A Conversation with Youssef Rakha
BY MAI SERHAN
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian writer working in Arabic and English. He is the author of the novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles, which are available in English, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award. The Dissenters is his first novel to be written in English. He was selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 event in 2010, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Quarterly, GQ Middle East, and Internazionale, among many others.
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Mai Serhan: First, congrats on a brilliant novel. It’s a real pleasure to be picking your brain about all its wonders. Let me start by asking; you’ve written The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, The Crocodiles, Paulo, and You Are Going to the Bar, all novels in Arabic. The Dissenters is your first novel in English, and I must say, I’ve been blown away by its prose. Tell me, why did you decide to write this one in English, and how did this switch affect the writing?
Youssef Rakha: I have been writing in English all my life. It’s not as if I made the switch for the first time, it’s just that before The Dissenters I hadn’t committed to a full-length manuscript that I would have to publish in English.
MS: But why did you prefer to write fiction in Arabic?
YR: Okay, where do I start? I suppose part of the answer has to do with what I was writing. My first novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, was completely bound up with the language. A lot of what is happening in it creatively is Arabic-specific. It’s almost like a showcase of all the registers of Arabic and their literary possibilities. And I was trying to come up with a contemporary version of what’s known as Middle Arabic. I was also trying to reclaim the notion of Cairo as a Muslim city from my own place, from my very secular, anti-Islamist position, and so it had to be in Arabic. The Crocodiles was a response to a love affair, a disappointment in love that was also bound up with Arabic poetry. The person I was in love with was a writer who wrote in Arabic and the social history of our community was all Arabic, so there wasn’t really a question about whether I should write it in English. And it was a similar situation with my third novel…
But I was also under the illusion that I didn’t have to write in English to reach a worldwide readership. I thought my work in translation could find its place in the English-speaking world, which is a complete delusion. Translations from Arabic are very rare and they tend to be tied up to current affairs and the news. The only reason The Crocodiles appeared with a relatively mainstream publisher in English was that it was written in 2012 and it was about the Arab Spring, right? But what I’m saying is, by the time I started working on The Dissenters, I had also reached a point of disillusionment with the Egyptian literary sphere. I just didn’t want to be part of it anymore.
MS: Why is that?
YR: For many reasons. In the aftermath of the revolution in 2011, the sort of political rage game we were all playing with each other on Facebook had gotten to a point where I couldn’t deal with it, or I didn’t see the point in taking part in it anymore. There was so much contention over nothing because we all wanted the same thing, in theory—full political rights and freedoms, and so on—we didn’t really disagree. Of course, some of us could see earlier than others that what we wanted wasn’t possible, that by insisting on the impossible, we might be contributing to something disastrous, and some of us were more upset by some things than others. I just couldn’t believe that the people I’d felt I belonged to politically were OK with a Muslim Brotherhood takeover as the outcome of the revolution, not only accepting but actually promoting it—that people had died for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over.
There was also the growing awareness of the Egyptian literary scene being confined to a virtual space. With Egyptian writers, even now, nothing really ever happens outside of Facebook. What I had come to realize was that nobody was really interested in anybody’s writing either, or at least my writing. What they were interested in were mutual benefits, you know—backscratching. It didn’t matter if they were actually reading or being moved by anything I was doing, it was always about how we could scheme to our mutual benefit. I guess you could say I was disillusioned with the political and cultural limitations of my community.
But then it was also taking a long time to publish my third novel, Paulo, and after having to wait to get it published and feeling ostracized, if not for writing it then for my comments on Facebook, I started feeling there was no point in being a part of that scene. It wasn’t necessarily about not writing in Arabic, and it wasn’t at all about writing in English. It was just about this feeling of alienation within a particular community that, in retrospect, I can now see, was disintegrating anyway. So it seemed like an opportune moment to try something I’d always wanted to do.
As to the second part of the question, how did the switch to English affect the writing: since finding a publisher for The Dissenters, I have been getting into what’s being written in America now, and what I’ve realized is that the first version of the novel was written in an idiom and a mental space that was totally distinct from what’s happening now in the English-speaking world. In that space, the big question was, how do I avoid being a tour guide, because you’re writing about a place that’s presumably, in some sense, exotic, even politically exotic. The Arab world is a place where revolutions and civil wars happen, where dictators hold onto power, and so on, right? So how do I stay accessible to a Western readership without turning into the explainer, the person who presents the other or the backward country or the Third World political situation.
And, even in Arabic, I think my raison d’etre as a writer is to write from my position as a non-Westerner into a West-dominated discourse. So tackling that big question was the main thing.
MS: We often are curious about an author’s writerly influences, but I find The Dissenters spectacular in a cinematic sense. I’m curious, are there any movies that might’ve influenced its visual language? And if so, which, and in what way?
YR: I wasn’t consciously thinking of specific movies, but I often ask myself how much unacknowledged cinematic influence goes into all of contemporary writing—because we think in terms of cinema, right? I think cinema is definitely there, especially black and white films from the ’40s onwards, both Egyptian and from the West. But it wasn’t conscious or deliberate.
MS: I felt like the women characters, especially those of Amna’s social milieu, belonged to ’60s black and white Egyptian movies.
YR: Yes, well, that’s very true. Part of the inspiration for the whole book was the picture that ended up on the cover, which is a studio portrait of my mother picking an orange from before I was born. I find it to be very moving. She looks so happy, but it looks so completely staged, and I happen to know she wasn’t happy at all. There’s this poignant duplicity about it. It’s meant to look convincing but at the same time it’s very obvious that it’s fake. It could’ve been a movie still. And the thing about Egyptian movies from the ’40s, until maybe the ’70s, is that they were actually filmed in studios, even the outdoor scenes. That complexity of artifice is quite appealing to me, the way in which artifice can say more about reality than if you accurately reproduced it.
MS: I started off as a short story writer, but I see that my prose really kicked off once I got into poetry. Poetry allows me to meditate on every decision with more intention. It’s all that careful construction, aesthetic attention, ingenuity and musicality. I get that same sense reading you, but I also know you are a poet. I’m curious who are those poets who’ve influenced your prose?
YR: Poetry, for me, is about a certain kind of control and a certain kind of intensity, or density, and it’s also about metaphor, being aware that everything you say means more than what it carries. Obviously, all these disciplines are helpful to narrative because they make the prose stronger and more precise. But the interesting thing is, I’ve written very few poems in English, and maybe none in the Egyptian vernacular. Almost all of my poetry is in standard Arabic. I think part of the reason my creative practice in English is interesting or unique is that it has a subliminal undertone of Arabic poetry; there is this sense of music that isn’t necessarily English. Poets who’ve influenced me; so the first name that comes to mind—someone who’s very important in my life—is Sargon Boulus, an Iraqi poet who spent most of his life in San Francisco. He translated Allen Gisberg’s Howl, Khalil Gibran’s Prophet, all kinds of interesting things. English poetry—I don’t know. A particular book by Ezra Pound, of all people, Cathay, which is supposedly translations from the Chinese, except he couldn’t really read Chinese; he took literal translations of Chinese poems and re-worked them, and some of those resonate with me in an insane way. I think the strongest influences are unconscious influences, though. I’ll tell you a story about influences. So, in 1997, very early on, I wrote a poem in Arabic. It had a certain rhythm to it, and I had no idea where that rhythm came from. Until I decided to re-read The Heron by Ibrahim Aslan a few years ago, and I realized it was the opening of The Heron. It wasn’t word for word or anything, but it was the exact same rhythm.
MS: Following his mother’s death, Nour, your narrator, ascends to the attic of the home he once shared with her. It is there that the wild imaginings of his mother’s life transpire. The attic is a common literary trope for female madness and melancholia. As a male writer, what was your experience like inhabiting that space, and by extension, embodying that very Egyptian female experience?
YR: I wasn’t necessarily aware of the attic’s canonical connotations in this way, but it was an obvious decision from the start. I suppose it’s because of those reasons but in a subliminal, almost unconscious way. There’s also the fact that the narrator was conceived in the attic, so it does have that weight in the novel. I think I was aware that the space, where he essentially becomes his mother, is on top. But it’s also isolated, right? It’s meant to be a magic place, a place of prayer almost, where these things happen. As to embodying a female space, I don’t know how contentious this is, but I actually don’t subscribe to this idea of separation of the sexes. I mean, my take on present-day gender activism would be to say, we’re all both, we’re all men and women.
MS: But you clearly delineate experiences along gender lines in the novel.
YR: In a political sense, yes, in the myth of the politics, but not in the characters’ psyches and not in what happens to them. I mean they have roles, but those roles also shift in the novel. But in life, I don’t necessarily believe that there is a clear-cut line between a man and woman, and this idea that a man cannot imagine what it’s like for a woman, or vice versa—I don’t believe that. I’d say there’s a bigger difference between people brought up in a centuries-old post-Puritan tradition, for example, and people brought up in a centuries-old Muslim tradition, than between men and women. The mode of gender activism that wants to separate men and women as experiential categories or irreconcilable consciousnesses is not something I subscribe to at all, at least not in literature. And yet, I did have this barrier. I didn’t feel secure enough to speak in a woman’s voice or inhabit a woman’s character.
MS: Why is that?
YR: I don’t know. But until the switch happened, and I found myself writing in English, it wasn’t possible. It hadn’t been possible in Arabic, though I want to stress that this has nothing to do with Arabic itself, or English itself. The actual shift, the fact that I committed to a long manuscript in English for the first time, and then thinking of my mother on the one hand, but also thinking that I could be telling the story of my mother. A character like me would tell the story of a character like my mother. It couldn’t just be done from her viewpoint. But it’s a fascinating phenomenon, right? You change your principal writing language and this thing happens. But if I know anything about human beings and how they function in the world, I know that gender is a spectrum in terms of consciousness, however much people deny this. You can actually be in a place that a woman occupies without biologically being a woman, and vice versa. It just involves the awareness that this is there and it’s possible. I think as a writer, in this and other ways, you have to realize that consciousness is fluid.
MS: The attic is a space where the narrator inhabits women’s bodies to also explore their sexual experiences and the politics of female eroticism. I found the sex in the novel to be unbridled, transgressive, and almost always disappointing. The women read as seductresses but also as victims, or prey. In the process, no man is redeemed and no woman withholds. Even Amna, the narrator’s mother, the essential Egyptian Mama, as conservative and pious as she is, has a string of sexual escapades. I wonder, if a woman had written this book, would it read as such?
YR: I hope so. I mean, I don’t think the sex is particularly male. I don’t think it’s any different from the sex in Toni Morrison’s novels, for example. The point is, even the essential Egyptian Mama is also something else entirely, right? She’s a whole world. To me, my characters are people, and I want to bring them to life as well as I can.
MS: I guess another way of framing my question would be, is it because both the narrator and the author are male that the sex reads as such?
YR: I think that’s a normative impression, and it’s conditioned by a strange kind of prejudice. I mean, I’ve often felt that straight male desire is frowned upon in the English-speaking world, and I think it’s frowned upon just for being straight male desire. More understandably, people might object to a male daring to depict female desire. But as I say I’m talking about human beings, human beings whom I myself could be, whether they’re male or female, and I believe desire is central to everything in human lives. You can’t claim to be giving a rounded picture of reality and not deal with it. There’s this beautiful defense of writing sex by Garth Greenwell, who writes extremely graphic sex evidently from his own life but since this is gay sex I don’t think it’s as much of an issue. There is no question about it being a male fantasy or an abusive intervention. I try to be true to what I’m writing and not hold back, and of course, I’m helped by the fact that I never had to worry about this in Arabic. There are sensationalized aspects to the novel, of course, like the scene when the mother, Amna, finds her daughter, Shimo, in a very compromised state in the attic, but those scenes are there to provide the tension. It has a dramatic function.
MS: Central to Nour’s feverish visions in the attic is the femicide of a string of women dubbed The Jumpers who, after being exploited by various men and by a failed state apparatus, enter into a catatonic state and end up falling off balconies. I kept telling myself while reading this novel that it could have easily been called The Jumpers, seeing how they tie all the narrative threads together, but you chose to call it The Dissenters. I take it that the emphasis on dissent is intentional. Why that leaning?
YR: It somehow never came up, the idea of calling it The Jumpers or The Myth of the Holy Jumpers; that would’ve been a good title, right? I think I was half aware I didn’t want it to be about just that, because that’s the title of a fairly discrete part of the book. The book was actually called Amna, after the mother character, but then my first agent asked me to think of another name, so I thought of The Dissenters. “Dissenter” as opposed to “dissident” is interesting in connection to what everyone is doing in the book, really, and in very different ways. Even Abed, the narrator’s brother, who is part of the state security apparatus, is a dissenter, but he’s dissenting from the family, not politically.
MS: The Dissenters is, in part, a letter addressed to Shimo, the narrator’s sister. The letter is the narrator’s attempt to reconcile his sister to his mother, which he does by reimagining the mother’s life. But we never hear back from Shimo, which raises the question, who is this letter really addressed to? If it’s your English-speaking meta-reader, what is it that you wish to convey?
YR: I think the answer to this question goes back to the fact that, at the start, Shimo was not a character at all. She was just a device allowing the narrator to talk—in English since that was the language of her education and she had moved to the US. But, in the editing—and I was blessed with an amazing editor—while the book was taking root in America, the only character who actually lives in America started to take up more space, which I think is a beautiful thing—for the character to grow in this organic way. Shimo was essentially a way to justify the journey the text makes from Cairo to California. But as her presence expanded, I became aware of her being a woman in her own right, and a dissenter, in a different way to her mother. So I thought I’d work more of that into the story. In this sense, she becomes an example of someone who’s given up and left. She’s given up her sense of belonging, her country, and that doesn’t seem to be an issue with her. I mean if we’re to hear back from her, that’s another book, so I don’t think there’s room for her response given the way the book is structured. I suppose what I wanted to convey through Shimo in particular is for the American reader who has no connection to the Arab world to feel that this could be their next-door neighbor, someone they might know.
MS: The attic is also an elevated space that gives rise to some transcendental themes, such as faith, death and hope. The Jumpers are at once promiscuous and holy. It is such an intriguing combination. Towards the end of your novel, the narrator writes, “dead women stories were all the hope I had,” and that their death has turned him into a prophet whose message gives their death meaning. So, is death the only hope left for us?
YR: The holiness is kind of after-the-fact, like saints. Saints become saints after they die, right? In Islam at least. In the case of the narrator, The Jumpers are holy because they give the revolution meaning, in the context of his mother and what happens to her. They’re supernatural in the sense that they enable him to key into his mother’s life experience from a first-person perspective, so that what happened to her happens to him too. And in a sense this process is the revolution, because the revolution itself didn’t really do anything, it had almost the opposite effect of what it had set out to achieve. It mobilized the mother but it also devastated her. It was a kind of proof that it was wrong to engage in the first place, that when as a pious Mama she had avoided being part of anything outside her immediate surroundings, when she had forsaken being fully alive, she had made the right decision after all.
MS: You write, “The Jumpers were like the revolutionaries’ reflections. Except they were the original pictures, the revolutionaries corrupted copies of them. Their numbers equal to the revolution’s martyrs.” I’m interested in the almost mythical dimension attributed to those female acts of suicide. Is it an exercise in radical choice, a purified form of protest that attempts to rise above politics? Is it penance those women are seeking? Perhaps sacrifice for a nation’s sins? What does femicide mean to you within the larger framework of the story?
YR: For the narrator, The Jumpers are the core, the meaning of revolution. Because, without them, without the fact that their death means something or performs a function, not only the last four years of his mother’s life but her whole biography would be meaningless. So The Jumpers are a kind of faith. This faith is contrasted with dogmatic religiosity, right? Dogmatic religiosity is a way of avoiding being alive and having political awareness, whereas this faith is radical. We always think of hope as a positive thing, but actually in the history of thought, the history of philosophy, hope wasn’t always encouraged. Hope can be seen as diabolical too, because as long as you have hope, you suffer—until what you hope for comes true, and it often doesn’t.
MS: They say, hope is pain when it’s all that’s left.
YR: Yes. There’s a lot of philosophical precedent for that. I guess the reason why we think of it as a positive thing is because of the idea of hope for salvation in Christianity and Islam, but that’s a different story. I don’t think of hope as a particular factor in any of this. I think the narrator has a purpose, which he feels he accomplishes at the end, and that is to tell the story. The power of the attic is that it represents, enables and embodies that purpose.
MS: Seeing that Shimo’s cut off her mother and left the country, does hope only exist in aborting personal and national histories altogether? Or is hope a wild imaginary that is only made possible through the act of narration?
YR: What interests me in this question, especially you asking it, as a Palestinian at this moment, is that I think by existing, by being fully functional human beings, and in this case doing literature, we embody the only possible resistance. I don’t know if there’s anything else we can do. Part of the point of this book is to suggest that maybe it’s not about what we do politically. It’s not about demonstrating and protesting as such, which—the least you can say—is ineffective. It’s about being who we are, which also involves knowing who we are. For me this is achieved through writing. The book asks whether, when you set out to change the world, you do more harm than good. It suggests that merely existing with sincerity, with integrity, may be the more meaningful path. So, there’s that as well. Something that I wrote in one of my essays recently is the difference between the Arabic words for “witness” and “martyr”: shahed and shaheed. Shahed is somebody who knows and shaheed is somebody who knows the truth. This circles back to the idea of death being the only hope, because you only know the truth once you die, right? I think it’s about witnessing, about being content with knowing until we can have the honor of knowing the truth.
MS: Or speaking your truth.
YR: Yes, speaking your truth.
