Spring is the sweetest time to discover new poetry. Lingering daylight and blossoms, the chance to open a book on a park bench and be transported, briefly, to a heightened world. Each spring, I find myself gravitating towards collections, both intimate and bold, that wrestle with identity and history, desire and self-definition. Poetry opens up space for us to explore a feminist vision free from the lens of judgment or rational discourse, making imaginative leaps that awaken possibility.
Here are seven new poetry collections that consider intersectional issues of gender and oppression. These poems got into my head, under my skin. Read them and let your world expand.
A fierce, feminist page-turner of a book, Melnick’s third collection is a riveting follow-up to Landscape With Sex & Violence. “You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times/ before you become one,” she writes, recounting the story of babysitting for the rabbi’s son as a teen, a chilling parable about survival under patriarchy. With her signature wit and candor, Melnick reckons with a history of misogyny and anti-Semitism, war and atrocity, sexual and domestic violence, myriad abuses of power—and yet there is humor and hopefulness in her voice, a perpetual sense of discovery. These poems reclaim the power of mother-love and female pleasure, searing rage and desire, as they navigate layers of generational and personal trauma and rework them into art. Refusenik rewrites what it means to live in America today. On July 4th, Melnick insists: “I recognize my own fireworks.”
Shelley Wong is the poet-queen the world needs right now. Her visionary debut, As She Appears, centers queer women of color in shape-shifting poems of becoming and knowing, seeing and being seen. Wong uses white space and silence to pose questions about identity and interiority, femininity and power: “women are familiar with surrender/ & the appearance of it,” she writes, letting the lines float free on the page. Subversive and sensual, Wong’s poems take us from the solitary salt marshes of Fire Island to Pride month in New York, dancing “in strobing summer heat.” She mourns a lost relationship, writes odes to Frida Kahlo, contemplates being a “not-mother,” appraises the rites of courtship and fashion, wanders Golden Gate Park in the pandemic spring. These gorgeous poems are alight with flowers, birds and longing, making a new world in their wake. As She Appears is a stunning feat of self-creation: “As a girl, I never/ saw a woman/ who looked like me./ I had to invent her.”
Forde’s audacious debut won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and offers surprise and delight at every turn. In visceral poems that get up close to the Black female body, its blood and breath and hungers, Mother Body follows the journey of the fat girl as she nicks herself shaving, endures a pelvic exam, savors post-coital bliss, dances, eats, orgasms, exercises. A poetic descendant of Lucille Clifton, Forde writes with femme swagger and fine craft, her language rhythmic and lush. In “Ode to My Stomach,” she revels in naming: “You are/ honey dome. Power house. Piston/ of digestion pump-pumping.” At the beach, fat girl studies “a jellyfish’s rainbowed remains:/ luminescent dew, a gelatinous porkbelly of blues…” These unapologetic poems are full of wonder, refuting a legacy of shame and unworthiness. Mother Body dances with pain but claims joy as a birthright, a coming home to self-love and wholeness.
I confess I expected to dislike a poetry collection about the male experience, written by a straight, white cis-man. Instead, I was captivated and deeply moved by Salerno’s agile poems, which wrestle with masculinity in its complex forms. With tenderness and precision, The Man Grave interrogates the privileges and vulnerabilities of boyhood and manhood, from schoolyard memories of the epithet “fag” to sperm viewed under the microscope at the IVF clinic. Salerno’s speakers try to “leave manliness behind” but can’t stop seeing brutality everywhere, recalling the violence of male relatives, watching an osprey hunt its prey. Shame and anger simmer in a series of “Sports No One Follows” poems: “To learn how to shut another man’s mouth/ you must point at him with the fat end of the bat…” Taut with wordplay and irony, The Man Grave finds sorrow inside laughter, redemption in the act of empathy. A gentle poem about shaving a mustache nearly broke my heart.
Erika Meitner’s sixth collection blazes with eroticism and curiosity. These passionate poems teem with incisive observations of daily life, from night-swimming at a Holiday Inn to buying a pregnancy test at CVS. “I’ve got years in my mouth too, waiting to be fished out,/ laid across a table, and gutted,” she writes. Useful Junk explores memory and the body with relentless lyricism and nostalgia, writing in praise of female pleasure and discovery at midlife. Meitner’s poems want to inhabit everything, and do: perimenopause, infertility, friendship, motherhood, family trauma, sexting, trying to take a selfie of one’s own ass. There is an infectious, headlong energy to the lines, a vision “multitudinous and wild” akin to that of Walt Whitman. I felt these speakers were looking into my own heart, revealing the wonder and vulnerability of its yearning: “Can I ask you again to tell me about my body,” Meitner urges, “to introduce me to my own numinous skin?”
Paul Tran’s astonishing debut is balm for survivors everywhere. Their collection investigates sexual violence and generational trauma while forging a bright path of resilience and healing. Tran is a queer and trans descendant of Vietnamese refugees whose innovative poetic forms reflect the shifting, nonlinear experiences of trauma survivors. Resisting the urge for closure, their poems cycle through memory and recurring imagery; the song of a passing ice cream truck, heard during an assault, replays in the lines. But Tran finds strength in breaking apart language and exposing its trickery, naming slippery homonyms, dancing around the unspeakable act of violation: “Reap. Pear. Pare. Aper. / These are versions of the word/ I won’t say.” The poems recast a legacy of war and abuse, critique the imperial gaze of Renaissance art and the scientific method, retell the tale of Scheherazade until it becomes a story of survival and love. All the Flowers Kneeling affirms poetry’s transformative force: “A poem is a mirror/ I use to look/ not at but into myself.”
The much-anticipated second collection from surrealist poet Kristin Bock explores dystopian dreamscapes, myths, and spells. Glass Bikini channels Barbarella in her silver spacesuit and Mary Shelley in her prophetic brilliance, illuminating our nightmare world. These poems travel from ashen Pluto to the day-glo Dollar Store, populated with robots and rabbits, mannequins and monsters, mirrors revealing what makes us human. Bock mixes deft prose poems with her signature lyricism to heighten emotion. Buttons shine “like opals buried deep inside the moon;” “grief is a boat/ exactly the size and shape of the sea.” And hope exists in the redemptive power of the feminine. The final sequence, “Copilot,” recounts the last days of a doomed planet, a reverie of violence and survival where tenderness between women becomes a promise we can hold: “I want to tell her shhh, I’m here where you left me, in the blue basin, waiting to catch your analogue heart like an egg from the sky.”
Fess Avenue wasn’t a long street. There were only three houses on it, all with attics and fairly large yards. Drawn there by an ad in the classifieds, I moved into the attic room of the middle house, which belonged to a Mrs. MacMillan. She herself occupied the lower floors. Such being the case, I had an excellent view—not only of Mrs. Nolan’s house, but Mrs. Casper’s as well.
Like Mrs. MacMillan, these two neighbors had been without husbands for a long time. Since Mrs. MacMillan never spoke about her own situation, I never found out what happened to Mr. MacMillan. But she told me that Mrs. Nolan lived alone due to her ornery disposition. As a young newlywed, she would often beat her husband. And one day, she’d arbitrarily ordered him to scram, threatening him with further beatings if he made any attempt to return. Since kicking him out, Mrs. Nolan had shown no desire to live with anyone else at all.
Mrs. Casper’s was a different story. She hadn’t cared much about her husband, a traveling salesman who’d rarely been at home. Whether he was in the house or elsewhere, it appeared to make no difference to her. It was the same when he died in a car accident in Cincinnati. She had betrayed no sign of either sorrow or joy.
That was the extent of my knowledge, for that was all that Mrs. MacMillan told me. Don’t try to manage the affairs of others and don’t take an interest in other people’s business. This was what Mrs. MacMillan advised by way of conclusion once she was done telling me about her neighbors. It was the only way, she said, that anyone could ever hope to live in peace.
Furthermore, she continued, for the purpose of maintaining good relations between her and myself, I was only allowed to speak to her when necessary, and only ever on the phone. Therefore, I should get a telephone right away, she told me. And until the phone company came to install my line, I was forbidden from using hers. After all, she said, there was a public phone booth a mere three blocks away. She went on to say that the key she’d lent me could only be used for the side door. Her key was for the front entrance. This way, we could each come and go without bothering the other. Also, she continued, I should leave my monthly rent check in her mailbox—for I had a separate mailbox from hers, located on the side of the house. I must say, initially, I found these terms extremely agreeable, for it wasn’t as if I liked to be bothered by other people myself.
The whole summer passed without any problems. I used my time to attend lectures, visit the library, take walks, and cook. And every now and then I would sit contemplatively in Dunn Meadow, a grassy area where there were always lots of people. I bumped into Mrs. Nolan and Mrs. Casper a few times, but as neither of them showed any desire to become acquainted when I tried to approach, I too became reluctant about speaking to them.
But as summer started to give way to fall, the situation changed. As autumn approached, the town of Bloomington was flooded by thirty-five thousand incoming students—new ones, as well as those who had spent the summer months out of town. But as far as I knew, not a single one of them lived on or in the vicinity of Fess. Bloomington bustled with activity, but Fess Avenue remained deserted. Besides this, as time went on, the days grew shorter, with the sun rising ever later and setting ever sooner. And then the leaves turned yellow and, by and by, began to shed. Not only that—it rained more often, sometimes to the accompaniment of lightning and thunder. Opportunities to go outdoors became few and far between. Only now, under such conditions, did I pay more attention to life on Fess. All three of them—Mrs. MacMillan, Mrs. Nolan, and Mrs. Casper—spent a lot of time in their yards raking leaves. The leaves would then be put into enormous plastic bags, placed in their cars, and driven to the garbage dump about seven blocks away.
Mrs. Nolan had a peculiar habit. If she caught a glimpse of any animal while she was in her yard, she would immediately begin pelting it with rocks that she appeared to keep at hand for this purpose. She always managed to hit her target, even without taking aim. A number of bats dangling from low branches were dispatched; the same went for assorted birds that had just happened to stop by, only to perch within stoning distance of Mrs. Nolan. It wasn’t just her throwing abilities that were impressive, but also the extraordinary vigor that enabled her to wound and terminate the lives of so many animals. Her actions weren’t illegal, of course, but I wondered at how she never attempted to be more surreptitious. How she disposed of the poor creatures’ bodies remained a complete mystery to me. I was positive that both Mrs. MacMillan and Mrs. Casper knew about Mrs. Nolan’s behavior. Yet it came as no surprise to me that they simply let her be, without attempting to raise the matter or report her to the police. Apparently, it was by carrying on without interfering with each other that they were able to get along well.
Mrs. Casper didn’t possess exceptional qualities like Mrs. Nolan, but it was hard to ignore her all the same. She was old and sometimes looked unwell, and when she looked unwell, she was unsteady on her feet. When she was in good health, she was capable of a brisk stride. I often thought to myself that if she ever had cause to run, she would manage a good sprint.
All three women shopped at the local Marsh Supermarket from time to time. It was a small branch, which sold both regular goods and ready-made foods, not far from the nearby phone booth. Naturally, since it was such a quiet area, the store didn’t have many regular customers. The owner himself didn’t seem to expect much business. The main thing was that the store could keep trundling along, and he seemed satisfied on this front. In keeping with the general atmosphere of the neighborhood, he wasn’t friendly, speaking only when required. Personally, I only shopped there if I couldn’t get to College Mall with its many affordable stores, some distance away.
To combat my loneliness, I’d sometimes flip through the phone book. In its pages, I discovered the numbers for Mrs. Nolan, Mrs. Casper, and the nearby Marsh. Over time, once we were well into autumn and the days had grown even shorter, and strong winds had become a regular occurrence, as had lightning and thunder storms, I set about killing the lonely hours by playing telephone. At first, I’d dial the recorded voice that would give me the time, temperature, and weather forecast. That sufficed initially, but over time, grew less effective. I began calling various classmates. They responded in the same way they did when I met them on campus, in as few words as possible, until I exhausted all possible topics of conversation. I began ringing up Marsh, asking if they stocked bananas, or apples, or spaghetti—anything really—which ended up annoying the owner. Mrs. MacMillan didn’t seem too happy either whenever I called her with some made-up excuse. Like the store owner, she seemed to know full well that I had no real reason to talk.
At last, one rainy night, I phoned Mrs. Nolan to ask if I could help clean up her yard. This seemed not only to surprise her, but enrage her as well. Was her yard that filthy, that disgusting, she inquired. When I answered, “No,” she asked what my ulterior motive was. I just thought she might need some help, I said, upon which she asked whether she looked so sickly, so feeble, that I felt compelled to offer my services. Naturally, I replied that she looked perfectly healthy. She promptly told me, “If I need anyone’s help, I’ll place an ad.”
After this conversation, I didn’t dare to phone Mrs. Casper.
One night, as the rain fell outside in a steady drizzle, something changed. There was a light on in Mrs. Casper’s attic. And it remained on every night. I soon found out that someone was living there—an old man who looked about sixty-five years old. Every morning he would poke his head out the window and take aim at the ground below with a pistol, like a child playing with a toy. But I was certain that what he was holding was a real gun. And if I was right, something terrible might happen. So I immediately called Mrs. MacMillan. She thanked me for informing her, but then tried to bring the matter to a close: “If Mrs. Casper really does have a boarder in her attic, then that’s her business. Just like you living here is mine. If he really does have a gun, he obviously has a permit for it. And if he doesn’t have a permit, then they’ll arrest him at some point.”
Every morning he would poke his head out the window and take aim at the ground below with a pistol, like a child playing with a toy.
I made a hasty attempt at protest before she could hang up. “If anything happens, won’t it be bad for us?”
“As long as we don’t bother him, what could happen?” she replied.
And that was the end of the conversation.
The next morning, under the pretext of buying milk, I took a walk to Marsh. Naturally, I took the opportunity to check whether there was a new name on Mrs. Casper’s mailbox, but there was no name to be found. While paying for my milk, I commented to the owner, “Looks like Mrs. Casper has a new boarder.”
“Yeah. He’s already been in a few times to buy doughnuts.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“How should I know?” he replied with a shrug.
Coincidentally, on the way back from Marsh I ran into Mrs. Nolan.
“Mrs. Nolan, did you know Mrs. Casper has a new boarder?” I asked.
“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Nolan, showing no desire of wanting to talk further.
My hope that I would run into Mrs. Casper, unfortunately, remained unfulfilled.
That night, after some deliberation, I phoned Mrs. Casper.
“Mrs. Casper, I see there’s someone living in your attic.”
“Yes, I rented it out, son. Why do you ask?”
“If he needs a friend, I’d like to get to know him,” I said.
“All right, I’ll tell him. What’s your number? If he’s interested, I’ll let him know he should give you a call.”
After giving her my number, I asked for his in return. Mrs. Casper replied that he didn’t have a phone. Nor did she know whether he had any plans to have one installed.
When I asked for his name, she said she had no clue. “If he used checks to pay the rent, I’d know it, of course. But he pays me in cash. The only thing he’s told me about himself is that he fought in World War II.”
On this note, the conversation came to an end.
Things went on as usual after that, except for the weather, which got increasingly worse, and the temperature, which continued to plummet. Every day, the man would point his gun at the ground below, taking aim at a large rock beneath a tulip tree, never firing any bullets. And every night, the light in Mrs. Casper’s attic would shine steadily on. In the meantime, the old man never called me. And I never ran into him. As far as I knew, he never left the house, so I never had the chance to chase after him and pretend to bump into him by coincidence.
One morning, when the weather was particularly bad, I called the phone company to ask if anyone on Fess Avenue had recently installed a line.
“What’s the person’s name?” asked the operator.
“I don’t know. But he lives on Fess.”
“Now that’s a tough one,” answered the operator, “unless you know his name. Keep in mind, sir, since all the new students began arriving for the fall semester, thousands of people have been installing new lines.”
Her answer terminated my desire to pursue the matter further.
The next day I went to Marsh to buy a doughnut.
“Did the old man stop by recently?” I asked. “The one who lives in Mrs. Casper’s attic?”
“Why, yes. Didn’t you see him, son? He just left the store.”
“Oh, really?” I said, somewhat bewildered.
I asked whether he’d ever received a phone call from the man. The store owner shook his head.
I hurried out of the store, but my efforts to run into the old man bore no fruit. Several times I circled the area—South Tenth and Grant, Dunn, Horsetaple, and Sussex—but I saw no trace of him. Then, upon returning home, I found that the old man was already back in his room, aiming his pistol below, as usual, making shooting motions, but never firing a single bullet. I hoped that at some point he’d look my way, but my wish was never granted.
That same night I decided to write him a letter. Since no one knew his name, I could address it to anyone and Mrs. Casper would be sure to pass it along. On the back of the envelope, I wrote, John Dunlap, c/o Mrs. Casper, 205 Fess Avenue.
The letter read as follows:
John,
How about meeting at the Marsh at half past eleven on Wednesday morning? I know you like doughnuts. This time around, the doughnuts are on me, and the coffee, too.
Best wishes,
I printed my name and address.
Also that very night, I dropped the letter in the mailbox near Marsh. I’d nearly reached the mailbox when an old man came out of the supermarket. I mailed the letter and hurried after him, but he’d already vanished, having turned into a small alley connecting South Tenth with South Eleventh. I couldn’t say who this old man was for sure, but there was a chance that he might be Mrs. Casper’s boarder. I hesitated for a moment. Should I chase after him or return to Marsh first, under the guise of buying bread or cake, to find out if he really was the man from Mrs. Casper’s attic? My hesitation was to blame, I suppose, for by the time I decided to follow him into the alley, I’d lost his trail. It was only when I returned to Marsh did I receive confirmation that he was indeed the man I was looking for.
“This time he bought a tuna sandwich,” the store owner said.
Strangely, there was no light on in Mrs. Casper’s attic that night. I kept waiting, but still the light remained off. My fingers began to itch.
In the end, I gave in and phoned Mrs. Casper.
“Mrs. Casper,” I said after apologizing for calling so late, “you did tell the man in your attic about me, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did, son,” she replied promptly. “But he doesn’t seem to be interested in talking to anyone.”
“So . . . just wondering, Mrs. Casper, why isn’t the light in his room on?”
“My, my! How is that any of my business, son? He pays me rent, after all. I’m not going to stop him from doing whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t damage anything or cause trouble.”
Unsatisfied, I pressed on. “Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Casper, but if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t he have a gun?”
“My, my! This is too much, son. What is it to you if he does have one, and what’s it to you if he doesn’t? Now, goodnight. I hope you won’t ask about him again if it’s not urgent.”
And that was the end of the discussion.
In the days that followed, everything went on as normal. On Wednesday, starting in the morning, I attempted to keep my eyes glued on Mrs. Casper’s house. As usual, at around ten-thirty, the man opened the window and began playing around with his gun. Then he shut the window. Meanwhile, I was prepared to leave the house the minute I saw him heading out through Mrs. Casper’s yard. But he never appeared. Soon it was almost twelve-thirty, and he still hadn’t emerged. Only then did I give up. Leaving the house, I walked dejectedly to Marsh.
The ground was still wet from the rain that had fallen all last night and early that morning. When I reached Marsh, I was startled to see my letter lying on the roadside in the gutter, drenched in rainwater, but saved from slipping into the sewer by a branch that had fallen from a large tree overhead. I found the letter had been opened. I had no idea whether the man had thrown it away on purpose or if he had accidentally dropped it.
“Has that old man been in today?” I asked the owner after getting some milk.
He nodded.
“About what time did he come in?”
“Oh, an hour ago or so,” he replied.
Hmm. If that were the case, then he must have left while I had been in the bathroom.
“Have you found out anything else about him?” I asked.
“Nope,” replied the owner. “Oh, wait. He did mention that he very much wanted to find some young folk to spend time with. People in their twenties, sound in body and mind—to train how to handle a weapon if the need ever arose. Then he began babbling. Said he once dropped a bomb on a Japanese ship. Darned if I know what’s wrong with that guy.”
The owner then turned his attention to sticking price tags on some canned food that had just come in. My attempts to fish for further information about the old man met with failure.
The old man in Mrs. Casper’s attic didn’t open his window that afternoon. But in the evening, I did catch a glimpse of something rather strange: Mrs. Casper leaving her house and making her way unsteadily to her car. Because it was already dark, I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I had the impression that she didn’t seem well. I ran down, but by the time I’d reached the street, Mrs. Casper had already started her car. She veered too far right as she turned the corner and almost grazed the curb.
It grew late, and there was no sign that she had come back yet. The whole house, including the attic, was dark. What I really wanted to do was phone Mrs. MacMillan, but I thought to myself, What’s the use? Then, all of a sudden, I heard a gunshot, so I called her right away. The phone rang for a long time. She must have already gone to bed or fallen asleep. Sure enough, she sounded pretty peeved.
When she asked me what kind of a shot it was, I hesitated. A pistol shot wouldn’t have been that loud, but I answered nonetheless, “A pistol.”
When Mrs. MacMillan asked where the sound came from, I hesitated once more. I’d heard the shot loud and clear, but what wasn’t clear was where it had come from. So once again, nonetheless, I replied as if I knew. “From Mrs. Casper’s attic.”
Mrs. MacMillan said that no one should meddle in Mrs. Casper’s affairs if the woman herself hadn’t asked for help. Then I told her about seeing Mrs. Casper earlier. At this additional information, Mrs. MacMillan expressed her thanks.
“She must be having an attack again. She has bouts of fatigue. Have I told you about it, son?”
When I said, “No,” she explained that Mrs. Casper had suffered for a long time from the terrible malady, and her doctor had advised her to come straight to him or go to the hospital whenever the symptoms came on.
“She should have told us so we could have helped her,” she added.
When I brought up the gunshot again, Mrs. MacMillan replied, “If you think it would do any good to report it to the police, go ahead, son. But be prepared to get a headache from all the questions they’ll ask.”
Without consulting Mrs. MacMillan, I phoned Mrs. Nolan. The phone rang for ages before she picked up. And like Mrs. MacMillan, her voice emanated extreme annoyance. After insisting that she hadn’t heard any noise, she asked if I was absolutely sure I’d heard a shot. When I answered, “Absolutely,” she insisted on knowing where the shot came from.
I answered as if there were no doubt in my mind. “Mrs. Casper’s attic,” I said.
“Then it must have been that old man with his gun. Isn’t that right?” she asked. She sounded as if she wanted me to agree with her.
Again, as if there were no doubt about it, I answered, “Yes.”
Since I didn’t know what else to say, I ended up asking, “So, do you think we should report it to the police?”
“Why by all means, son, by all means. As long as you’re fine with them thinking you’re crazy when you can’t prove it was definitely him who fired the shot.”
My desire to further discuss the gunshot waned. And when I told her about seeing Mrs. Casper, Mrs. Nolan’s response— both in tone and content—was similar to Mrs. MacMillan’s.
I couldn’t bear to stay put any longer. So I left and walked glumly toward Marsh, hoping to see something promising in Mrs. Casper’s house. At the very least, Marsh might still be open. Mrs. Casper’s house was completely dark. Even the little light on the porch was off. Yet, faintly, I could hear the sound of someone sobbing on the porch. I couldn’t do anything, of course. And I didn’t have any reason to enter Mrs. Casper’s yard, apart from curiosity. Let’s say I did go in and something happened. If curiosity was my only excuse, then it might get me into trouble.
It turned out Marsh was closed. So I turned and headed one block over. Like Fess Avenue, this stretch of road was also deserted and dark. An acute regret at renting a place on Fess rose within me once more. Nearly everyone who lived in this neighborhood was old, lived alone, and had no friends and no interest in making any. Historically, this had once been a lively area, but the town activity had long shifted away, to College Mall. On the corner of Park Avenue alone were two abandoned movie theaters that had fallen into disrepair. But I’d agreed to live in Mrs. MacMillan’s attic through December, when the fall semester came to an end. By the time I returned and passed Mrs. Casper’s house again, there were no more sounds. The house was still dark.
If curiosity was my only excuse, then it might get me into trouble.
The next day was busy, and I had to put aside all memory of the previous night’s events. In the morning I had to go to the library, and from there straight to class. And because I had so much reading to do, followed by more classes, I didn’t go home for lunch but ate at the Commons—a cafeteria in the Union building, which formed the center for the majority of campus life.
When I entered the Commons, there were practically no free seats. Over by the entrance was a long line of people waiting for food. After getting something to eat and selecting my drink, I joined another long line of people waiting to check out before taking their meals to the dining area. In the meantime, country-western music blasted over the speakers.
For some reason, I felt a bit shaky. Soon, I found I had a slight headache as well. And wouldn’t you know it, right when I glanced over at the revolving doors leading from the dining area to the lawn, I saw the old man from Mrs. Casper’s attic heading outside.
There were still about five people ahead of me, waiting to pay, and behind me there were around ten. I couldn’t possibly set down my tray of food in order to chase after him. There was no way. All I could do was wait patiently for my turn. Once I paid, another problem arose. Every seat was now taken.
This being the case, I couldn’t possibly set my food down on someone else’s table to dash out and see if the man was still there. In the end, I had no choice but to go downstairs, to the seating area for the Kiva café one level below. And as I made my way down the steps, I felt waves of dizziness wash over me.
After that last incident, there were several things that were worthy of note: Mrs. Casper’s boarder never came to the window to play with his gun anymore; the light in his room remained on all night; Mrs. Casper exhibited no signs of relapse; and I began spending more time hanging out at the Union. It was an enormous building, with many floors and many rooms, with many tables and seats where one could study, equipped with stores, a post office, and other university-owned services. And I found I never happened across the old man again.
I did go to Marsh once, and the owner told me that the old man was still an avid doughnut buyer. What time the man would show up, the owner told me, he never could tell. Something else worth mentioning: whenever I woke up, my head would start to ache, and I would initially see spots of light. I would occasionally experience the same sensations when I stood up after sitting down. And, sometimes, while walking, I would start to feel shaky.
One day, I was in the Union, walking from the bookstore toward the Commons. I was heading to the exit near the Trophy Room in order to get to Ballantine Hall, where I had to take an exam. And of all things, at that exact moment, I spied the old man heading from the Commons to the men’s room. Naturally, I seized my chance. I was at the men’s room in a flash. It was a multitude of mirrors, of sinks and electric hand dryers, of urinals and stalls. I’d just reached the urinal area when the old man swung one of the stalls shut. I didn’t need to pee, but I had no choice. Once again, I felt unsteady on my feet. I finished peeing, but even so, I pretended to keep going. Then I deliberately took my time washing my hands.
Wouldn’t you know it, while I was washing my hands, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” yelled the old man—like a kid playing with a toy gun.
I waited.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!” he kept yelling from inside the stall. A few people began to take notice, but only for a moment, before ignoring him. In order to linger on, I began using the hand dryer. Over the low roar, you could still hear the “Bang! Bang! Bang!” A few others, who’d just come in, looked curious. What happened next, I had no idea. I had to rush off to Ballantine Hall.
After the exam, I felt as if I’d been hit in the head by a sledgehammer, and my whole body felt as if it were engulfed in flames. I had to take a cab home. As we passed Dunn Meadow, I saw some kids playing. The old man was there, too, making a spectacle of himself. He was acting as if he was going to shoot them with his gun, and they were stepping backward, hands raised, as if scared of being shot.
“That vet. He’s at it again,” the taxi driver said.
When I asked what he meant, the driver replied that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen the old man in Dunn Meadow, behaving like this.
“Told me he was a bomber pilot during World War II,” the driver said. “His plane got shot down by the Japanese in the Pacific. He and two other crew members survived, thanks to their life vests. Then they were caught by the Japanese, tortured, starved, and denied medical treatment. His two friends died, and he almost did too—of beriberi. After Japan threw in the towel, he was taken to an army hospital to recover. They fed him five times a day to make up for the starvation, and he wound up marrying one of the nurses. They had two sons—one died in Vietnam and the other drowned while swimming in the Ohio River. He said his wife died, too, only recently. Of colon cancer.”
That night, I couldn’t take it longer. I was sick and needed help. I phoned the student health center, which told me to come in straightaway. Then I called a cab. I couldn’t help but grumble when the taxi took a long time to arrive.
“Sorry, man,” said the driver. “I got held up by some guy when I tried to turn onto South Tenth. I had to go back and take Park Avenue in order to get to Fess. What a moron! Cars on the road, and he’s in the middle of the street, waving a gun!”
I wanted to know more, but the sledgehammer-strength pain in my head kept me from saying anything. The taxi sped on, turning onto Woodlawn Avenue. Then, damn it all, just when we were about to turn onto South Tenth, the old man from Mrs. Casper’s attic ran into the middle of the road, pointing his gun at the driver.
“This guy again!” the driver yelled, veering away toward Memorial Stadium.
The remainder of the night was hazy to me. I think I pretty much half fainted once we reached the health center. I don’t even really know what happened the next day except that my body felt like it was on fire and I had to undergo all sorts of tests. Then, on the third day, I began to feel better. They said my condition wasn’t critical and I would be allowed to leave in a few days’ time.
In the meantime, I’d received a phone call from Mrs. MacMillan who wanted to see how I was doing. She mentioned that Mrs. Casper had returned from Monroe Hospital a few days ago. When I asked about the old man, she told me that he had frightened Mrs. Nolan with his gun, and that Mrs. Nolan had threatened to call the police. Even Mrs. Casper had expressed unhappiness about her boarder, saying he was prone to fits of rage.
That same day, the campus newspaper—which had a circulation of about fifty thousand copies—printed a letter to the editor about the old man. The letter’s writer, a Sue Harris, said that for the past few days, an old man had been roaming around the Union and Dunn Meadow, pointing a gun at anyone who walked by. Speaking for herself, Harris couldn’t tell whether the gun was real or fake. But even if he wasn’t threatening anyone’s safety, wrote Harris, he was certainly spoiling everyone’s view.
The next day the same paper ran three more letters about the old man. One, from a Susan Tuck, took the same tone as Harris. The two others, penned respectively by Cindi Cornell and Paul Smith, took issue, saying anybody and everybody had the right to have fun. If anyone didn’t like having a gun pointed at them, then they shouldn’t go near him. And if anyone felt he was spoiling their view, then they should look away. Both Cornell and Smith then testified to the service that the man was providing to those who did like to have fun. For, whenever he showed up, they said, he and his antics succeeded in amusing people who were otherwise bored.
On the third day, the same newspaper printed a photo of the man, which took up two columns’ worth of space. “The Old Man with No Name,” read the caption. After stating that they had received numerous letters and phone calls about the man, the editor wrote, “This old man, who refuses to give his name, intends to rent the twenty-third story of the Union building tower and fit it out with a machine gun and boxes of ammunition—for the purpose of self-defense if anyone tries to cause him harm.”
That was also the day I was discharged. I left the minute the nurse told me my taxi had come. My mood was overcast, influenced by the bad weather. I wasn’t particularly excited about returning to Mrs. MacMillan’s house. As the taxi pulled away from the health center, the first snowflakes began to fall, marking autumn’s end.
After dropping me off in front of Mrs. MacMillan’s, the taxi sped off. It had just rounded the corner, near Mrs. Nolan’s house, when I heard Mrs. Casper shrieking in fright: “Help! Help! Help!”
At the same time, I heard the old man yell, “Watch out or I’ll shoot you! Watch out or I’ll shoot you!”
Sure enough, there was Mrs. Casper sprinting toward me, followed by the old man, aiming his gun at her. At the sight of her terrified face and his resolute expression, I was determined to block his way in order to give Mrs. Casper a chance to escape. And when I did, it wasn’t he who fell flat, but me. Of course, the pain in my head came back with a vengeance, followed by spots of light. When I got to my feet, I heard a gun go off, followed by another shot. It was the same kind of sound I’d heard the night I watched Mrs. Casper leave her house. I could barely make out anything, but there, to my shock, were two figures lying on the sidewalk—one, the old man, and the other, Mrs. Casper. The snow was now falling thick and fast.
The old man was drenched in blood. It trickled slowly onto the pavement, the snowflakes alighting on the pool of red. I don’t know why, but I knelt beside him. His eyelids flickered open, briefly, as if he had something to tell me. But then they shut once more. And then a bellow—long and loud from his lips. And I don’t know why, but I began stroking his head. And when I tried to close his mouth, I found that his jaw had gone stiff, as hard as steel.
I became aware of an old woman standing nearby. When she spoke, I realized it was Mrs. Nolan.
“Yes, I killed him. The wretch,” she said in a defensive tone of voice. “You know full well he would have killed Mrs. Casper. That’s why I came to the poor woman’s rescue. Just so you know, son, he threatened to finish me off several times.”
When I stood up, I suddenly realized that Mrs. Nolan was carrying a short double-barreled shotgun. And I was convinced—that night, after Mrs. Casper left her house, this was the weapon that had gone off, not the pistol belonging to this poor old man. And I felt hatred for Mrs. Nolan. I remembered the squirrels and birds that had met their destruction at her hands. The woman was nothing other than, and nothing but, a murderer.
When the police and ambulances showed up, I straight out refused to be taken to the police station. Finally, they granted my request to be brought back to the health center instead. And so, under the escort of two campus police officers, I was returned to the student health center.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Even though the night-shift doctor finally let me take sleeping pills, my eyes remained wide open. I found myself pursued relentlessly by the old man’s gaze before his eyes had closed. And I couldn’t erase the memory of his mouth, gaping and unyielding as steel. I wondered, what had he been about to say? How cruel Mrs. Nolan was.
From the police, I received the information that the old man’s gun wasn’t a toy, but it hadn’t been loaded. Mrs. Casper had been lying sprawled on the sidewalk, not because she’d been shot, but because she’d fallen down in terror before fainting when she’d heard the gun go off. And, in keeping with what Mrs. Nolan herself had admitted to me, when Mrs. Nolan had looked out her attic window and seen the old man threatening to kill Mrs. Casper and chasing her with a gun, not to mention Mrs. Casper herself shrieking for help, she had gone straight for her shotgun, fully intending to strike the old man down. Mrs. Nolan also mentioned to the police that the man had threatened to shoot her many times before.
When they spoke to the police, both Mrs. Nolan and Mrs. MacMillan said that I had often seen the old man playing with his pistol, and that one night I had even heard the man fire his gun.
“So, you see, it’s not possible,” said Mrs. Nolan to the police. “The man must have kept bullets.”
In Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating, the protagonist Lydia, a 20-something Londoner and artist, is a frustrated foodie. She salivates over the idea of the delicacies of her Japanese father’s homeland, and reads labels of food with interest and desire. But for all the intent, Lydia can’t eat or drink—she is a vampire and can only stomach blood. Her British Malaysian (vampire) mother, a mysterious and forbidding character, has been feeding Lydia pig’s blood since she was a kid.
Lydia not only craves food. She wants a normal life of connection with others. She can’t share dinners with the other artists in the loft building she works out of. She can smell blood everywhere but because she eschews human blood, she is starving. Life should be beginning. Her troublesome mother is tucked away in a nursing home; she’s starting a new internship at a London gallery. But her severe hunger and her unusual constitution (plus some creepy men) get in the way.
I spoke to Claire Kohda, who is a violinist who’s played with the likes of dance music legend Pete Tong and the English Chamber Orchestra, about vampirism as a metaphor for colonialism, taking otherness to the next level, and comparative vampire perceptions across cultures.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: You take “otherness” to the extreme in the novel. A mixed race young woman who is a hungry and conflicted vampire! How did you dream her up?
Claire Kohda: At the time of writing Woman, Eating, I was wondering a lot about how I belong in the places and systems I exist in, wondering whether it’s possible to belong when you are also different. A year earlier, I had been to Japan and felt very foreign there; soon after I came back, we went into our first lockdown, and there was a huge increase in hate crimes against Asians, and that emphasized to me the fact that many people in England believe I’m a foreigner here, too. Being mixed race, the feeling of difference follows you everywhere, even into your home where you are ethnically different to both of your parents. I think all of this was what drew me to writing about a vampire—a creature that is in between so many things: in between life and death, good and evil, human and demon.
All of this happened very organically, almost subconsciously, though. I think of all the themes in Woman, Eating as having been percolating—strengthening and becoming richer—through that first year of the pandemic, without me realizing. I felt so helpless while all the awful things were happening to the Asian communities in the US and UK and elsewhere; but, I think a part of my mind was fighting back, and creating this vampire with Asian heritage, this expression of all those feelings of otherness I’d internalized and struggled with.
Then, one day, Lydia essentially just appeared in my head, fully formed. She appeared sitting at a large dinner table, surrounded by food, watching the other dinner guests breaking bread, sharing wine, and wishing she could eat with them. Food is central to this novel and to Lydia’s life. Asian cuisines are so often used to other Asian people. Names of Chinese dishes have been shouted at my mum and other people I know of Asian heritage, as if our cuisines are so different or weird that they can be used as slurs to dehumanize people. Asian cuisines are also often perceived as cruel too; I often find myself being asked about whaling or dog meat, despite being vegan; It can be hard to not internalize the monstrousness other people (mis)place onto you when they associate the cruelty of a specific food industry with your racial identity. Lydia is, in part, that racism made manifest. She is what many people would consider to be a monster, even though, when it really comes down to it, the only thing that sets her apart from us is her diet; the only thing that sets her apart from humans is what food she can eat.
JRR: I am especially interested in the choice of making her mother have both British and Malaysian roots while Lydia herself is part Japanese. Can you tell us about how you came to this decision?
CK: Traditionally, vampire narratives have been used to tell stories about colonialism. Dracula is thought to have reflected Victorian guilt about imperialism; the colonized other (Dracula) consumes the colonizer (his victims). The vampire is very often a metaphor for consuming, for taking—and that is true in Woman, Eating too. Lydia’s mum, Julie, believes vampirism is a curse inflicted on colonizers as a punishment for taking what was not theirs. She describes this curse as having spread like a disease. I wanted the roots of the vampire to lie in an act, not just a specific person—for vampirism to have come from a kind of imbalance in human society, from something that took place that was so wrong that it manifested a monster.
The way Julie sees it, her vampirism is a legacy of colonialism; it’s trauma that was caused when Malaysia was colonized by Britain, and then again by Japan, that has lasted—because Julie is immortal— for several lifetimes-worth. She is intergenerational trauma made flesh. And Lydia inherits that trauma too; she can’t see the humanity in her mother; she can’t access her Malaysian heritage for so much of the book. Only when she essentially takes it from a British man, does she realize what she was missing.
Vampires are fascinating creatures – they’re kind of timeless things, un-aging, yet ancient. Colonialism is ancient. We’ve always taken from each other. And I wanted the vampire to have come from that. In England, the fact that Western countries colonized so many East and Southeast Asian countries is not a part of our education; so many people don’t know that this happened. When I started writing Woman, Eating, I recognized that I had an opportunity to reinvent the origin of the vampire, to center it around this part of history. I wanted Lydia’s own identity to be complex too. Lydia’s own ethnic heritage contains colonized and colonizer. While growing up, I was always conscious of being two ethnicities that were enemies during the WWII; narratives that positioned one side as the heroes and the other as villains were confusing for my identity. Lydia’s entire identity is divided between sides that seem to her to be opposed to each other.
There’s a lot of taking and taking back in Woman, Eating–a lot of the book is about ownership. The book is partly about colonization, yes, but also about consuming culture through food and through collecting art, consuming and taking lives, and about how sexual assault can be like a kind of colonization of the body, a kind of taking of ownership. These are all examples of types of vampirism. But the first vampire in the world of Woman, Eating was always, in my mind, a colonizer.
JRR: To understand herself, Lydia looks up langsuyar, the female vampire of Malay folklore on Google. I didn’t recall this character from my childhood (I grew up in Malaysia) but remember being terrorized by the idea of the pontianak (apparently the daughter of the langsuyar). You have Lydia observe that vampires in Asian cultures are not revered as in the West and that women vampires are “blamed for their monstrous states.” Yet, poor Lydia has no fault in her condition.
CK: “Poor Lydia” I feel could easily be the subtitle of Woman, Eating! I wanted people to feel for Lydia—to really, deeply feel for a vampire, a creature that we might normally consider a monster. I also wanted people to feel for a character who actually does a lot of things wrong; who is selfish and flawed.
Asian cuisines are so often used to other Asian people.
The Langsuyur and the pontianak both are born from really traumatic experiences—the loss of a child or the death of a woman in childbirth. When Lydia looks up vampiric creatures on Google, she reads all the things she finds in a way that is quite negative; by this point, some of Julie’s self-hatred has passed onto Lydia already. And, so, it felt right that she would take from her research only something negative–that women creatures are blamed for their monstrous states. This is true, to a degree. Many folktales from East and Southeast Asia depict women unable to deal with trauma, or unable to deal with other emotions, and becoming evil or vengeful monsters. Yet, what Lydia misses is that, in the case of the langsuyur, the woman became a vampiric monster because of grief, because she felt so much love towards her daughter, and couldn’t deal with her death. Lydia completely misses that aspect of the story. She’s blind to it. And for a lot of the book she is blind to the love of her own mother, too, whose story mirrors the langsuyur’s. Julie, confronted with the possibility of losing Lydia when she was a baby, turned her into a vampire. So, Lydia’s vampiric state is the result of her mother’s love.
I really wanted to step away from the kind of reverence for the vampire we see in Western vampire stories. I didn’t want to create something that was titillating, or revering of power, or of youth. Lydia, in this novel, isn’t really aware of her power, and she recognizes how terrifying and monstrous humans with power can be; how power itself can be dangerous. This novel isn’t really horror either. The vampire exists mostly in the horror genre in the West; but, in a lot of literature from Asian countries, the supernatural appears in otherwise very grounded novels and doesn’t result in those novels being pigeon-holed as horror or fantasy. I wanted to remove the vampire from the horror genre and look at a vampire in a very grounded way, and see what I could learn about what it is to be human by observing Lydia trying to just simply live her life in our world.
JRR: You take us on quite a tour of London through its contemporary art world. I want to ask about the conversation Lydia and Ben have after The Otter show where he expresses his disenchantment with the art business. Lydia herself reflects on how her artist father’s paintings are owned by other people who can look at them at any time while she cannot. She says, “I think art comes to mean something different to people when it becomes something they can possess.”
I wonder what you think about this concept of visual art (as something to be possessed and boasted about) v. books (which are only owned in a lesser and milder way and people are less impressed by book ownership/boasting, I think) and/or music (which as a non-musician, seems to me to be unpossess-able)?
CK: This is such an interesting question! Art collecting has long been tied to colonialism, and war; once we take an art object and lock it away, it becomes something that no one else can see, that no one else can possess, and so it makes sense, I think, that it is something that is tied to the taking of other countries and cultures. So many museums in the West have in their collections items that were looted during wars, or during colonial “missions.” Gideon, in Woman, Eating, collects art and has a particular interest in what he calls “world art.” He buys art as if he is buying parts of the respective culture that art has come out of; the colonial history of art collecting is reflected in his style of collecting. There’s a part in the book where Julie explains how Western collectors described Lydia’s dad’s art, and those descriptions use language that is based more on stereotypes about Japan (“refined”) than on what his art is actually like (“brutal and violent”).
Her vampirism is a legacy of colonialism; it’s trauma that was caused when Malaysia was colonized by Britain, and then again by Japan, that has lasted for several lifetimes.
There is something unique about collecting visual art–how the more limited a print is, for example, the more expensive it is; or how a one-off is even more expensive. In cases like that, value is ascribed to exclusivity. The less we have a chance to see an artwork, the more value it has. If we are the only one who can see it, that means we have something special. For the artist, that means that selling work is always linked to loss. When an artist sells a piece, they no longer can have it; they have to let it go entirely, and maybe they’ll never see it again.
With music and literature, there isn’t an object that the maker creates. It’s more ephemeral. There’s no sculpture or painting that can be held or touched. When we create a piece of music or literature, it’s automatically shared between the maker and the reader or listener. Even though we can hold books, a book is only a stack of paper with ink, bound together. The novel itself just exists in the mind. And exclusivity doesn’t come into it at all.
This doesn’t mean I don’t love visual art though. I still love making art; and I love working on a sculpture, owning and changing its shape, and being in control of that process; and I understand how people can desire to possess something, to keep it for themselves and themselves only–that’s a very human thing to want I think. But it can get tangled in the terrifying desire to own and possess another person, or another culture. Visual art is such a pure and beautiful thing, until you buy it.
JRR: Finally, Lydia gets to taste all the human food she can’t have and has been hungry her whole life. This (and maybe her revenge was a tonic too?) seems to give her new life. She seems reborn. Can we expect more of Lydia?
CK: Yes, it was definitely a tonic. We get so much from food, not only sustenance. Food helps us connect with friends, family, ancestors, our cultural heritages. We share food together, we cook for each other; we pass recipes down through generations; recipes travel with immigrants and refugees to new countries—they’re a part of home we can take with us anywhere. This is such a huge part of Lydia’s and her mum’s experience of life that is missing, because they can only digest blood, and it stands in the way of Lydia really being able to engage with her heritage.
The Malaysian food Lydia tastes for the first time comes from two real businesses in the UK: the Chinese Malaysian Scottish chef Julie Lin in Glasgow who runs Julie’s Kopitiam and Ga Ga—her food is tied to her exploration of her cultural heritage, and on Instagram she posts often with her mother—and the Malaysian kaya (coconut curd) business Madam Chang’s Kaya, whose kaya recipe was passed down to founder Ae Mi from her grandmother when she was just four. In both these instances, food connects different generations of a family, and connects two countries: everything Lydia has been missing.
Like thescrap collector in one of his stories, Omer Friedlander’s prose sifts through the junk of this world to find those whimsical elements that are otherwise overlooked. Rich in imagery and sprinkled with humor and spice, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Landconjures intimate and inventive portraits of Israeli life. Even though Friedlander is only 27, his debut short story collection glides through imagination, reality, and history with the maturity and elegance of a Jewish grandmother’s Shabbat lunch. Seeing right through the small talk around the steaming pot of cholent, Friedlander brings the unseen to the fore, paying tribute to the crumbs on the floor, the twitch of an uncle’s mustache, and the two cousins playing footsie underneath the table, who will forever associate brisket and beans with a kick in the shins.
I first became acquainted with Friedlander’s work during a jazz performance held in a Tel Avivi backyard. After the first set, the upright bassist was approached by an old teacher from his high school, who immediately asked about a certain Omer’s whereabouts. By way of eavesdropping, I found out that the musician, Elam, had a twin brother based in my hometown, New York City, who wrote stories in English about the country in which we both felt like strangers at home. I skipped out on the second set and speed-biked home, where I located the title story of his collection, “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land,” online, and spent the rest of the evening devouring any material I could find. I was immediately taken by the sensitivity of Friedlander’s approach to character, setting, and detail, and have been looking forward to the release of this collection ever since.
Geffen Huberman: Let’s talk about the title of your collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land.
Omer Friedlander: The title comes from one of the stories in the collection, which follows a divorced con-artist who sells empty bottles of “holy” air to gullible tourists, together with his young daughter and her one-eyed cat named Moshe Dayan. The father takes the form of the traditional diasporic Jewish archetype of the luftmensch, the man of air, a kind of impractical person who can’t make any money, and the only way he can sustain his relationship with his daughter is through these get-rich-quick schemes and his over-developed imagination. I wanted the title of the collection to give a sense of the tone of the stories, kind of absurd, whimsical, and irreverent, fable-like sometimes, and it also locates us in a very specific place.
GH:In your work, there are characters who collect objects, sometimes things that seem like junk to others but to them has special meaning.
OF: Objects are very interesting to me as a writer because they can function like capsules for memory. They’re etched with the personal history of their owner. I think it becomes even more fascinating when the story attached to the object is invented.
In my story “High Heels,” a teenager working at his father’s shoe-repair shop in Tel Aviv is fascinated by a pair of high heels kept on the top shelf of the store. According to his father, the heels belonged to Franceska Mann, a Polish-Jewish dancer who died in the Shoah. Franceska really did exist. I came across an account of her life and this was the inspiration for my story, and yet the boundaries of fact and fiction in her case have become blurred. In the most famous account of her story, Franceska performed a striptease to distract a Nazi officer, then stabbed him in the eye with the tip of her heel, stole his pistol, and managed to fire a few rounds before she was shot. In another account, she was believed to be a Nazi collaborator. No one really knows exactly what happened, and this is an amazing opportunity to write into the gaps of the conflicting historical accounts.
In “Alte Sachen,” two brothers who are junk collectors struggle with the burden of the memory of their dead father. The memory of the father is contained within a recording device, and they listen to his mechanical voice over and over again. The younger brother believes his father’s spirit is literally reincarnated in the object. I’m very interested in objects acquiring significance because of their history, or in objects being imbued with meaning by their owners through the act of storytelling.
GH: Many of your stories deal with characters on the fringes of society. Why do you think you’re attracted to writing about these unlikely encounters: a love story of a Jewish girl and a Bedouin boy, a friendship between an Arab and a Jew?
OF: The stories in the collection are filled with characters that are outcasts. Junk collectors, con artists, smugglers, loners, and people who, though still alive, seem to only haunt the world. The characters are all looking for intimacy and human contact, yet constantly face the difficulty of shedding their roles. The stories explore the possibility, difficulty, and hope for relationships across divides and boundaries, political and physical borders, between generations and collective identities.
Writing allows us the possibility to imagine a different world. If we can’t imagine anything different, we are doomed to despair, to be stuck in a purgatory of the status quo.
The characters that populate the stories often struggle with an inherited weight of memory, negotiating the burden of living in a war zone during times of violent conflict. But the stories mostly don’t aim to portray directly the violence that constitutes their background landscapes. Rather, they explore private moments of fragile intimacy that are formed through humor and absurdity, and an eye for the grotesque and fantastic in the midst of what for others are sharply drawn lines of conflict.
With such loaded subject matter, I think it was very important for me to approach the stories through character and with empathy. I wanted to avoid it becoming a lecture about politics. It’s my job to raise questions, not to provide easy answers, so I never write in order to make people change their mind about anything. It makes me think of Amos Oz, who had two pens on his desk. One pen to tell stories, and another pen to tell the government to go to hell.
GH:The theme of imagination, of contriving an alternate reality, is salient throughout the stories. Can you speak on the relationship between imagination and writing?
OF: Imagining an alternate reality is definitely a preoccupation of some of the stories, but not in the sense of escapism. I think writing a slightly skewed, absurdist world which is fabulous and fantastic and unreal, at least in the conventional sense, sometimes allows us to see more clearly the strangeness of our own world. When Kafka writes that Gregor Samsa woke up one day as a cockroach, it may not be realistic, but the emotion feels so true.
I think of writing as a form of play. You have to be able to be seriously playful (or playfully serious) even when you’re writing about the most politically charged topics. My writing process is one of discovery. My stories aren’t planned out in advance. It’s a bit like improvisation in jazz. My twin brother and many of my close friends are jazz musicians. They improvise on a certain melody or theme. My writing is the same, at least in the earlier stages of drafting, I’m improvising, seeing where the story takes me.
The theme of imagination is also related to my interest in fables and fairy tales, which comes from my father, who collects old, illustrated children’s books. When I was growing up, I remember my father going to flea markets and used bookstores to scavenge for these books. What I find exciting about fairy tales is that they offer the possibility of metamorphosis, transformation. There’s an instability in fairy tales, boundaries are blurred.
When you’re writing fiction, the world may be invented, but the emotional core behind it is always true. Etgar Keret says humor for him is related to empathy. It appears in times of conflict and despair. It’s like the “airbag in a car,” released only in a state of emergency.
Writing allows us the possibility to imagine a different world. If we can’t imagine anything different, we are doomed to despair, to be stuck in a purgatory of the status quo.
GH: Your stories, some of which are historical in nature, directly deal with topics integral to the Israeli canon such as the Holocaust, but with a refreshing, somewhat distanced perspective.
I have never felt like I truly belonged in Israel… And yet… it is still my home, the place where the people’s way of laughing and being friends and getting into arguments is most familiar to me.
OF: I remember my final-year high school history exam in Israel, it was all about the Holocaust. The way it was taught was problematic. It was this petrified, nationalist symbol. When I was writing about it, years later, I knew that I needed distance and humor. One of the stories in my collection, “The Sephardi Survivor,” is about two brothers who are jealous of their Ashkenazi classmates whose grandparents and relatives are Shoah survivors. It was inspired by a conversation I had in Brooklyn with some Israeli friends. One of my friends, whose family is from Iraq, said that growing up he’s always been jealous of his Eastern European Ashkenazi classmates, who had relatives that were Shoah survivors. It was such a strange, but understandable, sentiment. To be jealous of another person’s suffering was an odd idea, of course, but the Shoah has such prominence in all Israeli discourse, it strangely becomes a kind of social cache, a matter of prestige to have relatives that are Shoah survivors.
In my absurdist story, the brothers decide to kidnap a survivor, Yehuda, to bring to class for a school “Show and Tell” on Holocaust Memorial Day. The story frames the memory of the Shoah in an unusual way, that is absurd and ironic, but more importantly, it focuses on the individual, the human. It’s not abstract, it’s not numbers in a textbook, it’s a person, Yehuda, with his own eccentricities, flaws, and tender longings. This is what fiction can do—it can transform the abstract into the intimate.
GH: Your mother tongue is Hebrew. Why do you write in English?
OF: My decision to write in English, whether conscious or not, has to do with me feeling like both an insider and an outsider in Israel. I have never felt like I truly belonged in Israel, even though I was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Tel Aviv. And yet, even though I feel like a stranger sometimes, it is still my home, the place where the people’s way of laughing and being friends and getting into arguments is most familiar to me. Writing in English allows me a certain distance that is necessary in order to be more probing and ironic, to see all the strangeness and particularity of a place, with its many contradictions and complexities.
Some of my favorite writers write in Hebrew. It’s a fascinating language because it was used for prayer and ritual for two thousand years. It was a holy language, and it was considered sacrilege to even ask for a glass of water in Hebrew. It was revived as a spoken language only in the 19th century, and the gap between Biblical Hebrew and its modern day equivalent is probably not as large as Chaucer’s English and today’s English. As Amos Oz says, Hebrew is a minefield of Biblical allusions. When you’re writing a domestic scene about a son asking his parents for pocket-money, you have to be careful not to bring in Isaiah and the Psalms and Mount Sinai. It is like playing music in a cathedral, he says, there are a lot of echoes.
Hebrew is also constantly changing and adapting. Many of the new slang words introduced into the language come from military jargon, which is so prevalent in day-to-day life in Israel. As Yehuda Amichai writes:
“to speak now in this weary language, a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible…a language that once described miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.”
In his poetry, Amichai was always finding new ways to combine the vernacular, everyday Hebrew with the weight of Biblical resonances, creating playful juxtapositions between the sacred and the profane.
GH: You’ve mentioned a number of Hebrew-language authors: Grossman, Oz, Keret, Amihai. Do you view your writing as a continuation of the Israeli literary tradition?
OF: I love the work of Oz and Amichai, but I don’t know whether I’m writing out of this particular tradition. If I am part of a tradition, maybe it’s that of writers that write in a language other than their mother tongue. Maybe it has to do with feeling out of place in your own home. I think many writers have a kind of internal restlessness. They don’t feel at home anywhere. Even at home they’re strangers, but that’s the only way they’ll have the perspective to see clearly.
In the past few years, as I’ve been working on my own book about technology, I’ve been reading books about technology—critiques of Silicon Valley, of internet culture—and wondering: where are all the people of color? Sure, Silicon Valley is known as the home of the tech bro—a white man, probably wearing a Patagonia jacket and a pair of Allbirds. But still. People all around the globe, of all races, use the internet every day, use social media every day—where are these stories about technology?
I was thinking about other questions, too: What is the experience of a woman of color in a world of tech bros? How does the algorithm try to standardize us as people—to suggest that there’s one way to be? How does it feel to be a person who doesn’t fit into the algorithm?
These are some of the questions I grappled with in writing my debut novel, Happy for You, which follows half-Japanese half-Jewish Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto as she leaves a PhD program in philosophy to join the third-most-popular internet company, where her team is developing an app that objectively measures user happiness. Even as she tries to convince herself that the project is worthwhile—that she is doing good—she confronts the limitations of technology in understanding the nuances of race and cultural context, and, more generally, the algorithm’s general push to make all of us conform to a single standard of success and of happiness.
For this reading list, I wanted to include books that center people of color in stories about contemporary technology, as well as books that center people of color in considering how the way we relate to technology could be different in the future.I’ve also included two books of poetry that I’ve found deeply impactful, works that defamiliarize our contemporary technologies, using programming code and Google Translate to new and surprising linguistic ends. Spanning past, present, and future, these books prompt us to consider the ways technology perpetuates racial biases and injustices—and how we might liberate ourselves from its insidious control.
Edge Case is narrated by Edwina, the sole female employee at a AInstein, a New York City startup that is developing a joke-telling robot. She is also an immigrant from Malaysia with a work visa that will soon expire. When the novel opens, Edwina’s husband—also a Malaysian immigrant, also working in tech, and also on a work visa (that is similarly about to expire)—has gone missing, and the novel follows Edwina as she tries to track her husband down and cope with the possible dissolution of their marriage while simultaneously trying to figure out how to get a green card before she has to either move back to Malaysia or remain, undocumented, in the United States.
This funny, deeply-thoughtful novel is narrated by Alexandra, a 25-year-old Chinese American writer who —at the novel’s start—works as a reporter for a prestigious tech publication in San Francisco. As she grapples with her relationship with her white boyfriend, J., she simultaneously grapples with her predominantly white newsroom and reporting on the predominantly white companies of Silicon Valley. The novel’s fragmentary narrative covers microagressions at the workplace, pay disparities, interracial relationships, and histories of anti-Asian discrimination, forming a kind of collage of thought that is always grounded in the narrator’s specific longing to find her place in the world.
This collection of poems expresses what it feels like to be an Asian American woman—to be objectified, to be fetishized—both in real life and in the virtual world. Choi writes about technology and incorporates technology itself into her poetry as a formal device; in “The Cyborg Wants to Make Sure She Heard You Right,” for example, she runs a series of tweets that were directed at her through Google Translate, showing the startling persistence of Orientalizing language even as it moves through multiple rounds of translation. Another poem inhabits the voiceless android Kyoko from Ex Machina, writing back to the film’s techno-Orientalized vision of the future and insisting on an Asian woman’s right to speak and to be heard.
In Travesty Generator, Bertram uses computer code and programming to create poetry that responds to the hidden racial biases of coding, algorithms, and digital technology and to offer new narratives for the relationship between Black lives and technology. As Bertram writes in the afterword:
“I use codes and algorithms in an attempt [to] create work that reconfigures and challenges oppressive narratives for Black people and to imagine new ones.”
Bertram uses Python, JavaScript, and Perl to produce poems about anti-Black violence, Harriet Tubman, codeswitching, and being a person of color in a zombie apocalypse. The book interrogates the relationship between race, technology, and narrative, producing iterative permutations that are sometimes beautiful, sometimes shocking, and always haunting and alive.
Originally published by Tor in 1992, this cult science fiction novel was reissued by Strange Particle Press in 2016. It’s 2045, and the journalist Xólotl Zapata is living in Tenochtitlán, formerly known as Mexico City. The U.S. is in decline while Africa and Latin America are ascendant centers of technology. The story follows Xólotl after he is infected with a highly-contagious virus that can download beliefs into the human brain; it can instill any kind of beliefs, but in Xólotl’s case, it has made him into a carrier for converting everyone he meets to the Aztec religion. Antic and fast-moving, filled with Spanish, Spanglish, and Nahuatl, the novel upends the typical U.S.-focus of science fiction and technology-driven narratives, offering a vision of a decolonized technological future.
Built on an epic scale, The Old Drift weaves together the stories of three Zambian families (Black, white, and Brown), spanning the course of more than a century (1903 to the near future) and mingling multiple genres (historical fiction, surrealism, fantasy, science fiction). The final section considers an array of technologies, both real and speculative: nanorobots and microdrones, gene-editing and CRISPR, and devices called Digit-All Beads that are implanted in users’ hands and work similarly to smartphones (with similar problems of surveillance). Serpell traces the connection between past colonialism and present-day government control, looking toward a future when technology no longer forces people to submit, but allows them to revolt.
Moving between 19th-century China and the near-future Pacific Northwest, Salt Fish Girl centers on two female characters: Nu Wa, who escapes her Chinese village after an arranged marriage goes awry, and the teenage Miranda, who lives in the corporate-controlled city of Serendipity on the coast of what used to be Canada in 2044. Dissolving the borders between myth and science fiction, Lai creates a mash-up of genetically-engineered beings, shape-shifting, creation stories, reincarnation, virtual reality, and a mysterious sickness called the Dreaming Disease, whose sufferers ultimately voluntarily walk into the sea and drown themselves. Like Serpell, Lai draws a connection between past and future, destabilizing the primacy of Western science and technology. The book is not an easy read; rather, it is poetic, mystical, and sometimes confounding, a kind of fever dream of the body, feminism, and queer intimacy. Its narrative chaos and sensory overwhelm are part of its beauty.
In the Womb I Leave Graffiti for My Younger Brother
You, lithe swimmer with feet you will use
like hands, meet me here—read what I write
on the wall of mum’s uterus the way later we
will cobalt blue spray the field to mark where
to hit, throw, catch whatever it is we try to hold—
baseball, whiffle, bug clot or frog race—here it is
dark and I have been here before you, so allow me
to give you something: she will not
ever be yours. You will break
the waves looking, breathing into the space
left by airplane, foot, abrupt hang up, memory fissures
but for now this room, cozy fluid den
of safety—see what I left behind? Words in their infancy
a blueprint we will not find until this decade but
we found it, brother! Think of it: both of us swimming
in blankness so dark no lighthouse/flashlight/torch/bonfire
can get through and yet here we are, grown and reading
and here, too, is my hand. I beg you, take it. In
the deep I will hold yours.
Sometimes I Apologize to My Children
and sometimes I break open
the pomegranate of my chest
holding each membranous seed
inside while I consider my children
and the ocean of heartache potentially
lapping at them in the future made even
colder despite global warming’s ruin
because they don’t know specifics—death
sure maybe they get that but what about loving
someone who doesn’t love you back or
hurts you or about slack misery jobs or finding
chains across your front door because of bills
unpaid and, too, the sad bright crocuses blooming
in front of that stoop, what about the getting
pregnant at the worst time or being unable
at the best? What about plain old human cruelty
boxed up in elementary construction paper
cutting or the adult-sized lunch tables from which
one might still be excluded and just what can I say
about the underground tracks of desires unmet
crossing lines with well, that’s just the way it is—
and to think I wanted to ring the bell of joy
have it sound out to each of my grown babies so
I am sorry for the splitting open of my chest and
sorrier still for the mess my seepage and the world
slops on you but still, I told you about the crocuses—
bright purple and yellow, green so alive it sews you up—
I told you that, too, right?
Returning to England after two weeks in Nigeria back in 2019, I found myself marveling at how green the grass on the side of the motorway was. The thing I love about coming home from anywhere, is the moment where you can look at everything with a fresh, often rose-tinted, perspective. Maybe it’s partly “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and partly the fact that distance allows us to drink in the details we would ordinarily overlook, but for a brief time, the familiar suddenly becomes novel.
In literature, homecomings are great because the reader begins on the same page as the narrator or protagonist, walking into the party together, so to speak. A well-written homecoming scene immediately situates a character and reveals a lot about their relationships to the place and people around them. We all come from somewhere, and our connection to that place—or the conspicuous lack of one—can quickly and succinctly, say a lot.
My debut novel, Hope and Glory, starts with a homecoming. Glory has been in Los Angeles where she’s been having the time of her life, if you believe her Instagram feed. When her father suddenly dies, she returns to her hometown of Peckham, South London, where she finds her family in complete disarray. Her brother is in prison, her once-ambitious sister is stuck in a problematic marriage, and her mother is very close to mental breakdown. Her return home is not the triumphant victory lap she once imagined it would be, but it is the beginning of her journey to reconnect with her family and herself.
Another thing that I love about homecomings in literature is that they work across multiple levels. Of course there is the physical return to a place, but it could also be revisiting something on an emotional or psychic level, reconnecting with old friends and enemies, or a re-exploration of the inner self. In my humble opinion, the best homecoming stories are mix of all of the above, and below you’ll find a list of some of my favorites.
Memphis is a lush novel that follows three generations of a Black Southern family through tragedy, the civil rights era, loss, estrangement, and reunion. It is a celebration of the bond of women, the resilience of family and the musicality and life of the city of Memphis itself. Tara’s prose is so rich I could almost feel the heat and smell the honeysuckle.
It starts with ten-year-old Joan, her mother and her younger sister returning to the house her grandfather built, escaping their Marine father and a violent home. In Tennessee, they build new lives, chase old dreams and navigate past traumas. Stringfellow writes a coming-of-age story that is filled with love and hope, as much as it challenges the darker side of humanity, and in particular, the harms that men enact on the women in their lives.
26a is the debut novel of Diana Evans, the author of the critically-acclaimed Ordinary People. It is a layered story that is all at once tragic, warm, humorous and dark.
It begins in the attic room of a residential home in Neasden, North London, where twin sisters Georgia and Bessi weave a fantasy world around themselves. They share their home with older sister Bel, younger sister Kemy, their homesick Nigerian mother and emotionally unavailable English father. The narrative moves to Nigeria, where their mother experiences a long-delayed homecoming of her own, but where her children are introduced to various terrors that will haunt them when they return to England. 26a is the story of a family that is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.
The title of the novel is a Twi word, which literally translates to “go back and get.” It is also the name of an Adinkra symbol, which is used to represent philosophical ideas by the Akan ethnic group, who are primarily found in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Sankofa is a fitting title for a novel that follows a middle-aged woman as she returns to a “home” she has never known, in order to “go back and get” an understanding of who she is at a point in her life where all that she has known is fast falling away.
When we meet Anna, she has separated from her husband, her only daughter is an adult who needs her less and less, and her mother has just died. When Anna finds her father’s diary amongst her mother’s possessions, she sets off on a journey to find out more about a man she never knew who left her mother before she was even born. This journey takes her to Bamana, a fictionalized West African country, where she discovers uncomfortable truths about her father and his legacy, but also has the opportunity to connect with a side of her heritage that has been obscured for most of her life.
Charmaine Wilkerson’s bestselling debut novel begins with estranged siblings, Benny and Byron, forced to reunite at the request of their late mother. They return to the house they grew up in to piece together the fragments of a woman they soon realize they didn’t fully know. Through a voice recording delivered by their mother’s lawyer, they unearth a family history filled with secrets and shame that casts their parents in a completely different light. Through this, Benny and Byron are also grappling with the break down of relationships—with lovers, their parents, and each other.
Black Cake is a unique story, written in fragments and multiple perspectives. It covers decades and continents, flying between a community on a Caribbean island living in quiet terror, a postwar Britain as hostile to immigrants as it is desperate for their labor and finally, modern day California. The novel is also rich in thematic significance, with motifs of the ocean and food resurfacing to provide a satisfying circularity to narrative.
The Salt Eaters starts in the middle of a healing ritual for Velma Henry, a veteran community activist who suffers a breakdown and attempts to kill herself after becoming disillusioned with her life’s work. The ceremony is overseen by Minnie Ransom, a locally famous healer who is guided through the healing by a “haint” named Old Wife, and witnessed by a variety of characters, many of whom know Velma personally.
This novel is beautifully lyrical and experimental in style, written from numerous points of view, including chapters that feature long dialogues between Minnie and her spirit guide, Old Wife. The politics of 1960s and ’70s feminist, anti-war and civil rights movements are apparent in the narrative, without being overbearing or preachy in tone. Ultimately the book is as much about collective healing as it is about Velma finding her way back to herself.
Noo Saro-Wiwa is a travel writer and the daughter of famed Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. After her father was murdered by Nigeria’s military regime in the ’90s, she stayed away from Nigeria for many years, finally returning as an adult to make sense of the country her father loved and died for.
In Looking for Transwonderland,there is a different sort of homecoming. There is little sentimentality but a clear-eyed look at a country whose greatness has arguably been squandered due to persistent poor governance. Still, it is revealed to be a country that is as beautiful as it is maddening—something that Nigerian nationals, both home and abroad, will readily agree with. So much of modern Nigerian myth revolves around Lagos, the sprawling mega city that is home to The Giant of Africa’s creative industries. But this travelogue reveals the breadth and diversity of a nation in the way only a Nigerian returning from exile can.
While it goes without saying that Toni Morrison was a writer of singular talent and significance, I feel like her second novel often flies under the radar when it comes to evaluations of her work. Sula, for me, is as much a portrait of town and a people, as it is about the titular protagonist and the evolution of her relationship with Nel, her best friend.
Sula and Nel grow up in Bottom, a fictional town up in the hills of Ohio. They both have strained relationships with their mothers; Nel secretly despises her prim and proper mother, while Sula nurses growing contempt her care-free, openly promiscuous one. A secret tragedy that they witness binds the girls even closer together, but as they get older, Nel decides to stay in Bottom, falling willingly into the role of wife and mother, while Sula leaves the town, travelling, attending college and living a life as care-free abroad as her mother did at home. When Sula returns, her presence sends ripples through the town, which will ultimately test her friendship with Nel the most.
Before starting a job as a radio copywriter, where I frequently wrote ads for strip clubs and sex shops, I worked the counter at a small bakery near a college campus. Many customers were professors who made small talk while I sliced their olive loaves. On occasion – not daily, but enough to see a theme – they would point out that my job, to serve them, was beneath the standards of respectable work. “Where did you go to college? And why are you working here?” one woman asked me after we discussed the books we were reading.
The bakery owner had offered me a job when she noticed my daily purchases getting cheaper and suspected, correctly, that I was running out of cash. The city was a place I had moved to in order to support someone else’s ambition. There I found myself friendless, jobless, and unmoored. Visiting the bakery was a bright spot in my daily routine and I was happy to work with the interesting, creative people who owned it.
Later, some millionaires wrecked my car. One afternoon, I found it had been totaled where I had left it parked near the small one-bedroom apartment where I lived with my wonderful cat and my terrible boyfriend. While I inspected the damage, a passerby told me that the couple who lived across the road had smashed into it and left without leaving a note. They were surgeons, the passerby told me before leading his dachshund away. When I knocked on their door, Mrs. Surgeon frowned at the inconvenience of my visit and remarked that I would probably be happy to take the insurance money and upgrade my twenty-year-old Honda. When the windfall—a couple hundred bucks—arrived, I used it on rent.
Not long after the car wreck, I applied for corporate advertising jobs. I was tired of the constant remarks about my job, the lack of respect I was afforded as a service worker, and even more importantly, I was tired of being broke.
The job interview was a writing test: I was put in a room with a client brief and a laptop. The brief may have been for shirts or for air conditioners: just a basic ad mentioning the client’s business, the type of product for sale, and the street address and phone number of the business. In a few minutes, I opened the door and told them I was done. They called back the next day to offer me the job of junior copywriter, starting at $18,000 per year, reporting to the sales manager.
Each day, I sat in a gray cubicle next to a part-time country DJ who told me about the Vietnamese food he had once eaten in Seattle. I reviewed the briefs that landed in my inbox and typed up scripts. Five stations transmitted from antennas on top of the art deco skyscraper, which sat above an enormous lake. The clients who bought ads were local bars and clubs with themed music nights, gas marts on the nearby Indian reservation, and restaurants with discount game day menus when the local football team played.
The ads for sex shops and strip clubs aired on the station that played a “shock jock” program during morning drive time. Client briefs for touring strippers sometimes included photos, but often were a list of bullet points detailing the woman’s achievements in the previous few years: Miss Nude Miami. Miss Redhead Oklahoma. Miss Topless Atlantic City (Runner-Up). Some ads followed a template that made the job more like transcription than writing. Name the stripper, list a few titles, then mention the dates of her local performances, the venue and its address. And mention the wings. Every strip club sold chicken wings, and each club’s wings were—according to the club itself, which I dutifully repeated—famously the best in town. On a given week, I wrote anywhere from two to eight ads for touring strippers.
The job – both the impetus for applying, and the work itself – played into the writing of my debut novel.
Sex shop ads were looser and weirder. Often, the client would have an idea for how to frame the advertisement; for example, two friends chatting by the side of the pool and deciding to reroute the day’s events toward the dildo aisle. At no point in my position did I argue for creativity, realism, or even novelty: if Forbidden Fantasies wanted “Jessica” and “Katie” to pour a couple of white wines by the pool and then, out of the blue, agree that the best use of the afternoon would be to purchase latex outfits before the return of their husbands (who were, presumably, watching Miss Topless Atlantic City, runner-up, while eating the city’s best wings), who was I to argue?
While I was writing these ads, the job seemed like a blip on my resume that wasn’t as interesting as the trajectories of my friends who were studying in graduate writing programs or editing fiction. Now, though, I see how the job – both the impetus for applying, and the work itself – played into the writing of my debut novel, Housebreaking, which is about a working-class young woman who does something profoundly stupid, and then keeps doing it past the point of reason.
Let’s say you don’t want to earn $18,000 a year writing about Miss Redhead Oklahoma just so that you can turn out a debut novel more than a decade later. No worries: I’ll tell you what I learned.
Bringing My Worst Self to Work
Once I sat in the audience while a writer I admired said that the best writing ought to reflect the qualities and personality of the writer herself. He went on to praise a writer friend whose kindness and generosity bubbled up on the pages of her short stories. Well, I thought, slumping in my seat. There goes my novel-writing career. I knew then, as I know now, how shitty my personality actually is. I’m impatient, quick to judge, and have a remarkable ability to imagine the most catastrophic outcome of any action. As if that list weren’t long enough, beneath my smile you’ll find an underlying class resentment that would prompt the Titanic’s iceberg to float out of the way in deference.
The summer before I started sixth grade, my family was homeless for several months. During that period, we remained in my hometown, living in a kind of shadow society: my mother drove us to a different bus stop so that we didn’t board at the homeless shelter and we shopped at a different grocery store where there were no familiar witnesses to see us paying with food stamps. I didn’t tell my friends what was happening, and no one asked. I felt judged, secretive, and angry. In the cell of my brain that ought to remember to pick up eczema cream at the pharmacy, there is instead a filmstrip, on permanent loop, playing the time my high school friend’s mother called my family trash. (Fuck you, Janet.)
While for too long I shunned the idea of exploring my anger and resentment in fiction, I enjoyed the benefits of surreptitiously airing my grievances on the radio. The surgeons’ first names appeared in multiple ads: a raft of toys from the autumn sale at Sinful Sensationz might bolster Mr. Surgeon’s underperforming dick, while at dollar wing night Mrs. Surgeon’s children praised the heavens that they skipped out on another miserable, silent family dinner at home.
I shunned the idea of exploring my anger and resentment in fiction, but I enjoyed surreptitiously airing my grievances on the radio.
The advice to reflect yourself in your writing sounds a lot like the corporate maxim to “bring your whole self to work”—and in fiction, I didn’t want to. I wanted to bring the appealing parts, the traits I would have trotted out in an introductory meeting with a new boyfriend’s parents. Writing my novel though, I couldn’t help the bad parts bubbling up. My protagonist, Adela, isn’t a stand-in for me: she’s more of a loner, more stubborn, and less conventional. Her family situation is nothing like mine. But the themes of my book, the black hole at the center of her adolescence and the social failure that spins out from it, are subjects that she and I could talk about if we met for coffee (after which she’d pick my pocket while I paid the bill).
With the novel, I had a chance for context – a benefit of length, really – and a level of maturity I didn’t have as a young copywriter. My novel isn’t a burn book, nor would I want it to be. My feelings about my own childhood are more complex and nuanced than they were when I was an adolescent, and that hopefully translates when imagining my protagonist and her choices. Nevertheless, anger follows the laws of matter: it hasn’t disappeared or been destroyed, it is only rearranged. (Still, forever, fuck you, Janet.)
Cutting Out the Fat
In my undergraduate writing workshop a couple years before my radio gig, I was a perfectionist who labored over every metaphor. Zombie drafts continued to rise from the grave years later, commas spirited away, adverbs defenestrated. But there just wasn’t time for that kind of attention when I might write twenty ads in a day.
I was precious about my own writing in a way that did not matter to my audience.
The nature of a radio ad relies on brevity and compression. “Scene building” – insofar as it exists – might only be a simple sound effect laid over the background. Ads might only be fifteen seconds, especially around the election cycle when the cost quadrupled as candidates fought over airtime, and yet client briefs were never actually very brief. When client instructions were Foster Wallace, I turned out ads that were Forster: direct, simple, logical. With fiction, I had to realize that I was precious about my own writing in a way that did not matter to my audience. The information – the story – mattered. Characters mattered. The style mattered to me, and should matter, but the way I used to write, taking years to develop a paragraph while arguing with myself over each word, would have precluded me from ever writing a novel at all.
This wasn’t a decision not to care about sentence-level writing. Rather, I learned to accept the audience’s reaction to my work while being less emotionally attached to it, and to ensure that I did pay attention to those aspects that were critical to my reader but were perhaps less interesting to me. When, later, I turned the opening of my novel over to a trusted reader and she told me that it was meandering and unnecessary, I lopped it off and moved on, because she was right.
The Lady and Her Ego
Imperfection and a sense of humility underpinned my job, which I knew to be ridiculous. While I took myself extremely seriously as a fiction writer who produced little and published nothing, I was all too eager to play up the silliness of copywriting, in which I was paid to produce work that tens of thousands of people heard and with a job title that would have earned approval from the same people who thought my bakery job beneath me.
I sent my friends tapes when I incorporated their names into spots and told them about the ridiculous characters at the station, like the DJ who wore a ten-gallon hat and loved to talk about #ranchlife yet was a born-and-bred suburbanite who had never been within a thousand miles of a cowboy.
I wrote my debut when I was 39, and regularly thank the gods that I didn’t get a publishing contract in my early 20s.
The radio job also made clear that there were both necessary and unnecessary audiences. In my position, the salesperson and the client were necessary. If they weren’t happy, I had to do the spot again. Others, like the DJs or production team, were the equivalent of Goodreads or the guy in your workshop who has always hated your work: operating in the background, always opining, yet best blocked from notice.
I wrote my debut when I was thirty-nine, and regularly thank the gods that I didn’t get a publishing contract in my early twenties because I would have been insufferable. The stupidity of the radio job and seeing the disconnect between the regard that it earned balanced against what I actually did on a day-to-day basis helps me to see public validation for the trap that it is, although it’s a trap I still fall into from time to time.
Being published was very different from my expectations. The glory of signing a contract fades too easily as books are sorted out into the “most anticipated” and … everyone else. The everyone else pile is enormous. And even having a massive hit might not provide the kind of validation that I would have expected, or desired, as a young writer.
A couple months ago, I spoke to a friend who has had every type of external approval that I thought a writer could want: money, awards, famous friends, a permanent place in the public sphere. Despite all those things, it can still feel like not enough, even for people like him. Success, he told me, must be measured between the book and the reader. Whatever else you seek from the outside world inevitably feels cheap.
At the time I write this, my debut hasn’t been published yet, and I expect that it will be a modest seller. Who knows how many people will read my novel, but it will pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who heard my radio ads, which were neither artful nor important.
And yet.
And yet a month after I left my radio job, every trace of me had been recorded over. Who knows what will happen to my book, but I would like to imagine that whatever libraries look like in 2040, my book might be in one of them.
When I think about writing my book—with speed, with purpose, and with a sense of humor and humility about the whole enterprise—I’m taken back to that gray cubicle in the skyscraper above the enormous, frozen lake, with a brief to write a thirty-second conversation between Jessica and Katie about their unusual plans for the afternoon ahead.
A few years ago, during the initial craze of 23andMe, I received a gleeful call from my Turkish mother who had just taken the test. We have Serbian, Bulgarian, and Italian blood! Considering her deep familial ties to the Ottoman Empire, I didn’t find this particularly surprising. Rather it was her enthusiasm at the now proven connectivity to these other lands that piqued my interest. The results of this test opened up a new world of curiosity for her as she began to draw parallels between her habits and her newfound cultural roots. Everything now had a reasoning that could be traced back to an ancestor—diet, skin complexion, mannerisms, creative leanings.
But what if she were able to trace the particular family member from each country? What if she could learn about the serendipitous moments that triggered each individual to cross paths with the other and bring her into existence? How would the knowledge of their stories impact the course of her life?
In her debut novel, An Unlasting Home, Mai Al-Nakib takes us on this very journey. Through the culturally rich stories of four female characters—Lulwa, Yasmine, Noura, Maria—we venture across the globe from Kuwait to Turkey to India to America, as their tales knit together to create the fifth character and protagonist, Sara. A professor of philosophy at the University of Kuwait, Sara finds herself on trial for blasphemy after an ultra-conservative law is passed, making the act a penal offense. As Sara awaits the results of her conviction, she reckons with the stories of these four women and must now decide what her story will be.
Despite the 6,317 miles between New York and Kuwait, I sat down with Al-Nakib over Zoom. Our respective bookshelves heaving with multicolored books in the background, we spoke in depth about the Middle Eastern melting pot and finding empowerment in not belonging.
Amy Omar: Your novel is such a refreshing and eye-opening account of just how culturally connected we, in this case the Middle East, really are. In many ways, like the countries in the Middle East, Kuwait is a confluence of many different cultures, being the crossroads of trade and political turnover. There are many touching moments of ethnically different groups living in peace amongst one another. Do you think this has helped foster more of an openness to other cultures? How did this amalgamation affect your upbringing and how is this different today?
MAN: The novel attempts to capture the sense of movement and migration that has always existed in Kuwait. As a port town, pre-oil, because of maritime and overland trade, Kuwait was a crossing point, linking the Arabian Peninsula, India, Africa, Iraq, and Iran. This intersection of cultures could be experienced in the language, music, food, and, of course, the people themselves. All this encouraged an openness to other cultures, a worldliness and acceptance of difference. This sensibility lasted into the post-oil period, I would say up until the 1980s, when I came of age. After the invasion, however, Kuwait turned inward, developing a more defensive, siege mentality. This is understandable as a response to the invasion, but because as a nation we haven’t fully metabolized the trauma of the invasion or its outcomes, it has had some negative effects. An Unlasting Home attempts to deal with this through Noura’s complicated relationship with Kuwait, as well as Sara’s.
Kuwait is now going through a hyper-nationalist, borderline xenophobic moment in its attitude and policies toward migrant workers and non-Kuwaiti residents.
Kuwait is now going through a hyper-nationalist, borderline xenophobic moment in its attitude and policies toward migrant workers and non-Kuwaiti residents. The unresolved issue of the stateless bidoun population—long-standing members of Kuwaiti society who continue unfairly to be denied citizenship—is simply untenable. This all has to do with both a sense of entitlement amongst the population and their fear that by sharing rights or awarding citizenship to others, they will lose their own privileges. In my opinion, this attitude poses an existential threat to the very survival of the country. This may sound apocalyptic, but these types of social fissures tend not to end well for nation-states. Combined with our lack of concern over environmental degradation and our lack of preparedness for a post-oil economy, the future doesn’t look bright. I think all of this is reflected in the novel.
AO: On the topic of migrant workers, I’m really intrigued by Maria’s storyline. Maria sacrifices her family in India and moves to Kuwait and then to America to raise Sara and Karim while their mother, Noura works. Historically, the narrative of the caretakers has been greatly overlooked. Why was it important to tell Maria’s story alongside Sara’s other female ancestors? How does her backstory shed light on the other stories?
MAN: The stories of relationships that develop between domestic helpers and the children they care for is underrepresented in Kuwait and elsewhere too, and I felt this was an important story to tell. Maria leaves her own children behind in India to care for the children of strangers in Kuwait. She does this to ensure the survival of her children, but over time, these other children, Karim and Sara, become her children, too. Maria becomes the emotional center of Karim and Sara’s lives, filling in the gaps left by their parents.
Because Maria is a second mother to Sara, she plays as significant a role as the other women in Sara’s life. In aligning her story with the stories of the other women, it becomes clear how, as women, as mothers, they share many of the same obstacles and aspirations. It doesn’t matter where they are from—whether Turkey, Lebanon, India, Iraq, Kuwait—these women want similar things: better lives for their children and for themselves.
AO: I’d like to talk about the men in your novel. You have these characters like Dr. Sherif and Mubarak who are examples of this type of man who we don’t really talk about. They are the type of men who aren’t outwardly advocating for women’s rights, but in subtle ways, really support the women in their lives. It was really refreshing to see a non-stereotypical Middle Eastern narrative of a father figure who, for example, didn’t disallow their daughters to study or work.
MAN: It mattered to me to convey these examples of supportive fathers, brothers, even unrelated men like Dr. Sherif, who believes so much in Yasmine’s talent and wants her to succeed as a writer. It’s too easy to portray men, especially men from the Middle East, in the stereotypical, Orientalist way you mention; but the reality is so much more complex and interesting.
What holds these women back is less one individual man and more an overarching patriarchal force that structures their lives, limits their decisions, shapes their choices.
What holds these women back is less one individual man and more an overarching patriarchal force that structures their lives, limits their decisions, shapes their choices. For example, while Yasmine’s husband, Marwan, comes closest to the overbearing, sexist husband type, it is in fact the patriarchal system that enables him to control her property, to marry a second wife, to prevent her from working—in short, to keep her under his power. But Yasmine was raised by an open-minded father and she had the support of her father’s friend, Dr. Sherif; so not all the men in her life followed that oppressive pattern.
For Noura, also raised by a supportive and loving father, the social and cultural expectation is that she should follow her husband back to Kuwait. This prevents her from fulfilling her ambition of going into politics in the United States. The choice for Noura is either to divorce her husband, who she loves, or to submit to his decision for the family. And yet Tarek seems so completely oblivious of his own privilege to decide on her behalf; he takes it for granted. It’s these patriarchal forces that bind these women, regardless of the support some of the men in their lives may provide.
AO: The idea of a homeland identity has always been fascinating to me; often we end up attaching ourselves to a homeland different from the one of our birth. I was particularly interested in Noura’s detachment from Kuwait and Sara’s attachment to it. Noura clearly saw the lack of opportunities for women in Kuwait, but Sara is still hopeful. Why does she return to Kuwait?
MAN: In many ways Noura grew up in a much more hopeful Kuwait, so it’s unexpected that she would be the one to want to leave in the early 1970s, when the promise of its future was still viable and exciting. But it was her political acumen that enabled her to perceive the cracks before anyone else. Sara grows up feeling out of place in Kuwait. She wants to be American. Maybe she picks up on some of her mother’s sense of loss; and it’s her mother who decides to enroll her and Karim in an American school [in Kuwait] once they return from the United States, which alienates her from her country even further.
But once Sara moves back to America and achieves everything she thinks she wants—a great job, a nice boyfriend—it turns out not to be enough. Unlike her brother, Karim, she doesn’t feel at home there. Karim always knew, as a gay boy, that Kuwait could never be a home for him. He leaves with no regrets, no looking back. That is, I think, a privilege afforded to him as a man. He has the freedom to sever ties in a way Sara cannot. Sara isn’t forced to return, but she has subconsciously internalized the experiences of her grandmothers, her mother, and Maria, and, through them, is drawn back. She senses that it is only in Kuwait that she can piece together the puzzle of these generations of women and the effects they have had on her.
AO: One of the central themes of An Unlasting Home is lack of permanence—in the physical home, politics, relationships. For better or worse, the lack of stability forces the characters to stay on their toes. Do you think this awareness of the lack of stability actually drives the characters, by not allowing them to “settle down”?
MAN: That’s really well put. In some cases, they have to move for reasons beyond their control—to follow husbands, to escape poverty, and so on. Sometimes the move is chosen, even if circumstances force the choice—as is true for Yasmine and Maria. But for all of them, I think, a sense of being in place or of belonging is elusive. There are times or places where they seem to almost belong—Lulwa in Pune, Noura in St. Louis—but that inevitably gets disrupted. And then there are instances where they force themselves to stay put in the space of non-belonging, and it seems almost perverse, but there is something that discomfort provides to them. This is true of Sheikha, staying with her brutal husband; and of Lulwa, allowing herself to be held captive for seven years by her mother, Sheikha; and of Noura, staying put in Kuwait long after she could have gone.
There is a degree of empowerment in not belonging; it allows you to pivot and to create possibilities for yourself that are often fruitful.
There is a degree of empowerment in not belonging; it allows you to pivot and to create possibilities for yourself that are often fruitful. This is the case for Maria, moving herself from Goa to Pune and then to Kuwait, making a life for her children that would not have been possible without her capacity to tolerate non-belonging. Sara ultimately comes to this understanding of non-belonging as well. In some ways, all of the women who shaped her have made it possible for her, finally, to let go of this place that was never completely hers anyway. Sara carries her home with her in the form of the stories that she manages to rescue from oblivion and make her own. It’s only at that point that she can let go and move on.
AO: Growing up, you spent a lot of time in America. In a way you had the best of both worlds—summers in the U.S. and the rest of the year in Kuwait. Do you feel like your time in America impacted how you view the world, your career, and self in a way that would’ve been different if you had just grown up in Kuwait?
MAN: Very much so. I lived in America until I was about six, and, like Sara, it really did affect how I saw myself. My first language was English; I didn’t learn Arabic until I returned to Kuwait. We didn’t speak Arabic at home, so I learned it at school, in the one class dedicated to it. My parents spoke Arabic with each other, but English with my sisters and me. My mother grew up in India, and her first language was English, too. So, when the question of a “mother tongue” comes up, my mother’s and my own was English, not Arabic.
I attended the American School of Kuwait, which was a little American bubble in the desert. My mother really wanted her daughters to be educated in the American system, which she believed in. She wasn’t hung up on the language issue. She figured we would absorb Arabic, which we did. But all that did create a sense in me of being an outsider in Kuwait. In some ways, it’s similar to the experience of an Arab American kid growing up in the U.S. with immigrant parents, but with a twist. For the Arab American kid, the culture at school and outside the home is American and the majority language is English; but at home, the parents might be holding on to the language and culture of origin, not wanting the kids to assimilate too readily. The kids, however, tend toward that majority (though there are, of course, exceptions, and this is not to say the majority automatically welcomes them in). For me in Kuwait, the culture and language outside both home and school was different than my own. It was a majority I did not tend toward. This could be confusing at times, but it didn’t bother me much because I was in that safe bubble. In fact, I appreciated the difference, and for me now, as a writer, I appreciate it even more because I find value in that outsider position. It’s what Edward Said would call contrapuntal—it affords you a double perspective that provides overlooked insights. I appreciate being between two worlds, two languages.
AO: In what ways did you feel different than your peers in Kuwait?
In Kuwait, we tend to swing between extreme conservatism and moderate openness.
MAN: When I was a teenager, I wanted so much more freedom, a wild freedom, and I couldn’t understand the limits. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve changed that much! The things that bothered me when I was 14 still bother me now. I still have issues with many of our so-called customs and traditions, especially when they’re used to legitimate hypocrisy or injustice.
AO: I have to ask, how much of Sara’s blasphemy trial is your attempt at rewriting history, a history that could have been your personal story if an amendment to Article 111 of the Penal Code had been passed? Did it ever cross your mind that, “This could have been me”?
MAN: Yes, and in fact, when I was a few years into writing this novel, it actually happened to a colleague in the philosophy department! She was accused of blasphemy. It wasn’t a capital crime, but it was still an offense she could have been fined or imprisoned for. The case was dismissed, but it took a few months, and that level of stress is terrible.
In Kuwait, we tend to swing between extreme conservatism and moderate openness. After 2013, Kuwait seemed less conservative than it had been. This may have had to do with the residual effects of the Arab Spring, or maybe the shock of the amendment to the blasphemy law that almost passed. In any case, there was a shift away from the conservatism that had dominated since the 1990s. Now it seems like we’re swinging back again toward conservatism, and there have been several recent incidents targeting women specifically. That said, women have become more vocal than ever and are pushing back. Groups like Abolish 153 are fighting to overturn domestic violence laws, and we’ve had a #MeToo movement here also. It’s an uphill battle because the pressures against women remain entrenched, but it’s really heartening to see the increased advocacy.
“Inte hora,” a general tells his wife early on in Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin. You are free, in Arabic. The saying appears at first during a quarrel over politics in the intimacy of a Cairo home while, outside, revolts against Egypt’s then leader, King Farouk, combust the city. A saying echoed three decades later in the multigenerational story.
Who is free and who gets to be free, I wondered as I read the Egyptian American author’s debut novel. The married woman from Cairo’s upper crust society who answers her daughter’s inquiry about love with “I’m still waiting for that to happen”? The principled servant who watches over the daughter of the house and hardly ever gets to see her own kids? The teenager with a dozen suitors who must choose between her family’s support and the love of the only man she wants? The young, disillusioned officer who can only make something of himself if he leaves his country? Or the student who seeks an education in the U.K. only to be sent back over his place of birth?
Freedom—what it means to be free and what it takes to be free—appears to be a theme in Azim’s rich and intricately composed novel set between Egypt and the U.S. It’s found in the choice of words (passports are “liberated” from drawers where they are kept hidden) and symbols (chickens attempting to take flight from a rooftop and tumbling down).
Mostly though this is a story about origins and home. Origins as what’s marked in our identification papers, what runs in the family and what reveals itself through genes. Home, too, for Azim’s characters come in many forms. The family home that housed a former version of oneself. The address in a handwritten letter that may uncover family secrets. The space in a life found in arts. The safety of a love that needs neither explanation nor competition. “I just want to go home,” an ailing character says at one point in the novel, home then turning into an eternal haven for the soul.
Azim and I met on Zoom earlier in March. She spoke from Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family while I joined from Dubai.
Ladane Nasseri: You said in a recent talk that you started working on this book 15 years ago and initially wanted it to revolve around 9/11. What was it about the Arab American experience that you wanted to capture and how did that change?
Dalia Azim: I had wanted to write a multigenerational saga about an Egyptian family that immigrates to the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century, but because I moved to New York a month before 9/11 and that was so much a part of our experience then, I wanted something that portrayed positive sides of the Arab identity. I abandoned that after a year. It seemed falsely limited to focus on 9/11 when my initial impetus was to write an immigration story.
In the past few years since I found the right angle for the book, it became more about the characters and their experiences. The jumping off point is a woman who has little to no agency in Egypt in the ‘50s as she’s watching a revolution unfold outside her sheltered home. How she develops an awareness of what freedom means and trying to find out what freedom could mean to her.
LN: The novel starts at the time of Egypt’s struggle for independence. I saw parallels between what was happening at the nation’s level and at the characters level. We see a yearning for freedom politically but also in Hala’s efforts to emancipate herself. It’s about what it means to be free, and its limitation given Egypt’s politics and Hala’s emigration. Tell me more about choosing this time period as a setting, and the notion of freedom.
DA: The waning days of the colonial period and the emergence of independence in a country like Egypt is something that has always been very fraught and interesting to me. I had grown up hearing stories, my relatives had lived through that, my grandparents talked about joining the protests in the street and what it meant to come out of that moment.
I wanted to have a character, Hala’s father, be part of the inside, see these machinations and understand that it’s very orchestrated still. It’s not freedom across the board. For Hala as a woman whose life was being determined for her by her father mostly, it’s a personal awakening. She has a close relationship with the family’s live-in servant, and she also sees that there are all these ways people are constrained and the revolution is not going to change anything for them—whether it’s women or people from the serving class.
Khalil too is from a working-class background, and he doesn’t see himself having the future he wants in Egypt. There is a pivotal scene where he is part of a rally for (former president) Gamal Abdel Nasser. That’s something that fascinated me, the speculations on whether there was a legitimate attempt on his life then or if it was staged to create the springboard for him to make a bid to unseat the president and become president himself. I wanted that to be a turning point for Khalil—this sense of political corruption, that the composition of the government and who’s running the country has changed but it feels as controlled by a small group of people as always.
With Hassan, there are more obvious parallels of incarceration versus freedom, and he goes through a major transformation when he is incarcerated. For me, the most moving part to write was when he comes out of prison and tries to get his footing back in the world after so many years of not having anything.
LN: Did you want to write a multigenerational story as a way to record the evolution of Egypt over time and capture the breadth of the immigrant experience?
DA: That was a big part of it. I wanted to explore the multigenerational experience of leaving one’s home country and settling in a new place. The alienation and the disconnect from the sense of home was something I really wanted to get into emotionally with the writing.
Writing is an act of creative empathy.
Although I found that once the characters leave Egypt, I had to pare it down because there is a point where it becomes too didactic, inserting certain events in history just because they happened, not because they were integral to the story. There were other wars, other conflicts with Israel, turmoil within the country with transitions in leadership I ended up pointing to only when it was essential. Like the transition from Nasser to (former president) Sadat. You learn more about that through Hassan’s perspective in prison, the political ramifications of that with another round of people being incarcerated.
LN: Hala is the only character written in the first person. She has a strong personality, she takes certain decisions that are life changing, but she’s also fairly traditional when it comes to her relationship with Khalil, hiding things from him, or being wary of how much she shares with others. What were the challenges of writing her?
DA: Putting myself into the mindset of a woman who grows up in the ‘50s is in and of itself challenging. My experience is so different growing up with a lot of agency and freedom—my parents are Middle East, and they are very open minded compared to other first-generation Arab immigrants I have met.
Writing is an act of creative empathy. Writing about experiences that are so foreign to me is the biggest challenge but also the most rewarding. I wanted to portray her as a mix of confident and naïve. She has so little experience of the world when she does things that ultimately unseat her life. She does have a private education from the school system, but a lot of her education comes from movies and soap operas that she watches at home, so she has this silly, romantic aspect to her. She suffers when she leaves and is somebody who probably would have suffered had she stayed as well. She’s one of those people who’s always wondering what if and wonders if she made the right decisions. She has some impulse issues that come out and it becomes clearer as the book goes on. Hala was challenging but also core to the story. It was a way to narrate this background of the revolution and talk about women’s freedom.
LN: Middle Eastern women when they are represented in mainstream Western media and movies, are often so flat. They are usually depicted as victims with very little agency and some of that can be true at times, but I don’t feel that we see them as multi-layered human beings. I found that so satisfying about your female characters, they are multi-layered. What was most important to you as you were developing them?
DA: It bothers me when I encounter unidimensional characters in other stories. There’s always complexity in something that may come across as a negative trait, it usually has some sort of origin story and so to really flesh out what the backstory is, what is happening in the present, what makes a person a person is one of the reasons I love to write. It’s important to capture the good and the bad in order to make characters memorable, to make them as whole and complicated as possible.
LN:We witness external, political upheaval but also internal ones. Themental health aspect you introduced, and its impact on the characters’ lives brought an unexpected element to the story. It was a slow reveal and on the second read I could see hints I had not picked up at first.
The more Arab and Arab American writers we have who are writing complex stories not set around terrorism, the richer the field becomes and the more accurate it becomes in terms of describing a diverse community.
DA: It’s something that I have seen very little, if at all, in literature about the Middle East or from the Middle East. Mental health is something that many people deal with, and that we should all be talking about more.
I was drawn to the idea that what might have seemed like naive impulses could have been underpinned by mental health issues. Although the book changed form a lot the mental health narrative was there from the very start. It’s something I initially wanted to explore in a heavy-handed way as response to 9/11, but as the book got more mature and developed, I thought it would be more interesting to look at it—not in a contemporary character but further back—at a time when it would not have been diagnosed or recognized.
LN: In a 2018 article, you wrote about wanting to take your kids to Egypt to visit family and your friends wondering if that’s safe. When you are in Egypt, your relatives are concerned about the extent of gun violence in the U.S. Living in the U.S., we fail to see how the country can be perceived by non-Americans. What are some of the misconceptions you are trying to dispel as a dual citizen and someone who is able to have that dual perspective?
DA: It bothers me when people ask if it’s safe to bring your family to the Middle East. It’s as safe as anywhere. There’s always unknown, there’s the threat of violence anywhere you go. It’s hypocritical for Americans to say that and not be looking at what’s happening in our own country. Gun violence is insane in the U.S. In Egypt and other places, you cannot just get access to them.
I was born in Canada and raised in the U.S. I’ve spent a lot of time in Egypt, but I have never lived there. Although it’s getting better, in the 20 years that I have been a writer, it’s been challenging to find books that are either translated into English or written in English about the Middle East. That pool is growing. It’s becoming a richer area of literature with stories that do defy stereotypes. The negative stereotypes about Arabs are well known and that’s something I definitely want to counter through my own writing. That’s a lot to take on as an individual writer but the more Arab and Arab American writers we have who are writing complex stories not set around terrorism, the richer the field becomes and the more accurate it becomes in terms of describing a diverse community. We need to continually add more diverse narratives to the literary scene so that we ultimately have a more complex picture.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
