanish as one Haitian writer, Micheline Dusseck, does. Maybe English also offers a veil, some kind of distance that makes me bolder, but that’s just the way it’s always been. Always behind my English, though, are Creole and French certainly. I sometimes think I am doing simultaneous interpretation while writing: the characters are speaking Creole, and I am interpreting for them.

I’ve always admired that you never hinder the flow of your narrative with awkward translations. Somehow your translations enhance the rhythm. When do you know that a line in Creole or French is necessary?

When I use Creole and French it is easy, I think, to understand contextually. If you read carefully you should get what it means. However, I try not to do literal translations because I know a lot of people are reading the book who speak both languages, so I try to add a bit of extra nuance for them.

There is a heartbreaking moment in “Claire of the Sea Light” when the little girl sees a child’s tombstone near her mother’s and ponders “who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.” It reminded me of Anne in your novel The Dew Breaker, who holds her breath when passing cemeteries because she imagines her drowned brother searching for his grave. Can you talk a bit about that intimate relationship between the living and the dead in your work?

It’s a morbid fascination for me, this fine line between the living and the dead. When I was little, my uncle was a minister and presided over a lot of funerals, so I often heard that death is not the end, and that there is something else, and that the dead are always with us. I believed this deeply and grew less afraid of the dead and less afraid of death. I was just telling a friend the other day—who is obsessed with past lives’ experiences—that my childhood made me totally unafraid of death because of all the post-death possibilities it provided. I only became afraid of death again, I think, when I had children. My only fear is of leaving them. Writing a story like “Claire of the Sea Light” is almost like getting those fears out of yourself, placing in someone else’s life a moment that personally terrifies you and then taking it out of your nightmares and putting it on the page.

You mention the idea of “leaving them”—that is, death as separation from your children. Of the father in “Claire of the Sea Light,” you write: “It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.” Is separation just another kind of death?

Separation when you’re a little kid, I think, can feel like death, which is also something you are struggling to understand. In Haiti when people say someone is lòt bò dlo, they can mean that the person has died or that he or she has migrated, has gone to live in another country. After my first book was published, I met a woman who was five when her mother left Haiti for New York. She was asleep when her mother left, and no one had prepared her, so when she woke up and was told her that her mother was lòt bò dlo, she thought her mother had died. She was twelve when her mother sent for her. When she got to New York, her mother had changed, and she had changed, and she told me at nineteen years old that she never quite believed that her mother was really her mother. In her mind, her mother is dead, and she was tricked into an adoption of some kind. This is an extreme case, but it feeds my nightmares about parental separations when they are badly handled. Some families can be severed by that kind of separation forever, even when they are physically reunited.

In your recent essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work, you wrote that “All artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them. [The historic public execution of revolutionaries Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin] is one of mine.” What are some of your other creation myths?

There are some new ones now, which I talk about in Brother, I’m Dying. My father’s death. That was and still is so painful. My uncle’s death, the death of my minister uncle who raised me. The birth of my daughters. Slowly I think your foundation myths change as your foundations shift under your feet.

You also write in Create Dangerously that “I used to fear [my parents and uncle] reading my books, worried about disappointing them.” When did you stop worrying about disappointing them? Did that worry extend to your larger Haitian audience?

Thankfully I worry after the writing is done, and the book is about to be published. While I am writing I give myself free rein. Yes, I used to worry about a larger Haitian or Haitian-American audience that they would recognize nothing of themselves in my work. But then I know, too, that we all have the stories we have, and those are the stories we tell by various means. It’s foolish to try to accommodate your story to any audience’s taste. The most important thing I can do as a writer is tell the truest story I know with the most love and passion and respect I possess. The rest will just have to take care of itself.

You’ve spoken and written widely about the situation in Haiti since the January 12th, 2010, earthquake, including conversations with NPR and articles for the New Yorker. Do your Haitian readers approach you to share their own stories?

They often do, but not forcefully. When I am in Haiti, I just observe. I don’t badger people for their stories. They go though enough of that. I just observe and live the moment I am living because, especially with family members, there are so few of them.

Could you talk a bit about your last visit to Haiti?

It was a private visit. Most of my visits are. There was still a lot of devastation. A lot of people without homes as another hurricane season is approaching. The visit before that I went with a group of women activists from an organization called We Advance that was co-founded by the actress Maria Bello. We visited one of the first women’s clinics in Cité Soleil, where they do rape recovery and counseling. Rape has become a very big problem in post-earthquake Haiti. We also met and broke bread with and sang and cried with some extraordinary women who had run for parliament at great risk to their lives. These women were just exceptional, some of the most amazing women I have ever met in my entire life.

Part of the profits from Haiti Noir will be donated to the Lambi Fund, a non-profit organization. Could you talk a bit about their work and why you selected Lambi?

The Lambi Fund works in the rural sector in Haiti, and they work with women, which was very appealing given as we often say that Haitian women are the poto mitan, the middle pillars of our society.

Haiti Noir was almost complete before the earthquake struck in January 2010. How did you select the three stories in the collection that reference the earthquake?

I thought we had to represent the earthquake somehow in the book so I asked a few folks if they had written some stories since the earthquake, and we got the three wonderful stories in the book. I think it’s really hard to write fiction so soon after a tragedy, but our writers did an amazing job, and I am really glad we made that choice.

Was the completion of the project part of your own healing process after the tragedy?

Those stories, as disturbing as they are, were indeed healing. I think a year, ten years from now, this is a book that you will be able to read and appreciate in terms of how it’s represented Haitian fiction in general and the post-earthquake moment in which the book was published.

Thank you so much for your work and for your time.

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As Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Mariner, 2011), revs up, Gabriel gets himself into a series of pickles. The character’s front as a freelance reporter begins to crumble. He breaks off an affair with a cunning Wall Street Journal correspondent. His hedge-fund employers demand details of the impending natural resource nationalizations. Gabriel falls in love with Evo’s beautiful press liaison. He gets too close to the action during one of the daily strikes. A foursome of women, all stronger and smarter than him—his mother, his boss, his girlfriend, and his ex—draw and quarter Gabriel’s psyche as he weighs good lies against bad ones, victimless crimes against prosecutable ones.

This is not your grandfather’s expat novel. It feels like part of a new wave in that old tradition, along with Michael Fitzgerald’s Radiant Days and Clay Morgan’s Santiago and the Drinking Party. You won’t find young loners driven by the vague forces of alienation or boredom, in search of exotic meaning. Gabriel is instead driven by a brand of greed as nuanced as it is misinformed. He doesn’t see making the world a better place and making a shitload of money as mutually exclusive; he thinks they could happen in the same day, with the same opportunistic half-truth.

The novel never navel-gazes but instead drops the protagonist right into the crucible of our life and times. Among other things, the book is a crash course on Latin American history, contemporary economics, and international politics—with a page-turning plot. Its characters treat their careers with all the gravity they would in real life; Mountford is capable of the kind of sublime insights about work and human nature that we’ve stopped expecting from our novelists.

A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism does a better job than Forbes at covering the whims of high finance, and the novel does so without a trace of easy morality. You won’t find any heartless Gordon Geckos in here, swinging moneybags or fat cigars.

Gabriel does not always act honorably. At times, he’ll make you cringe—but his flaws are the flaws of his age. He is an imperfect man-boy who understands that, for his generation, jobs and bank accounts often outlast relationships.

It’s amazing how astutely Mountford renders the nature of money. He shows its most surreal qualities: its ability to expand or contract based on obscure tidbits of information that need not be true so much as believable. But he also captures its cold realism: the fact that unfortunately—perhaps tragically—it can be a force greater than love, greater even than family.

This is quite simply one of the smartest and most readable debuts I’ve come across in years. Mountford is a writer who rolls up his sleeves and digs into the zeitgeist all the way up to his elbows. He’s fearless in his depiction of world leaders, global events, and the oft-ignored gray areas between morality and success.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: mapsofworld.com

My first reaction was mixed; while I am not a blind fan of Roy or Chomsky or Ali, I have in the past agreed with some of their concerns about—for example—U.S. foreign policy. And I do have strong feelings about the government of Sri Lanka, about the war that ended in 2010, about repressive governments and freedom of speech all over the world. By the time the war was reaching its horrifying climax, no reasonable person, whatever their cultural allegiances, supported the Tamil Tigers’ methods (or perhaps I should say that I do not consider reasonable those people who remained supportive of those methods until the end). But it should not take cultural allegiances—which I have aplenty, being Tamil myself, and having grown up in another country that blatantly discriminates against Tamils and other minorities—for anyone who has followed the history and progression of the conflict to know that neither side has been blameless.

Yet the Reporters Without Borders petition made little sense to me on the most basic level: shouldn’t a literary festival be the last thing one should boycott in a country with a poor record of press freedom and human rights? I could see an argument for boycotting investment, or perhaps even tourism, but a literary festival? Really? Why sabotage an opportunity for free speech when they are so rare?

Image Credit: GLF web site

I decided on my own to ignore the boycott; then, early on the morning of the festival’s official opening, Shyam Selvadurai, this year’s curator and a writer I greatly admire, sent an email that confirmed my misgivings about the petition and strengthened my resolve to support the festival in any way I could. “I am a well-known Sri Lankan Tamil writer who has written in a very political way about the civil conflict in Sri Lanka,” Shyam wrote. “Why didn’t Reporters Without Borders think that my opinion needed to be sought? It feels, from my point of view, that they are guilty of the very same silencing they are fighting against.” He went on to say:

My own appointment to the position of Festival Curator embodies what the festival stands for. I am Tamil and the festival takes place in Galle, the deep Sinhala south, which has seen some of the worst violence committed against Tamils. I am, in addition, openly gay, and in fact was the first person to come out publicly in Sri Lanka. This, in a country where homosexuality is still illegal.

Shyam’s own identities aside, the program he put together deliberately included a BBC Forum on civil war—featuring, among other speakers, Chimamanda Adichie and the Sri Lankan human rights activist Sunila Abeysekara, an outspoken critic of her country’s government—and a “spotlight on Malaysia” in recognition of my country’s own struggles with ethnic tension and conflict. (I had been invited, along with my fellow Malaysian writers Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, Shamini Flint, Farish Noor, Tripat Narayanan, and Omar Musa, for precisely this reason.)

V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan / photo credit: Preston Merchant

My friend V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan has written a powerful, poetic critique of the boycott for the Millions; there’s nothing I can possibly add to her response, which made me want to cry and cheer simultaneously when I read it. What I can say is that I fell completely and unexpectedly in love with Sri Lanka, with its urban and seaside landscapes, its people, its food, the vestiges of its colonial past in architecture and culture. All this, all of it reminded me of Malaysia as I knew and loved her best, twenty-five or thirty years ago, the Malaysia of my early childhood, still unspoiled by malls and self-conscious consumerism. And the similarity was not just a figment of my imagination; my compatriots made the same observations. I’ve visited India twice, each time hoping to feel at home, to find familiar elements and faces and ways of talking or seeing the world, and while this has happened to a limited extent in south India, it was nothing like what I felt in Sri Lanka, that almost painful nostalgia, like stepping through some cosmic peephole into my own past. Even the Viceroy Special, the 75-year-old train the festival had chartered to transport participants from Colombo to Galle, felt familiar: the smell of the upholstery, the limp white sandwiches.

Sri Lankan food, too, seemed to have less in common with the austere vegetarian cuisine that dominates Tamil Nadu than with what I’d grown up eating in Malaysia: the spicy sambols, the abundance of fresh and dried seafood, the dodol made with coconut milk and palm sugar, the pittu and string hoppers that were a staple of my childhood thanks to the vendor who bicycled around our neighborhood at dusk. On our last night we had dinner at the Closenberg Hotel in Unawatuna, where every last detail—the dark wood of the furniture, the greying white paint that covered even the old round light switches, the geckos on the ceiling—recalled the Station Hotel in Ipoh, the old FMS Bar and Restaurant, the family house of my oldest aunt and uncle in the far north of Malaysia.

Courtesy Closenberg Hotel web site

Like Sugi, I had encounters that could only have happened at this festival, in Sri Lanka, to someone with my particular background and baggage, a unique confluence of circumstances I would have missed out on if I’d decided not to go. Not just the exchanges with other authors after their events or over rice and curry like my mother and aunts make them, but, for example: the aunty and uncle (the kind who are not related, to paraphrase Sugi) who briefly adopted Shamini Flint at the closing luncheon, upon learning that she was of Sri Lankan Tamil extraction, and mysteriously convinced the kitchen of the Jetwing Lighthouse to produce a plate of coconut pancakes (which were, incidentally, identical to a confection we Malaysians know by a Malay name) especially for her. “But I’m not Sri Lankan Tamil,” I had to confess when I joined them at their table and was pressed to partake of the pancakes, “I’m just a regular Indian Tamil.” “Never mind,” said aunty, “never mind. We are all Tamils just the same. You sit down and eat too.” Which of course would be what she would say; there is no other possible response in the aunty script.

As part of this year’s festival, Shyam Selvadurai had also started a program to bring in Tamil students from the north, who shared accommodation and meals with Sinhala students from the south. These students then attended sessions dealing with multiculturalism and civil conflict, including the round table on “Writing Malaysia” at which Twan Eng, Shamini, and I read and spoke about our work. “Your presence at the festival,” Shyam had written in his email to all this year’s participants, “will contribute to this broadening of young minds.” And while we believed him, because we believe in the power of literature to do exactly that, it never hit home quite so effectively as when small groups of shy Tamil students would approach me or Shamini to introduce themselves, to ask questions, or, really, just to sit and smile at us. I recognized these moments for what they were, having not so long ago sought them out myself: that recognition, that glow of, Oh, you’re just like me, and you’re a writer. So it can be done. Whatever the inherent limitations of that conclusion—because of course, being a writer takes a lot more than being just like anyone—and however unaware one is of those limitations, it still remains a necessary milestone for those of us who grow up in the shadow of the West, who even now do not look or talk or think like the people in most of the books we grow up reading, and who, for this and other reasons, think of being a writer as something reserved for them, the ones with the power, the lucky ones whose stories the whole world wants to hear.

After our “Writing Malaysia” round table, I donated a copy of my novel to another initiative supported by the festival: the Books United Project, which collects book donations for the Jaffna Public Library. A major repository and powerful symbol of Tamil literary culture since the 1950s, the library was burned in 1981 by an organized mob that included police and government-sponsored paramilitary groups, in the spate of inter-ethnic violence that eventually led to the civil war. My donation was the tiniest of gestures, one copy of one novel that most Sri Lankans have never heard of, but it felt significant, particularly in light of the call for the boycott, and I was glad for chance to do it.

Traveling with my 20-month-old daughter, I didn’t manage to attend as many events as I would have liked, but among the most memorable ones I did attend were moderated conversations with Chimamanda Adichie and with Mohsin Hamid. Both writers impressed me with their honesty and insight on a subject close to my heart, the intersection of politics and fiction. I was sad to have to miss events by—among others—Lawrence Hill, Jung Chang, Judy Fong Bates, Ranjini Obeyesekere, Pauline Melville, Louis de Bernieres, William Fiennes, Sarah Dunant, and the fabulous British poet Daljit Nagra, whose first poetry collection, Look We Have Coming To Dover, is one of my favorite collections of recent years. But if I couldn’t hear them on stage, I could and did sit with several of them in taxis and at meals, for leisurely chats about everything and nothing, which is always, in some ways, even better. The best thing about traveling with my daughter? Everyone, even a literary superstar, loves a baby, especially one who politely requests to view their belly button at lunch. Ah, babies, the great levelers. It’s difficult to dwell on status or hierarchies in their presence: my fondest memory of the lovely Pauline Melville is the analogy she made between the sound of my daughter’s mild distress and the cooing of doves.

I won’t lie: I do think the atmosphere of the festival was somewhat dampened, at least initially, by the withdrawal of Damon Galgut in response to the call for a boycott and of Orhan Pamuk and Kiran Desai due to a misunderstanding about the former’s visa status. Certainly they were some of the biggest names, and some people must have attended the festival just to hear them. But I felt amply justified in my decision to attend after the brave, moving closing speech by Geoffrey Dobbs, the founder of the Galle Festival. We’re not going to let Reporters Without Borders or anyone else close us down, said Dobbs, and the irony was not lost on us: free speech must prevail in the end, against the NGO that claims to fight for press freedom.

Doves credit: Flickr

Further Links and Resources

Read the Guardian’s coverage of the Galle Literary Festival.

Within this film noir framework, using the poison in Moth’s body as a literal “ticking clock,” Todorov takes us on a kaleidoscopic tour of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city, through the eyes of a man who has never seen communism and must learn his former world anew. In its most shining moments, Zift—which literally means a bituminous tar used to fix asphalt and occasionally as chewing gum—seamlessly blends its thriller aspect with socialist cultural critique.

Prior to its U.S. publication, Zift was adapted into a movie (with Todorov as screenwriter); HBO airtime made it the most broadly released Bulgarian film to reach American shores. Todorov and translator Benatov both teach at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Conversation

Steven Wingate: Most historical novels have some kind of resonance with the contemporary world in which they are read. Why is now the right time for Zift to come out? Why was it important for you to write it?

Vladislav Tordorov: The reason is complex. It concerns my personal fascination with the [historical fiction] genre itself. Also, it has much to do with the state of Bulgarian post-communist fiction. And it concerns the fictional representation of the communist past in Bulgaria today when we have conflicting versions of this past.

Novels talk to other novels, not only to the real world. Thus, they position themselves within various literary contexts. Bulgarian post-communist fiction of the 90s demonstrates a consistent “lyrical” approach—fictional reflections of a rather intimate and strictly personal, even idiosyncratic nature. Under communism novelists had to be markedly aware of their social and political environment, and [they had] to follow strict guidelines of its representation—the so-called “socialist realism.” After the fall of communism, they could engage in soul-searching, which led to the “lyrical novel.” This type of novel lacks eventful storyline and refrains from discussing social issues. The same goes for Bulgarian cinema, which at the time amalgamated personal frustrations and idiosyncrasies with folklore imagery and poetical fabulousness. Within such literary and cinematic contexts, my task was to create a type of narrative that would be both lyrical (Zift’s story is told in the form of a confession), and genre-and-plot driven (it consciously adopts the hardboiled style of noir). In recent years many plot-driven novels have been published in Bulgaria. In this respect Zift joins a new wave of narrative fiction.

Another aspect of Zift concerns the communist past. I have written extensively on this issue—essays, journalism as well as scholarly papers. Zift is my literary attempt to address it. Back in the 90s there were few novels that would deal with this past, although the situation has changed recently. The past that was ripping apart the nation in the public arena was generally ignored by fiction. In many respects this past defines the present state of affairs in Bulgaria, the common attitudes, the popular imagination, the public reflex.

Does Zift point toward any particular precedents outside of Bulgarian literature?

I wrote Zift as an indirect tribute to James Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. In these novels the narrator confesses to his crimes. I find Cain’s books much more interesting than Hammett’s or Chandler’s, wherein a private eye narrates while trying to crack a case. The criminal narrator is decidedly more fascinating than the private eye. I should also mention that Postman had a direct influence on Camus when he was writing The Stranger and on Visconti’s debut feature Ossessione that pioneered the Italian neorealism.

In your writing process, how did you balance the “socialist” and the “noir” aspects of the book? Did you always have a unified sense of how they would work together, or did that shift over time and fall into place in revision?

Zift draws on personal experiences—my early days of growing up in a communist country in the 60s and my later days of teaching fiction and film at Penn. So, I decided to couple my early memories and late intellectual pursuits in a novel.

Film still, Zift

In the Bulgarian literary tradition and its contemporary cinematic context the genre of noir is an exotic animal. On the other hand, in the American eye, the socialist content makes the classical genre of noir appear curiously estranged. This is probably why the movie Zift enjoys its highest critical acclaim and audience recognition in Russia and in the U.S.—the respective birthplaces of the socialist content and of the genre form. The form and the content are in a subtle way alien to each other. According to Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, this is what makes a work of art function effectively and become aesthetically pleasurable. He calls it “estrangement” or “de-familiarization” of the familiar. It is the result of the unusual coupling of form and content. The idea was to “unlock” the social reality of communism with a seemingly strange genre key, and vice-versa—to reinvent the political aesthetics of the genre by populating it with communist imagery. The clichés clash—these of the communist content and those of the noir form.

In the midst of following Moth through his adventures, you also give us moments that seem outside of time, in which people engage in circuitous philosophical debates, trade urban legends, etc. What were you going for in such scenes, and is there a unity of purpose for them throughout the book?

In the past, urban legends and popular anecdotes used to serve as potent antidotes against the daily dose of toxic communist demagogy fed to the public through various communication channels. The former were works of a collective anonymous countercultural genius that effectively resisted the official culture controlled by the Party. The urban lingo and legendary stories that the counterculture spontaneously and indiscriminately proliferated in effect subverted the official Party-speak, along with all the newspaper feature stories of shock-workers and mass exploits in the line of collective farming and industrial production. Vulgar philosophizing and anecdotal storytelling, the raw Pravda (truth) of life shared by outcasts, lowlife, barflies, and local idiots in the dark pockets of the city spectacularly outshouted the authoritarian, officially forged Pravda. The communist “speak” and its adversary—the countercultural lingo—presented a real challenge for the English translation, and I am glad to say that in my view, Joseph Benatov has done a great job.

Your uses of Wired Radio Outlet—Muzak-like songs often playing in the background—strike me as places where “socialist” and “noir” blend seamlessly. It’s creepy and Big Brother-ish, but at the same time your characters respond to it and even let the songs shape their behavior. What does Wired Radio Outlet mean to you, and what do you want it to mean to readers?

The Wired Radio Outlet brings back personal memories of many places and events. The everyday world around us was all wired. It was virtually everywhere—in schools, public baths, hospitals, etc. In the novel, the Wired Radio Outlet has a structural function. It measures the flight of time. It announces the exact time on a regular basis and thus serves the purpose of a public clock. The action deploys in one freezing December night, the longest night of the year. Time runs fast like sand in an hourglass, and Moth runs out of it as we read along.

Image Credit: Flickr

You also wrote the screenplay for Zift, which did very well internationally and was shown in the U.S. on HBO even before the English translation was released. How did you approach and manage that process? What does the story of Moth gain and lose in its translation from fiction into film?

Noir films are based on pulp fiction. So, in an effort to keep the tradition, I worked on the novel and the script simultaneously. I should point out that in the movie, the story has a different ending, which I thought was more dramatic for the viewer. In fact, the English version of Zift has the movie ending.

What did you learn from Zift that you’ll bring to your next fiction project? And do you mind telling us what that project is?

Yes, it is called Zincograph. The novel was published in Bulgaria last summer, and the script is in an early stage of production. Hopefully we could see it filmed by 2012. The story is about a cunning young man who becomes an informant for the Bulgarian communist secret police. He does his job with a great zeal, and yet he is dismissed, as Perestroika renders him useless. Spying and denouncing is his true vocation, so he decides to continue his activities secretly from the government. He creates his own phantom secret police department by recruiting a group of unsuspecting young intellectuals to spy on each other. As a result, he develops his own secret archive of denunciations and, after the fall of communism, benefits from that.

Zincograph is a black comedy with elements of political psycho-thriller that draws on the very nature of secret policing under communism—the presumed authenticity of the agents and recruitment based on automatic trust and unspoken fear. The plot is driven by the workings of the conspiratorial mind of an overzealous conformist-turned-psychopathic schemer and wicket social engineer. The purpose of this story is to debunk the commonly shared assumption that totalitarianism is a society of victims and victimizers. I submit that many people enjoyed spying on their neighbors, took pleasure in it and pursued it proactively. Declassified archives show that on many occasions we dealt with true zeal on the part of the informants, who didn’t simply follow instructions, but demonstrated maleficent eagerness to “develop” harmful information regarding the lives of others.

Image Credit: Flickr

How does Zincograph’s dark humor compare to the dark humor of Zift?

The “black laughter” in the two novels is of a different nature. The action takes place on historical thresholds—before and after the imposition of communism (Zift) and before and after its collapse (Zincograph). These events could be viewed as collective somersaults or tragicomic stunts in the political circus of their own times—jumping in and out of communism. The aim was to frame the two jumps differently in terms of genre, plot and antiheroes, but to keep their tragicomic representation. Zift is a confessional narrative delivered by a man who recounts his misfortunate life and badly failed intentions while facing his ultimate demise. Moth defies death by means of unrelenting existentialist irony—the battering ram of wit. His sharp aphoristic attitude towards the communist world demystifies it.

Image Credit: Flickr

This should have a redeeming effect on both him and the reader. Contrastingly, Zincograph tells the story of a con artist who social-engineers a fake political institution that replicates and thus mocks the omnipotent system of secret police. The mimicking of the untouchable system, its shadowy doubling is subversively farcical, is diabolically comical by nature. A bold political con is launched by a seemingly ridiculous man. His creation becomes the Trojan horse, which eventually disorganizes the system by making it function like one stupendous lampoonery. In both novels, the machinery of laughter vandalizes two formidable representations of the Absurd—the fact of Death and the fact of the System.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: Flickr

Image Credit: United Nations, via Flickr

Haitian Literature Is a Living Art: Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour and Thomas Spear, a scholar of Halitian literature and a professor of French at City University of New York, discuss the past 200 years of vibrant, strong Haitian literary tradition. They explore writing by Gary Victor, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Rene Philoctete and Edwidge Danticat and how they navigate issues of class, politics, the diaspora, and contemporary Haitian life in their fiction.

Haiti Noir: Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has written of her mother country, and the immigrant experience, over the past two decades. She’s published moving pieces in The New Yorker about family lost, and the state of Haiti a year after the earthquake, “A Little While” and “A Year and a Day,” respectively. Danticat also edited an anthology of 18 writers, Haiti Noir, published last month by Akashic Books. Poets & Writers contributing editor Kevin Nance has a great piece about the collection, you can read here.

Last week, Frontline aired a documentary about the island nation, a year after the disaster, called “The Quake.” The program puts into context the huge political, economic and societal challenges that face Haiti now, extending beyond the immediate havoc wreaked by the earthquake to the state of the country before disaster hit. The website, where you can watch the full documentary, also includes perspectives on how the country can continue to rebuilt in “The Way Forward.”

Eyewitness testimony about the earthquake and its after-effects is still being recorded and it will likely take years before the full weight of the effects are felt in the literature and art of Haiti. But I hope in the meantime, we continue – through collections like Haiti Noir – to support Haiti by reading her writers, remembering her struggles, and listening to her stories.

Within his cultural limits the author, as an individual, can and, indeed, must extend himself as far as he can to set himself and his art apart from the commonplace, showing all the while whence he comes, doing this through language most of all. With the translator we have quite the opposite situation. He cannot and must not set himself apart from the culture laid out before him. To do so would indeed be treasonous.

A translator, Rabassa goes on to explain, is not simply a writer but also a reader. If a translation is to be a successful one, the translator must be a particularly astute reader, attentive not only to the essentials but also to the cultural context whence the writer comes. And so we see how translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original as a translation task. So the question becomes: how does the translator mount a sensitive, careful reading of a literary work as she writes it from one language into another?

I knew to pose this question to myself only some years after I began, with what I might call dedicated chutzpah and utter naïveté, my translation of the semiautobiographical prose-poem novel I Saw You on the Street (Je vous ai vue dans la rue) by French writer Yolaine Simha. My efforts were buoyed by an undergraduate research grant I’d received to start the translation work, and motivated by my desire to translate as elegy. I had corresponded with Simha during a semester-long study abroad in Paris. We never met in person—her debilitating agoraphobia, which served as thematic fodder for I Saw You on the Street, saw to that—and in August 1999, six weeks after I had returned to the States, Simha committed suicide.

Simha left several notes before she took an overdose of barbiturates and jumped into the river behind her house in a farm town two hours outside of Paris. Several of the notes she left for friends include the statement “ce n’est pas une question d’angoisse mais de lassitude” (“it’s not a question of anguish but of exhaustion”). Along with Simha’s other works of fiction and experimental prose, I Saw You on the Street has languished, having received limited distribution before it was declared out of print. So it was an understandable impulse to want to translate her work as homage. But of course, this led to problems in reading in my initial work on the project, and by extension—if, as I do, you buy into Rabassa’s idea that translation is always an act of careful close reading—its translation.

Image Credit: Flickr

I Saw You on the Street struck me for several reasons when I first read it, but what I found most compelling was the theme of women’s innovative negotiation of the Paris streets. Since I had come of age in a time when awareness about sexual harassment was all over the US media, I had found my transition to Paris trying, to say the least. In the late 1990s, being followed on the street in Paris was still viewed as a compliment rather than a menace. This was shocking to me, particularly since one of my central inspirations for becoming conversant in French had been the work of feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. I Saw You on the Street spoke directly to what had been rendered so beautifully abstract in the works of other French feminists I had read. Simha’s fictionalized testimony of what it was to traverse city streets and feel threatened while doing so resonated with me, and surely informed my early experiences of Paris.

Petain, Vichy France, via Flickr

Simha’s work, I should note, was a large part of what led to my decision to pursue a PhD in French a few years later. That is mostly a story for another time, but a few more details encapsulate my curiosity about the intersections between Simha’s life and work: she was half-Jewish, and was born into hiding in Paris during World War II. This was, by all accounts, the root of her agoraphobia. She had, nonetheless, identified not as a Jew, not as a French woman, but as a Levantine. She had adopted Esmeralda, a Turkish name, as part of her pen name. What exactly was the meaning behind her assumption of this vague and distant socio-cultural identity? In I Saw You on the Street, it seemed to play out through themes and images that reflected upon French historical memory of World War II and Vichy, as well as the contemporary immigrant situation in and around Paris.

So the deeper I got into what became a ten-year, on-again, off-again project to translate I Saw You on the Street—and especially once I began contextualizing it more through other literary and social texts and less through Simha’s biography—the more I saw how brazen I had been in approaching the translation of this work as a new speaker of French, and as a fledgling navigator of French culture and society.

Image Credit: Flickr

I can point to three different periods of work on this translation project that might be helpful in considering the question of what it means to be a good reader if one is to be a good translator. My first attempt to translate I Saw You on the Street was spread out over two years, from November 2000 through the spring of 2002. The translation at this point served me more than Simha’s work: as I translated, I was also keeping up and developing my French. For all of my bull-in-a-chinashop approach to translation at this point, I will say that I was acutely aware of my shortcomings and lack of training any time I came across an unknown idiom, a particularly literary turn of phrase, some image or metaphor that seemed to be a literary or cultural reference.

I had two very kind readers of these first translation efforts, both tenured, full professors of French who had known Simha and taught her work to undergraduates. They were extraordinarily supportive readers: looking back at that first translation now, I can imagine that they both cringed and sighed multiple times as they made their gentle observations and raised helpful questions. With their prescience of advanced scholars, they were both aware, I would guess, that this version of the translation would open new avenues and possibilities for me, rather than lead to publication of the work in translation: I was working as an editor and playing in a band in Chicago, and this work allowed me to keep up my French during this time between undergraduate and graduate school. Their comments focused, for the most part, upon moments of poor reading, such as through cultural misunderstanding. They also helped me think about how to calibrate the translation of more literary verb tenses in this extremely terse and contemporary-sounding work. Above all, though, they both encouraged me, and for that, I can only thank these gentle and supportive readers.

Aubervilliers, via Flickr

My next translation was a far more rigorous and careful reading of the original work. This was in the summer of 2006, two years into coursework for my doctorate in French. My immersion experiences in French by this point included a summer in Aubervilliers in 2005, shortly before the riots broke out in that and other Paris suburbs. I had done some critical writing on I Saw You on the Street, as well, and as a literary critic and performance studies scholar who often attempts to embody the tone and style of the work I critique, I had had some time and practice with considering how to translate the tone of Simha’s work into English. These kinds of experiences suggest modes of reading that can lead to more careful translation of a contemporary work in a living language: through my new understanding of immigrant culture in France, I was reading Simha less obliquely from the embodied experience perspective. Through the body of knowledge I was amassing about literary traditions in French (and particularly in France), Simha’s work had become far more culturally intelligible to me. And my readers—including

Image Credit: Flickr

the board of a well-known translation imprint who only decided not to publish the work because they felt it couldn’t be marketed within a specific genre—were far more forthright and incisive. Their criticism of my translation was direct and targeted at the sentence level: why did you translate this idiom in that way?, for instance. Based on their comments, I decided to allow some more time to pass, to return to translate I Saw You on the Street once more before submitting it to the publisher my readers from the first imprint had recommended. I had come much closer to being the kind of reader I wanted to be the second time. But more time, experience, and distance between myself and that second reading needed to pass before I was ready to call the third time the charm.

Third reading: summer and fall 2009. I didn’t realize until some weeks after the fact that I had resumed my work ten years to the week of Simha’s death, which I honored by continuing to read I Saw You on the Street as a work situated within and yet separate from her biography. And how things had changed for me as a translating reader! I was on fellowship, in the midst of writing my dissertation. Simha’s work became a gentle entree back into reading and writing, each and every morning. Since the work is divided into 128 prose-poems, each morning I would translate one to three pages. I would begin with a fresh translation—another few years of both reading through literary works in French and another summer plus a full year of research in Paris led me to feel both more confident of and more hesitant about my readerly authority. After completing the newest translation of one prose poem, I compared the newest version to the 2006 version. Then, I would make judgment calls about different turns of phrase, and I looked up oblique expressions and concepts online. If I failed to draw a satisfactory conclusion from Internet research, I would turn to friends who were native speakers to find out what

Image Credit: Flickr

they thought of this or that in the work (and often it was the case in I Saw You on the Street, as was my hunch, that images such as “two kangaroos whose pockets overflowed with Scottish mice with black silky mustaches” were surrealist concoctions of Simha’s own design). I had become accustomed by my second pass through the work to relying on not only a French-English dictionary, but also a French dictionary, an English dictionary, and both French- and English-language thesauri. I combed my fingers through the hair of Simha’s work this time, I would say to friends. I wanted to render the work as seamlessly in English as it was in the French. If I learned anything from my third translation of I Saw You on the Street, it’s that good reading as a translator maintains a certain halting flow: I found that I needed to know when to stop, when to search, when to ask someone who might know better than me. Call this halting flow translator’s humility.

The translation of the elegant and epic crosscultural novel I Loved You for Your Voice (Europa Editions 2006, published in French by Balland in 1994 under the title Oum, written by Sélim Nassib) offers a particularly successful example of reading as writing. As is the case of I Saw You on the Street, in I Loved You for Your Voice, the translator’s conundrum is multiplied. I Loved You for Your Voice is a fictionalized account of the life and career of Om Kalthoum, the revered singer known as kawkab el-sharq (the Star of the East). The first-person narrator, Ahmed Rami, is the celebrated poet who wrote the lyrics to more than half of Kalthoum’s songs. Nassib’s novel could be, in a sense, qualified as a work in translation by default: with much of the dialogue between Rami, Kalthoum, and the other characters, it can be presumed that they are “speaking” in Arabic, although the dialogue is almost entirely written and read in French in the original, and in English in the 2006 Europa Edition.

Translator Alison Anderson ably preserves the resonance and flutter of several crosscultural voices in her reading-writing of the French Oum into the English I Loved You for Your Voice. There seems to be a clear awareness on her part of the importance of the translation theme that pervades the novel, for she has faithfully preserved all descriptions and references to musical interpretation as translation throughout the novel.

Rami was educated in Paris, “to learn Persian,” he tells us, “for the purpose of translating one single poem, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Quatrains.” Rami was a renowned poet before he became Om Kalthoum’s lyricist; the opening chapters of the novel portray their first meetings. Om urges Rami to write for her after their first encounter, during which she sings in a small theater disguised as a boy, as was typical in her early singing career during the 1920s. Rami describes his alternating sense of unease and wonderment as the “boy” sings one of his poems, written in classical Arabic. The voice creeps into him, filling him “with something so natural it was obscene, unconscious of itself.” A telling detail, if we think about Rabassa’s conundrum: had the “boy” singer not maintained proper distance from the lyric? Rami feels undone as his “words were transformed into what they meant to say; even I believed they were real.” Perhaps the problem here is that Om performed her task all too well.

So it is that Om, revealed to be a girl through the curve of her breast under rough peasant’s clothing at the end of the concert, is later able to convince Rami to write for her in colloquial Arabic. And so comes a second layer of a translator’s task, to translate in order for a work to reach a wider audience. “How many people understand your words?” Om asks Rami of his lyric poetry. “Why can’t there be poetry in a language which everyone understands, why not?” Granted, this is not translation in the strictest sense of the term. Yet Rami drawn to Om’s demand specifically as a translator, and he is both anxious and excited about her proposition.

Image Credit: Flickr

Indeed, Rami is sparked to write his first song for Om as he works on his translation of the Rubaiyat, as, he explains, he does every evening. It’s the very nearness and closeness of language, the intimacy and alienation of working with Khayyam’s verses, that lead him to write his first song for Kalthoum:

Arabic and Persian are different, but both are languages of the East, of a same world. The physical proximity plunged me into an exaltation which kept me from sleep. The passage was within reach. And when the meaning was revealed, when the music of the poem found its equivalent in Arabic, I felt the liberation of an emotion that was nine centuries old.

Translation reaches across languages, history, national boundaries and cultural traditions, but it’s even more than that, if we are to heed Rami’s experience. For he realizes, as he grapples with a rough passage of the Rubaiyat, that he is now working on the translation “for her.” He says, “I wanted that girl to sing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, that was all I wanted. That is what I had to have.” He describes this moment of the zenith of his quest to translate the classic work, as he realizes then that the meaning for which he grasps in the translation will all come together in her voice. In the quiet passage describing Rami’s solitary work, translation becomes musical interpretation becomes an act of sharing, of openness, of vulnerability, of love.

And it is so that he writes his first song for Om, entitled “I’m Afraid that Your Love.” This is a departure from the translation act of writing your ass off within a given story and setting: it is as if Rami describes a translation of the sense and sensibility, a translation of the emotional and visceral power, of Khayyam, to be channeled through Rami’s words and rendered through the voice of the woman who would come to be known as the voice of Egypt.

Om Kalthoum, circa 1968

Looking at Anderson’s translation of I Loved You For Your Voice offers this clear insight: the conundrum of translation as treason is responded to through the act of translating itself. Translated works tend to show their seams—in other words, remind the reader that the work is a translation, rather than the original—in the moments when they falter. A successful translation, however, reads seamlessly, and in its seamlessness can offer its own unique response to the peculiar problem of the translator as both reader and writer. As I Loved You for Your Voice progresses from the 1920s through the 1970s, Om Kalthoum singing Rami’s words can be read as a study in translation, the nearness and farness of other languages, cultures, countries, continents. Anderson’s very successful translation of I Loved You for Your Voice resonates within Nassib’s original text. The woven texture in the French of both thematic and literal movements from classical Arabic into colloquial Arabic, from Arabic into French, from lyric poetry into sung verse, remains palpable and present in the English. It is as if Anderson heeded Rami’s description in the text of how he wrote his first song as an invocation of the Rubaiyat for Om, “flowing out word after word, a poem in simple and obvious language…like a letter I might be sending to her.” The latter third of this statement might be the novel’s response to the problem of translation as treason. Alongside the original Oum, I Loved You For Your Voice serves not only as a lesson in translation craft, but also as writerly—and readerly—inspiration.

A particularly satisfying response to Rabassa’s conundrum about what it means to read and write as a translator comes in the process itself. Rabassa is famous for not reading a book before he translates it: he reads as he writes. He alludes to his own returns when he writes, for instance, about “treading very carefully” through a passage of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch once Rabassa realized that the passage alternated, sentence by sentence, between the thoughts of a character and lines from a novel he is reading. It might seem that in describing the pause and return, I am describing an obvious part of the writing process: revision. But translation revision is also a process of rereading, since a translator is as bound to reading as she is to writing. Ideally, the revision process will tie her writing more intimately both to her reading and to her reader.

Image Credit: Flickr

There are all kinds of ways of halting the flow. In my case, graduate seminars and doctoral research served as instructive pauses between the reading and writing of Simha’s work. As I worked on my third and final version of the translation, I condensed into a few months the halting flow of reading and writing then returning with new insight. By the third round, I had learned to pause. Rami poured a Rubaiyat-like sensibility into the early lyrics he composed for Om Kalthoum to sing, but as a translator of Khayyam’s work, he sat hunched over his bed by candlelight each and every night, reading meticulously, writing slowly. Read, write, pause. And return. So grows the seamless skin.