One of my favorite assessments of art is the Bechdel Test—a series of criteria that determine how successfully a work of fiction portrays its women characters. It has to have 1) at least two named women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man. If a work of fiction passes or not, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good or bad. At least not in the sense that we normally talk about art. The importance of the test lies in what it says about the work of fiction’s perspective on the world—how it sees the world. The troubling thing about a story that fails the Bechdel Test is that, in its world, women are not prominent enough to exist in a world separate from men. If a woman does exist, her presence is only by virtue of her connection to a man.
I like the Bechdel Test. I think it is important. And I think art needs another, similar test. A Bechdel Test for non-white characters. To pass, a work of fiction must have 1) two named non-white characters, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something besides a white character.
The United States is divided along cultural and racial lines. The loudest, most bellicose voice we’ve heard in modern politics now commands the most powerful country in the world, and he’s telling you that Muslims are dangerous. We’ve reached a point in our national narrative where the President of the United States is calling for a registry of and a ban on Muslims. Narrative matters, and Muslim stories are more important than ever. Vastly unrepresented in American fiction, the stories about Muslims we often hear come from the news. Stories featuring Muslims are more likely to be about terrorism than anything else. In a post-9/11, post-Trump America, Muslim narratives are scarce.
However, we’re seeing more and more of these stories emerge. HBO’s The Night Of told the story of a young Pakistani-American Muslim caught not only in the New York justice system but also in a maelstrom of anti-Muslim paranoia. He’s on trial for a number of things, but for the detective assigned to the case, Nasir’s Islam determines his narrative. We saw a similar narrative play out in the massively popular first season of the podcast Serial. In story after story, Muslims suffer and are interrogated because of their faith. But the power of these Muslim-dominated narratives is that they have the capacity to reshape the wider view of Islam in the world. Just like the art that passes the Bechdel test often gives you deeper, more nuanced women characters, these stories give us more complicated Muslim narratives than what Trump’s America imagines.
Rajia Hassib’s novel In the Language of Miracles passes the Bechdel test for non-white characters. It succeeds, however, in another way. The story demands that we pay attention to a Muslim-American family in grief. Although the narrative is not altogether new, it is one that is often unexplored from a Muslim-American perspective. It’s not just that they’re supporting characters, or that their lives exist only in opposition of a white person, but each of their narratives is fully fleshed out. The novel’s point of view roves from Samir and Nagla, the parents, to their youngest son, Khaled. With each of their stories, Hassib crafts unique Muslim narratives in reaction to a traumatic event. Much like Muslims after a terror attack, they are confronted, and by familial association, implicated.
The Al-Menshawys exist in a loop of fear and guilt that has become all too familiar for Muslims. In the wake of terror attacks, Muslims are regularly called on to denounce and apologize for their faith as though Islam and its 1.6 billion worldwide practitioners are a monolith. The Al-Menshawys’ eldest son, Hossam, murdered a neighborhood girl, Natalie Bradstreet. The family, in many ways, is held accountable and punished by the community. They are mistrusted and become targets of hate and online harassment. Unfortunately, this same narrative plays out for Muslims across the world. Hate crimes are on the rise. After the November 2015 Paris attacks, hate crimes against British Muslims rose 300%. The beauty of Hassib’s novel is that you’re brought into this family’s pain. You come to the other side and you’re forced to see the whites of their eyes. In a novel, monoliths come crashing down, and rich, varied stories are given their due.
With a memorial service for Natalie looming, the Al-Menshawys are noticeably not included. Early in the novel, Natalie’s mother visits the Al-Menshawys to explain that she no longer blames the parents, Samir and Nagla. Before long, her real reason for visiting surfaces. The memorial has become a public event. There are fliers all over town. While she’s not apologizing for the memorial, she quickly adds, “I do want you to know that this was not meant for you.” Samir takes her visit as an invitation. His wife disagrees:
“She was just being nice.” Nagla paused, raised one trembling hand to her forehead. “Because that’s how she is.”
Samir sat on the sofa, crossed his legs. “Twenty years in the U.S. and you still don’t understand Americans.”
The central tension of the novel begins here. Samir insists, against the will of his entire family, that they make an appearance, address the community and ask for amends. His wife, son, and daughter prefer a less conspicuous existence. They suggest relocating. Samir is stubborn. He stamps his feet. The family will go to the memorial, and they will go together dammit.
In the end, Samir subverts the Muslim narrative and confronts the world around him. He attends the memorial service with his reluctant family. In a world that demands from Muslims shame and condemnation, Samir holds his head up high. He chooses not to let his son’s crime dictate his present or future. He wants his community to know that he and his family are suffering.
When they finally exit their car, “[they] walked toward the heads now turned their way, against the outburst of whispers that exploded from the silence. Samir plowed through, his step slightly faster than usual, the increased speed recognizable only to those who knew him.” Rather than spoil the ending, I’ll instead focus on Samir’s audacity to be loudly and shamelessly Muslim. He pushes against expectation and decorum in order to grieve. He asks that in the wake of this horror, he and his family be allowed to have a space to exist. That they not have to shrink away and disappear.
Syed Ali Haider is the Program Director for Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit that pairs teaching artists with underserved and marginalized student populations. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Juked, and Cimmaron Review. Roxane Gay selected his essay “Porkistan” for The Toast vertical, The Butter. He is working on a novel. You can follow him on Twitter at @SyedARHaider, but his Instagram is more fun.
Rajia Hassib’s debut novel, In The Language of Miracles, reads as a post-September 11th metaphor for Muslim life in America. It is the story of an Egyptian American family, the Al-Menshawys, dealing with the aftermath of a murder, committed by their eldest son, Hossam, of their neighbor’s daughter and his onetime girlfriend, Natalie Bradstreet.
Set in the fictional northern New Jersey town of Summerset (not to be confused with the actual Somerset, New Jersey) in the run-up to the one year anniversary of the crime and a memorial service for Natalie, the novel weaves between the perspectives of Hossam’s parents, internist Samir and homemaker Nagla, younger siblings, Khaled and Fatima, and maternal grandmother Ehsan as they live under suspicion and scorn. Against his family’s wishes, Samir decides to address the town at Natalie’s memorial in an attempt to reintegrate the Al-Menshawys into the community in which they’ve lived for nearly three decades. His attempt goes predictably poorly.
Hassib’s narrative strategy is a smart one. She sets the novel in the days before the memorial, which allows the characters to reflect on the murder—a metaphor for the September 11th attacks—without having to dissect the motives for Hossam’s actions. (He appears only in flashbacks and recollections.) In doing so, she allows Hossam’s motives, which are only alluded to as being the result of mental illness, not to matter. After all, the rest of the Al-Menshawy family had nothing to do with the crime but are still entrapped by its implications. Through this strategy, Hassib personalizes the confusion, hand-wringing, and uncertainty that many American Muslims have felt in the decade and a half since the attacks. We did not commit the crime, but the burden is still both felt by us and forced upon us.
To be Muslim in America is to live under suspicion. But it wasn’t always this way. In prelapsarian times, for me being a Muslim male was never a problem itself. Few in the Midwestern American town in which I grew up could identify a Muslim, and I even recall being thanked by an elderly veteran for my co-religionists’ anti-Russian fervor in Afghanistan when I worked for a summer at the VA Hospital in Kansas City in the mid-1990s. Now, of course, everyone can identify a Muslim, even if that Muslim is actually Sikh, and Russia is not our enemy but our puppet master.
By September, 2001, however, I had moved to lower Manhattan and had just entered graduate school. Despite its reputation for being a diverse, tolerant metropolis, suspicion found me in New York. In the weeks after the attack, subway riders muttered insults, firefighters threatened to “smear my brains across the pavement,” the NYPD and FBI searched my apartment, and when I flew home for Thanksgiving, an Upper Eastside grey hair tried her damnedest to eavesdrop on my phone call. She was visibly upset when I wasn’t (for once) selected for enhanced screening.
The question then for American Muslims is that if you can accept a compliment for the perceived accomplishments of your perceived co-religionists, as I had with the veteran, then should you harbor guilt or responsibility for their ill-deeds as well? If all Muslims were good when some fought Communists, then are we all bad when some commit terrorism?
This is, of course, an absurd question, especially when considering the heterodox nature of Islamic cultures and practices across the world and the multifaceted geopolitical nature of terrorism and the war on terror. (See also Syria).
Nevertheless, guilt-by-association haunts American Muslims a decade and a half removed from 2001. Or as Hassib’s Khaled admits to a New York City barista, Brittany, who he’s befriended over their love for Lepidoptera: “They see me, they think of [Hossam]. They think of him, they think murder…. And the worst part is—I can’t shake him off. I can’t drive him away….”
You may think that this metaphorical setup would render the Al-Menshawys as archetypes, but Hassib’s novel succeeds through the richness and detail of her writing, which documents the dynamics of an inter-generational Egyptian immigrant family under one, suburban roof. The grandmother, Ehsan, anchors them to tradition, lighting incense, reciting the Quran, and baking scores of fetir el-rahmah or pastries of mercy, even as the elder Al-Menshawys eschew tradition. Ehsan’s daughter, Nagla, for example, smokes prodigiously, hates attending Friday prayers at the mosque, and doesn’t wear a headscarf. Replace grandmother with elderly aunt and fetir el-rahmah for samosas, and you essentially have my Indian Muslim American household.
The Al-Menshawy patriarch, physician Samir, is a particularly good example of how the September 11th attacks came to implicate all American Muslims. Thanks in part to the Hart–Celler Act, many skilled immigrants arrived to the U.S. in the 1970s, leveraging their education in order to create a better life for their families, as the cliché about this country goes. Many of those immigrants, like my own parents, established themselves in their communities as professionals, occasionally as doctors, despite facing racist attitudes, often from other physicians.
These immigrants reasonably thought that their vocations would earn them enduring trust, building on the stereotype of American, melting-pot meritocracy. Occasionally, this was the case. But for many American Muslims, the terrorist attacks of 2001 upended those perceptions, and they found themselves outsiders in the very communities that they had helped for decades heal.
This is where Hassib’s Samir finds himself after Hossam’s crime. Samir cannot fathom why the community turned so viciously against the Al-Menshawys: His practice suffered; his house was graffitied; and his family shunned. Undoubtedly, any family whose son commits a horrific crime would be vilified, but when the perpetrator is Muslim the implications and suspicion resonate further, capitalized on by both a political party hell-bent on finding boogeymen and a compliant and profit-starved media establishment. Dylann Roof, for example, not only did not impugn white supremacists, but his assassinations had such little impact on American thinking that a year later the nation elected a racist demagogue to its highest office.
Hassib’s Samir believes that he can change the ‘hearts-and-minds’ of Summerset residents through direct action, through a direct appeal by using Natalie’s memorial to “show that we are on the same side they are on. That we regret what happened as much as they do…. That we are not what they think we are.”
But American Muslims are no longer in that era, if it were ever possible. In fact, it has been long enough since 2001 that a younger generation of American Muslims has emerged from childhood to find themselves trapped in an increasingly hostile political climate, burdened with a crime that they have no connection to.
In a sense now, we are all Khaled, Hossam’s younger brother, who feels these implications the worst. As Hassib writes, “A year ago, his brother had pulled a trigger and unleashed a hurricane that had been pummeling Khaled ever since, snatching him off his feet and tossing him in the air, twirling and twisting him about, watching him grope for an elusive ground.” This is as apt a metaphor for Muslim life in American post September 11th as I’ve read. #WeAreAllKhaled
Farooq Ahmed, now a Los Angeles-based writer, has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Brown University and a M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University. He is completing a novel set in Kansas, where he was raised, and a screenplay featuring sasquatch, although he has never met one. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Occasionally, he can be found online: @mcfruke
Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to the U.S. at age twenty-three. She earned a degree in architecture from the University of Alexandria and a second bachelor’s and a master’s in English from Marshall University, where she went on to teach creative writing and postcolonial literature. She lives in Charleston, WV, with her husband and two children. In the Language of Miracles is her first novel.
In the Language of Miracles is the story of the Al-Mehshawys, a Muslim family from Egypt. Nagla and Samir immigrate to New York in 1985, with their infant son Hosaaam, and Samir finds success as a physician in the suburbs of New Jersey, where the family has two more children, Khaled and Fatima. When Hosaam murders his girlfriend, Natalie, and takes his own life, the family members become outcasts in their community. In the Language of Miracles is a novel about individuals dealing with loss, grief, and shame in the aftermath of violence.
Selin Gökcesu
I read in previous interviews that you were moved by the events surrounding 9/11 in designing the plot and having the novel unfold around an act of violence. But, the act of violence in the book is very specific, and in some ways, very stereotypical: a young man kills his girlfriend and commits suicide. Can you tell us more about this choice, about its relationship to political violence at a larger scale, and its personal impact on the characters?
Rajia Hassib
While the aftermath of 9/11 was, indeed, the main reason I built the plot around an act of violence, I was never interested in a direct exploration of the political aspects of that particular terrorist attack. Instead, I wanted to explore how this one event shaped the lives of so many who were neither involved in it nor in any way responsible for it. As a Muslim living in the United States since before 9/11, I saw firsthand how this terrorist attack rattled the entire Muslim community in so many ways, and I wanted to investigate this on its most basic, human level.
So I chose to build the novel around a straightforward act of violence that cannot be construed as politically or ideologically motivated. I felt this choice would free me to explore the impact of such violence on the survivors on a more intimate level because my characters would not have to deal with political implications directly. Having said that, I also knew that politics would unquestionably loom in the background—one of the themes the novel is exploring is why any crime committed by a Muslim seems to taint the entire religion, which, in a way, is one of the direct results of 9/11. So choosing a simple and specific act of violence allowed me to explore the politics of how culture views violence committed by Muslims, even if this violence is not politically motivated. This has always fascinated me, partly because it is my personal belief that political violence in general, when viewed in relation to the actual human beings who commit it, can always be traced to some sort of personal motivation. Research into the minds of terrorists has shown how past personal experiences play a role in radicalizing individuals, in turning them into people ready to perform acts of unspeakable cruelty. So my belief is that violence is always personal and intimate, and that’s how I chose to represent it in my novel.
Selin Gökcesu
My reading of Hosaam was as a somewhat ambiguous character at first. He became a villain once it was revealed that he tried to set his brother up. This was partly because we weren’t exposed to his inner world and mental state enough to sympathize with him. What was behind the decision to keep Hosaam a black box and a somewhat unsympathetic character?
I intentionally kept Hosaam an ambiguous and unsympathetic character, and I did so for two reasons. The first was my determination to keep this novel about Hosaam’s family, not about him. In what I know is a cruel judgement on my part, I felt that Hosaam’s decision to take his own life silenced his voice, that he, in a way, lost the privilege of representation when he chose to commit a violent act and leave his family to deal with the aftermath. I felt more sympathy with them than I did with him, perhaps because his choices turned their worlds upside down. I will admit that part of this stance is rooted in how I, as a Muslim, feel toward terrorists who commit acts of violence and get killed themselves. I always wonder how the terrorist’s mother feels, for example, or how his siblings can go on with their daily lives. In addition to the pain of knowing that a loved person did something so cruel, the family is left with the added pain of never knowing why he did it.
Which brings me to the second reason I chose to refrain from exploring Hosaam’s inner world: his family would never have access to that. They will never know exactly what led him to act the way he did, and I wanted the reader to share in their puzzlement, knowing fully well that it is a frustrating exercise and that many readers will be left unsatisfied. In my mind, however, this frustration can and should bring the readers closer to the experience of Hosaam’s family, who, after all, are the protagonists of this novel.
Selin Gökcesu
We see Hosaam alive in two scenes. His second appearance, halfway through the book, is especially startling and eerie. What did you want the readers to know about him through these scenes? What was the reasoning behind the timing of Hosaam’s appearances?
Rajia Hassib
Structurally, the novel is told from the points of view of three characters—Hosaam’s parents and his brother—and I felt I needed to allow these three voices time to develop and get established before I ventured into whatever limited access I was going to grant them into Hosaam’s life. I wanted to make it clear that my interest lay in the lives of Khaled, Nagla, and Samir—not in Hosaam’s life. So the timing was partly dictated by the pace of the novel as it was designed to focus on the three narrators. As I was developing their characters, I also reasoned that the more readers became interested in my narrators, the more they will want to learn about Hosaam, which meant that holding off on satisfying their curiosity—however limited this satisfaction was going to be—should make for a more engaging and intense reading experience. Once it was time to present Hosaam in the limited scenes I included, I hoped that readers would see him as a troubled young man, one who is showing signs of mental illness just clear enough to appear as such in hindsight but subtle enough to excuse his family for not noticing them earlier.
Apart from all of that, I will admit to one playful motive on my part: I hoped that delaying Hosaam’s scenes would give readers time to make presumptions about his motives and then test those presumptions against the explanation I end up offering. I felt that some readers may jump to the conclusion that Hosaam’s violence was religiously motivated—as many people do with all crimes committed by Muslims—and that delaying the revelation that he was, perhaps, a victim of mental illness, not religious extremism, may induce those readers to question the reasons they rushed toward such a conclusion to start with.
Selin Gökcesu
Throughout the novel, all the central characters change drastically except for Nagla’s mother Ehsan, who came from Egypt to stay with the family after Hosaam’s death. Could you tell us a little more about how you shaped her as a character, whether she was based on a particular person or perhaps a prototypical grandmother? What about her rendered her so impervious to change, even following a traumatic event in the family?
Rajia Hassib
Ehsan is definitely a prototypical grandmother. She is not based on any one particular person, but is rather a collage of many women I knew growing up in Egypt. The older I got, the more I appreciated the resilience of many of those women, who never seemed to realize how vital their solid dependability was for their families, how cherished their unquestioning love. I wanted Ehsan to embody the simple, generous qualities of all these women who internalized the roles their society dictated on them—mother, wife, nurturer—and who performed these roles with willingness and without questioning. These same qualities—the acceptance of the status quo, the inability to question society’s conditioning—are the ones that make Ehsan so impervious to change.
She hangs on to her religious belief, her place in society, her role in her family, and she is both too kind and too scared to challenge any of that. Her religious belief in particular is crucial here, since it would induce her to accept any traumatic event as God’s will, and, by extension, would characterize any questioning of God’s will as blasphemous. Interestingly, such simple attitudes towards traumatic events make it easier for her to cope than it is for anyone else in her family. So she remains unchanged.
Selin Gökcesu
In the novel, we meet several Muslim women—Ehsan, Nagla, Nagla’s friend Ameena, and Fatima—who are all very different from each other. I felt that Ameena especially challenged the simplistic Western stereotype of a Muslim woman. Can you tell us a little about how these characters came about? I was especially curious about which aspects of them were intentional from the start and which emerged as you wrote.
Rajia Hassib
Of the four women, Ehsan and Fatima were the ones clearest in my mind when I started the novel. Ehsan was to be the typical Egyptian grandmother, generous and loving, and Fatima was to be fairly religious—a reflection of a quality I see in many young Muslim women and which I think is not the expected stereotype. Ameena was not as clear a character when I started; her character did develop as I went along, but it developed naturally because she, too, represents many women I have come across in my life, despite how different she is from the Western stereotype. Of the four women, though, Nagla was the most difficult for me to get to know. In fact, I went through a revision of the novel where I literally rewrote every single chapter told from Nagla’s point of view after the novel was supposedly finished, just because I was not satisfied with the way I originally portrayed her. I had seen her as a grieving mother and little else, but, as I wrote her chapters, she started to emerge as a character with deeper troubles, a woman with a capacity for self-examination that ran much deeper than I had expected or intended, and I wanted to rewrite her chapters to give her the room to develop and emerge as the character I knew she was. Having said that, I did not set about intentionally trying to make the four women different; I just tried to develop them in the way I felt was the most honest both to their personalities and to the novel’s progress.
Selin Gökcesu
As a family, each of the Al-Menshawys is somewhat alienated from their greater community and the American culture. Although she is far more foreign, Ehsan is able to relate with Americans at a very human level, as exemplified by the graveyard scene. Can you tell us more about why that is?
Rajia Hassib
Ehsan’s absolute foreignness is the very reason she can so easily connect with Americans. Because she has no desire to fit in the American culture, she feels no pressure to conform and no embarrassment because of her difference. The Al-Menshawys want to be American, and arguably identify more as Americans than as Egyptians, and they are therefore more sensitive to their perceived differences. Freed from the pressure of self-consciousness, Ehsan is able to see the similarities between her and Americans, rather than focus on the differences. This allows her to connect with others on the very basic level of their shared humanity. It also helps that she is a genuinely kind and loving person and, as such, is quite sensitive to the feelings of others and immediately motivated to try to make them feel better.
Selin Gökcesu
With each chapter, the point-of-view changes. We see the events through the eyes of Khaled, Nagla, and Samir, but never through Fatima’s perspective. Why not?
Rajia Hassib
Thematically, I felt any contribution Fatima’s point of view would have to offer can easily be included in Khaled’s chapters, but that the opposite was not true. For while Khaled can explore the struggles of being the surviving sibling of a murderer, he has the added burden of being male and, therefore, of having to deal with the potential fear his community may feel toward him—he is the one who can arguably end up repeating his brother’s crime. I therefore felt his character had more to offer simply because he had more at stake. In addition, Fatima’s religiousness seemed to offer her a degree of peace. Between that and her young age, I felt she was not as conflicted as her parents or her brother had to be. She would have still made a fascinating character to explore, but I did not feel her character’s arc was necessary to the plot.
Selin Gökcesu
I have always had my own fascination with Arabic, which has some similarity to Khaled’s fascination with it. Although I don’t speak it, it has always been associated with divinity and holiness. In the book, we are exposed to Arabic through Khaled’s musings. Why is Arabic the language of miracles from Khaled’s perspective? Why is it the language of miracles from your perspective?
Rajia Hassib
From Khaled’s perspective, Arabic is the language his grandmother speaks when she prays for his health and his prosperity. It is the language of the Qur’an, which she reads in the hope of infusing protection upon him and his family, the language of prayer and, by extension, of the magic that is inherent in prayer, the belief in a God who can perform miracles. From Khaled’s perspective, Arabic is the language of miracles because the Egyptian part of his hyphenated identity associates the expectation of miracles with his Islamic faith as presented by his grandmother. When he prays for a miracle, he prays in Arabic. Here I hasten to note that, as I wrote this novel, I came to the realization that all prayer is, in some way or another, a language of miracles, that faith itself is the same, and that this applies to all people of all beliefs. So the miracle gained a larger scope, for me, and, interestingly, moved me to delete from the novel a direct reference I had to Arabic as the language of miracles, simply because I didn’t want to make this kind of connection between humans and their Gods exclusive to Muslims.
My perspective is a tad more cynical. I still view Arabic as a language of miracles, but I’m forever irked by how some people of my faith and background often rely too heavily on God, praying and waiting for Him to fix their problems without actively and earnestly trying to fix them themselves. I see this quite often, both on personal and on larger, political levels. In a way, the reliance on God that all faiths request can sometimes be transformed into a passive dependence that makes complacency possible. So the language of miracles becomes the vehicle of expecting miracles to happen, and, in the process, just waiting for them and neglecting our responsibility to act. So my subtle criticism of my own culture lay in exploring how often we fall on this sort of complacency, expecting God’s help just because we deem ourselves worthy of it.
Selin Gökcesu
Many of the chapters open with an English saying or quote and its Arabic equivalent, but a few of them open only with an Arabic word. What do these equivalencies (or lack thereof) reveal about the two cultures?
Rajia Hassib
I hope that they can reveal the subtleties of our similarities and differences. The chapters that open with both English and Arabic quotes often show that we are, indeed, quite similar, although they as often reveal how different cultures can interpret the same thing differently. For example, the first quote compares the Biblical “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away” to the Arabic saying “God gave; God took; God will provide compensation.” While both sayings are quite similar in revealing how both cultures attribute life and death to God, how they both acknowledge His right to take back that which He has given, I find the Arabic addition of “God will provide compensation” fascinating. One might argue that this addition implies that suffering is acceptable only as far as one can be rewarded for it. Such subtle differences can be quite telling, when applied to the differences in cultural attitudes toward various events.
The chapters that start with only an Arabic word can be equally revealing, if only by highlighting what the omission says about American culture. The very existence of the word Meadeddah—Arabic for a professional mourner—and the lack of an English equivalent, tells a lot about how the differences in the grieving process. The notion of a woman hired specifically to wail aloud during funeral services would be perceived, in America, as comical, ridiculous, or scandalous, whereas in some of the poorer parts in Egypt it is quite proper to display grief in such obvious, loud ways. Such differences offer food for thought. I hoped that including these various sayings will give readers something to contemplate.
Selin Gökcesu
At a more practical level, I was intrigued by the process of collecting these sayings and quotes—did you get help? Was it an ongoing process? Did the chapters come first or the quotes?
Rajia Hassib
The chapters always came first. I did not start including the quotes until I was on the third draft of this novel, and I started thinking that Ehsan would certainly respond to these chapters through some of the Arabic sayings and quotes—which is a quite typical reaction of an elderly Egyptian woman. But I could not have her do so, simply because she was not in every chapter. Moreover, almost every time I thought of an Egyptian saying, an English equivalent would immediately present itself, and those similarities intrigued me so much that I felt I had to share them with the readers. I did not need help to collect the sayings—I grew up in Egypt, where I was exposed to all of these idioms. Even the English ones came to me right away. The research I did was to find out the origins of the sayings, to determine which ones were religious, for example, and which ones simply traditional. Interestingly, I found that I had assumed some of the Arabic sayings were religious, when they were not, and vice versa. So it turned out to be an educational process for me, as well.
Selin Gökcesu
To me, the overarching themes from the novel were grief and the human desire to control one’s own fate. Can you tell us more about the cultural differences surrounding these themes and how these differences affected the characters and the plot?
Rajia Hassib
These two themes are certainly at the heart of the novel, and the cultural differences between them were crucial in developing the characters. While grief is universal, the human desire to control one’s fate affects how we grieve, and the notion of control is vastly different in different cultures. For one thing, Islam is built on a surrender of one’s control to God. So at the core of the religion is the acknowledgement that one, in fact, has very little control on life’s events, which does not mean that one has no will, but simply implies that one can control only how one can react to events, not whether or not these events happen in the first place. In a way, this can make grieving easier—people tend to accept the event itself as God’s will and can then focus on healing. In contrast, Western culture assumes a much larger degree of control. Here the assumption is that one can not only control one’s fate, but that any undesirable event could have been prevented. This makes for a higher level of accountability, which is a good thing, but it also complicates grieving, because it layers it with regret. Of course I present these differences in an overly simplistic manner—these attitudes are much more nuanced, in reality—but I think the core of my assumptions about cultural differences here has at least a degree of truth.
This brings us back to the earlier question about Ehsan and her steadfastness. As the only purely Egyptian character, she has a simplistic view of fate that assumes very little control on her part. All is God’s will, and, as a good Muslim, she accepts that. Khaled, who falls at the other end of the spectrum, culturally—more American than Egyptian—has to struggle with his grief partly because he is forced to examine these very attitudes and to determine how much of his own control he is willing to relinquish, if any. On the same token, Samir, a Muslim by birth who does not seem to give religion any thought, seems so determined to retain control that he is unable to recognize the futility of some of his actions. And Nagla, who is a mother first and foremost, has to struggle with the Islamic prohibition of asking “What if?” and thereby inviting regret, because, of course, she cannot help but ask. Because this is a character-driven narrative, these themes and the cultural differences surrounding them have, in fact, dictated the plot as well as determined who the characters ended up being.
Selin Gökcesu is a Brooklyn-based writer with a Ph.D. in Psychology from Indiana University and an M.F.A. in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, the Tin House blog, Asymptote Journal’s Translation Tuesdays, and The Rumpus.
Books Are Not A Luxury 