An award-winning writer and politicised mother of two, Ahdaf Soueif’s epic novels have made her one of the few Egyptian writers to gain international prominence. Enigma’s Asmaa Abdallah talked to Soueif about her love for literature, her love for Egypt, her prize-winning love stories and of course…motherhood.
Best known for her epic novel The Map of Love – which was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999 – Egyptian-born writer Ahdaf Soueif is a power player in the world of letters. Educated in both Cairo and London, she is a rare literary phenomenon, able to move with ease between the formal prose of the Arabic language and the evocative English of literature. Through her fiction and activism, she works tirelessly to correct the distorted image of Arab culture and Islamic civilisation; just beneath the surface of her words, a battle is often fought against stereotypical images of the Arab world.
Under her literary belt is an array of poignant novels, short stories and a host of gripping and thought-provoking journalistic features. Aisha (1983), her debut novel, saw her nominated for The Guardian Fiction Prize while Sandpiper (1996) was awarded the prize for the Best Collection of Short Stories at the Cairo International Book Fair in 1996. In the books In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and The Map of Love (1999), she chronicles vivid and passionate love stories against a backdrop of in-depth historical and political Egyptian life, while also touching on the Palestinian issue. When the Intifada (2000) erupted, the Guardian newspaper sent her to spend one week in Palestine. The narrative style of her Under the Gun series enabled British readers to come into close and sometimes harrowing contact with the tragedy that Soueif bore witness to in Palestine.
In 2004, Soueif published Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground; a collection of 38 fearless and perceptive essays that embody the modern search for identity and community. Spanning 25 years’ worth of political and cultural thought about Palestine, the veil and being “of an Arab or a Muslim background…faced with your reflection in a western mirror in the post-9/11 world”, the collection was met with rave reviews and controversy in equal measure.
Soueif is also an active member of the non-profit Al Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation which is devoted to preserving ancient Arabic manuscripts; she chaired the judges of the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction and translated Mourid Barghouti’s award-winning memoir I Saw Ramallah. She has taught at Cairo University and the University of King Seoud, and has given many a lecture on a myriad of cultural and political topics all over the world.
And beyond the words and awards, Soueif’s personal life bears a not-so-coincidental resemblance to the striking cross-cultural love-stores so often portrayed in her fiction. Almost at the moment she finished her PhD in Linguistics at Leech and Lancaster University, Soueif met British poet and editor Ian Hamilton. Two years later they married and Soueif soon embarked upon what she admits was her most challenging project…motherhood.
Your formative years were spent moving back and forth between Egypt and England, how has that period of your life influenced your work, outlook and writing?
My reality remained an Egyptian one, even when I was in London. Our life in London (from age four to eight) remained a bit unreal because it didn’t have my aunts and grandparents there. And the school I went to in London was not my school in Zamalek, with all my friends and therefore also remained unreal. So unreal, in fact, that I stopped going after three months and stayed home. Perhaps the problem was that my life in Cairo was so much more pleasant than my life in London. But those years made me bilingual.
I do two types of writing: one is journalistic activism or advocacy, like the pieces collected in Mezzaterra, which address political and cultural issues directly. Those pieces are written with the aim of trying to make a difference. I don’t know how ultimately useful they are but at least they give a voice to people and to a section of opinion that would otherwise not have a voice in the Western media.
The other type of writing I do is fiction; my novels make the Egyptian/Arab consciousness and point of view immediately accessible to a reader of English; it’s as if suddenly the Western reader acquires a group of Egyptian/Arab friends and family who confide their deepest thoughts and reveal their most profound feelings. And these friends and family also understand this Western reader so that he/she does not feel alien or out of place among them. These are conditions for a rapprochement of sorts to take place. The Map of Love has been translated into 16 languages and sold half a million copies in English alone. Yet, oddly, I was more hopeful 15 years ago. When In the Eye of the Sun came out, I was getting letters from French and Australian readers who empathised with my characters and saw that, at heart, we are all human. Now you reach people who are willing to be reached. But cultural rifts are created and maintained by those who do not want to be reached. And I’m not sure there is anything you can do about those people.
Anyway, luckily, one doesn’t write novels to heal cultural rifts. That’s the task of the activism. The novels are storytelling and bringing characters to life and exploring questions and issues that are interesting and worthy of being explored. That’s all they aim to do or to be.
And today, do you feel more at home in London or Cairo?
I feel at home in my home in London. In Egypt I feel at home everywhere. I love the feel of Cairo – though it is becoming more depressed, troubled and downtrodden everyday. I feel energised and nourished by everyday dealings with people; I also have big emotional moments sometimes just looking at the Nile or walking through certain Zamalek and downtown streets. It’s my city, and I love it the way you love your parents: living under their aegis and within their aura, your heart in your mouth as some other bit of them falls into disrepair, marvelling sometimes at how amazing they are and how rich their stories have been, arguing with them sometimes and wishing they were a little different, needing not just to be near them but also to be in communication with them.
In London, I love the springtime and the dramatic display of town gardens and street trees. I love the handful of good friends that I have. I love my house and the route I’ve driven my sons to school every morning for the last 12 years. I also enjoy a certain type of London humour.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Ever since I started reading I’ve dreamed about being a writer. I also dreamed about being a rock star, a ballerina and an opera singer. I started writing on paper (as opposed to in my head) in ’79. I had always made up stories in my head. And my family tell me I had always ‘narrativised’ whatever incidents, events or characters I brought home from the world. And it happened with a certain ease because of that long, hidden, mental apprenticeship and the massive reading I’d been doing since I was six. I didn’t think I was embarking on a career; I was just writing a couple of stories. But I happened to be in London at the time and I was giving Arabic lessons to make some money and one of the people I was teaching was a writer. So I showed him a couple of my stories and he, in turn, showed them to a friend who was helping to start the London Review of Books. And the Review published one – and put me on the cover. So then a publisher contacted me and offered me a contract. It was all coincidence really. I hadn’t thought that far ahead; I was just writing stories that were pressing me to write them.
What were your artistic influences growing up?
My parents were part of a ‘young intelligentsia’ scene when I was young. Hamid Oweis and Nabih Osman were among their friends. My father listened to a lot of classical (western) music and old Abdel Wahhab songs; so the sound-track to my childhood was Abdel Wahhab and Beethoven. I was always taken (sometimes dragged) to the theatre and the opera. My mother was a student of Rashad Rushdi’s, so I had the privilege of listening to him reading his new plays as he finished writing them. Meanwhile my nanny supplied me with Egyptian folk stories and stories from her neighbourhood. And when I started reading I went through my mother’s library (she’s a professor of English Literature) and through masses of contemporary Egyptian fiction and poetry (she’s also a critic).
So how do you manage to juggle motherhood and your career?
I have two sons, Omar Robert and Ismail Richard, so you see they each have an Arabic name and an English name. They’re both handsome and clever and funny and since they were born I’ve hugely enjoyed spending time with them. We’ve always lived part of the year in Egypt and we have a home and lots of family here so they’re well rooted in both Cairo and London. Last year during a family game at the beach in the Sahel Shamali my older son had to describe his relationship with me and he said that I was kind of like his teacher and friend as well as his mother. I was in tears.
But in answer to your question, managing motherhood and juggling a career is difficult at the best of times and in my case it was compounded by living in the UK – away from support I could have had from my family, and also by the fact that for a very long time I had to have a ‘day job’ to ensure financial stability. This meant that any writing had to be done in the evenings. I was fortunate the boys were happy at their school and their father, who was a writer, worked from home and so was there for them when I couldn’t be. I drove them to school in the morning, went to work, picked them up at 4 pm, spent time with them, prepared food etc. then started writing at about 9 pm. I lived on four or five hours sleep during the times I was writing!
And did motherhood affect your writing?
Children appeared in my fiction after I had my own. I think the experience of parenthood does alter you. Your children become the most important thing in the world, they reorganise all your priorities just by existing, and that reorganisation – which things matter and which don’t – of course comes through in the writing. Parenthood, pregnancy and childbirth are all very rich experiences, whether they’re happy or painful or whatever, they are rich. And so they’re full of material that as a writer you can make use of, you want to make use of and explore.
Do your sons read your books?
I’m not sure that my fiction is exactly what a young male will be most keen to read. But my older son has read the novels and the younger one has read the short stories. They haven’t sat there and praised me but they quite want me to get the next one written.
You have an amazing knack for striking the perfect balance between politics and romance in your fiction. How do you achieve that?
The characters take me in that direction. The genre I work in is the ‘realistic’ novel. So my characters live in a specific time and a specific place in our real world. And in that time and place things happen – political things. And they affect the characters who in turn strive to affect them. Most of the people I know, and certainly the people I find interesting, are people who are aware of the way in which politics and public concerns affect their – and everybody else’s – life, and are people who try to act on that public life for the better. I find the notion that the individual can just get on with her/his own life without minding public life very odd. And I truly cannot conceive of a life that can be lived untouched by the political.
The epic love stories depicted in your works are inspiring. Do you believe that such love really exists?
Perhaps every love story starts out as epic. Sometimes they turn into epic disasters, sometimes they fizzle into mediocre modes of existence and a few, I guess, are fully realised throughout their life.
Your (2004) collection of articles entitled Mezzaterra was described by some as anti-Semitic. How did that affect you?
You are referring to the review in the LA Times and some readers’ letters to the Guardian. But there were excellent reviews in the Independent and the Baltimore Sun! And lots of very supportive letters. In any case it hasn’t affected my writing. The ‘anti-Semitic’ accusation is regularly levelled at anyone who is critical of Israel or of Israeli policies. Which means it is now a common accusation since many people are now openly critical of Israel. The first time it happened it felt horrible and some of the letters are so nasty you want to go and have a shower after you’ve read them. But you kind of get used to it. One technique that I’ve learned is – whenever possible – to use quotes from Jewish anti-Zionist (or, at least anti-Occupation) writers. Of course the Zionist lobby labels these as ‘self-hating Jews’. But the overpowering fact is that there is a truth that needs to be spoken and an injustice that needs to be redressed. And ultimately, your responsibility as a writer is to tell the truth, to write from the heart, to write as well as you can, and to not bore your readers. But there’s nothing wrong with being partisan. In fact, you probably have to be partisan.
It seems Ahdaf the activist has taken over for a while, leaving the author no time to satisfy her public’s expectations. When will you publish your next novel?!
That’s the question: whether ‘tis nobler to engage in the day-to-day fight or to seclude oneself for a while and get a lasting piece of work written? Since the second Intifada and then 9/11 and the so-called ‘War on Terror’, I have found it impossible to live in the West and not speak up about the issues affecting the world, and particularly our region, so severely. And so, since September 2000, I have been an activist, whether through writing, lecturing, or debating. But, of course, I’ve never stopped thinking fiction. Since last November I’ve cut down the activism to the absolute minimum and have been concentrating on writing a novel. I can’t tell when it
will be finished but I’m giving it all I’ve got!
Well I read that it will be set in both contemporary & ancient Egypt…
This is a really tricky topic because I’m in the heart of writing it now and it needs to almost be kept wrapped up and hidden, like dough with khameera (baking powder) in it, you know? But, yes, it’s in two times: one is today, very contemporary, and the other time is around 2000BC – or 2007BC if you like, for symmetry. It’s very Egyptian in its concerns – but also, of course, it hopes to be about the world. And the last thing I’ll say about it is that some characters from earlier novels come back in this one.