It’s a very beautiful question. I haven’t thought much about the objects I’ve had bad conversations with, if you like, but here is one that just came to mind. Many years back, I picked up a World War Two hospital stretcher and converted it into a stool. Within that stool I made a window, and within that window I installed a video camera running a video piece called Don’t Look Back – when video was still an exotic part of our existence. It was a stool that looked steady, but had originated from a stretcher, an object that in many ways isn’t about steadiness. But whenever I revisit it, I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I had left it to speak in its original voice; I wish I had worked with that voice, rather than converting it. I enforced myself too much on that piece. These days, I feel much more at ease at not interfering too much with an object’s voice and form.

Are there things I wish I’d picked up? There are many books, from many places, that I simply didn’t have the means to carry all at once. But there is one book that particularly comes to mind: I was in Damascus in 2007, and I saw a very beautiful book in Arabic that had been damaged, broken to pieces and pages torn out, its spine stitched and repaired by many hands and threads. I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t be able to return to Damascus again – that it would be my last visit. If I had picked it up and brought it back with me, it would have been such a forecasting metaphor, telling evidence, and an appropriate object to deal with the present and ongoing situation in Syria from a distance. It would have been a reading of an unforeseen future I wouldn’t have imagined.

That’s a very beautiful answer – thank you. When you do pick up a book – when you select it as something that you will transform and transmute into a piece of visual art – what it is that makes you pick up that book? Is it the materiality, its aesthetic as an artefact? Is it the content of the book, its literature? Is it both?

It depends on what I’m working with. In 2015, I made an installation called Another Day Lost. It was a huge miniature model of a refugee camp: small tents made from book pages and medical boxes, surrounded by burnt matches – one for each day since the start of the Syrian uprising. Every day at 12 noon, I went and burned one more match and added it to the piece – a sort of living sculpture, if you like. I needed tonnes of books, because the installation was in five locations simultaneously. So I went to an Oxfam bookshop and asked them ‘Do you have any books that you just cannot sell?’ They said they did, and they sold them to me for 1p each. Hundreds of them. They still had to be about particular subjects, materiality and categories, though – home, migration, war, language; subjects related to a refugee camp. I took those ideas and found books that related to them in different ways – ‘home’ might have been a book about making cakes, ‘migration’ a book about birds. But the magic – something I didn’t anticipate – came when I spread these former book pages and medical boxes out as miniature tents, and, when you came close to them, you found poetry in accidental marriages between images and words. A flower next to a tank. Those connections were so spontaneous. So there was intention in selecting those books, with diverse readings on home or lack of it but also the accidental magic created by the viewer.

The whole idea of using books came when I was in Cuba. In Havana, people were taking furniture to the beach, breaking it to pieces, and making boats to migrate to Miami – the furniture of the old home being used to make the journey to a dream new one. I was working on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and was drawn to use pieces of found chairs, where you could read the remnants and forms of the furniture. And when I came back from Cuba to Cambridge, I started seeing much more clearly what was available around me. In Cambridge, that was books. And my art pieces started involving and responding to them.

Serendipity seems to run through your work. The serendipity of your experiences, and how they inform your work; the serendipity of how meanings land together; the serendipity of political moments and material conditions shaping how your work is viewed.

Yes, it does. Years ago, I met a wonderful Scottish woman who had a beautiful Encyclopaedia Britannica from her father. She didn’t need it anymore, but didn’t want to throw it away, so she gave it to me. For three years, the volumes sat in my studio; I didn’t know what to do with them. Then, one day, I just sat down and started working with them. Against all this alphabetised knowledge, all this wonderful material, I created my pieces. The series is called One + eleven = two, because between two drawings you see in one volume are eleven that you don’t. That was when I started really using books in my work – I mean, working with their content, but not being restricted by it. Sometimes, I saw a word. Sometimes, an image. Sometimes, maps, or nothing. Serendipity. I spent seven months going through and responding to the forest of words, and occasionally to the illustrations and maps.

Words are forms of practice as well as material for your work. In Urgent Archive, there are names of women written – or maybe drawn – in Arabic on the glass window at the front of Kettle’s Yard. You wrote those names with your non-dominant hand an in reverse – or maybe you drew them. Could you talk a little about names and naming in your work, and about your non-dominant hand?

The moment you asked that question, it took me to a place. A very appropriate place. When I was a little boy, I couldn’t form the first letter of my name. As the letter ‘I’ in English sounds like an ‘eye’, in Arabic ع  also sounds like an ‘eye’. Another serendipity. I came crying to my mother, so disappointed with myself, and she asked me what was wrong. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I cannot write this stupid letter.’ She asked me to show it to her. She was illiterate, but she looked at the letter and held my hand in hers and copied it – once, twice, three times – and then let it go, and I carried on copying it until I could form my ‘eye’. She said to me: ‘Don’t look at it as a letter. Look at it as a drawing.’ And that stuck with me, that very beautiful and generous idea that a letter is a drawing, that a drawing can form a language, that language is made of fragments of drawings. That’s something I’ve held onto when making found poetry – that words are sculptures.

Much later, I started teaching her the alphabet. She wanted to be able to write to my children, my two boys. In one note to them, she drew the alphabet and the numbers. That was a very powerful experience for me – how she was trying to teach them as she was learning. I made some pieces in response into her precious handwriting, including a piece made upside down and with my wrong hand. I was trying to be closer to her by imitating her. It was called Afterimage. And I found that, while my right hand – the adult – was overtrained, my left – the child – was still fresh. In fact, whenever I’m stuck, I go to my left hand. My non-dominant hand is a treasure.

In 2000, when I was asked by a photographer which object I would most like to take into the new millennium, I took weeks to decide. Then, when I invited him to my studio and had nothing in front of me, and he asked what I had chosen, I held my left hand in my right. That was my object that I didn’t want to lose.

When I made that window in Kettle’s Yard, I used it: if I had used my right hand, it would have been pure recording; with my left hand, I could breathe slowly, read the names slowly, and think about the enormity of the loss. The window piece was an extension of a piece exhibited inside the galley called Killed, Detained and Missing, a list of women written on an old pianola role, next to a speaker where I recited these names.

You talk about your right hand being overtrained, and it turns me to a question I want to ask about your training. Or, specifically, about training and place. You’ve talked elsewhere about your study in different practices, and about how those practices aren’t labels but a network of practices coalescing. But what I’m interested in is the relationship between training and geography – about the relationship between form, and the spaces in which those forms entered your practice. Syria, Russia, Cuba, the UK; painting, drawing, writing, theatre design (not in that order). How does space bear on practice?

I come from the volcanic mountains in the south of Syria. So even my journey to Damascus was about a different geology, different accents. And then, in Damascus, I was in a tiny room (nicknamed the Half) in a big city – an old Damascene house, where all my materials as a painter had to fit into that small, low-ceilinged room, but everything around me in Old Damascus was material for painting. In fact, as well as regretting not picking up that book, I regret that in those days I did not look more, see more, excavate that present. I had a very intense four years there, where I started sculpting and re-sculpting my ways of seeing. The mud of Old Damascus became my mud. But I needed to breathe after the intensity of the early 80s, and I left for Baku, and then Saint Petersburg.

That’s where I dived into theatre as a solo performer – and I hadn’t expected, at all, that this was a language I would dive into much later in my life. I found I could convey a feeling without saying a word, and that was very special to me. It shifted my practice – there was more about the relationship between body and space, body and light. Gorbachev was doing his perestroika, and I was doing mine (to myself). Damascus was fine art, Arabic, heat, south; Saint Petersburg was architecture, Russian, freezing cold, north.

And then I came to Cambridge, where everything is so miniature-like. After Saint Petersburg, Cambridge looked like a theatre set, but it was also where I had studio space for the first time. Theatre design was an obvious thing to study in London. But I knew I was not an architect, nor a theatre designer. Having my studio next to the ADC Theatre, and encountering all the old props discarded behind it and using them in my work, is how that space most shifted my practice.

I take my studio for a walk with me wherever I am. I take my eyes with me too. And I pick up objects from a place, not reading at the time what these objects might become, just letting it sit, letting them tease me a bit and teasing them back, then the action of seeing but not seeing the final product, and then finding that the piece is shaped by all these conversations, places and forms. That’s a bit dangerous for an artist known for a particular style, a particular language that people expect of us. But I’ve found that, though I love painting and I am a painter, I don’t mind venturing into unfamiliar mediums, novel places. This risk enriches me, and enriches my articulation of a feeling.

So maybe it’s about the serendipity of how place and time and form encounter each other, but the constancy of your eye amid all those shifting encounters.

I’d like to take this idea of movement and return to the idea of migration you mentioned earlier. Migration has figured in your work for decades. And the figure of the boat has been an ongoing part of this. You’ve spoken elsewhere about how the boat has been, for you, a way to articulate the violence of conflict without centring images of conflict. And I’d like to explore the ethics and aesthetics of the boat a little.

I was at Glastonbury this year, and Banksy’s inflatable boat passed a few feet in front of me in a crowd. By the time I’d left the crowd and got signal on my phone, critics and politicians and voices on social media had all already weighed in with loud (often awful) opinions about it. Because of our polluted political and cultural discourse, the image of the boat has become so contested and fraught – often as a way of avoiding talking about the boat itself. Easier to address an artist’s work about refugee deaths than address refugee deaths themselves, perhaps. As an artist with many famous works involving boats, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for asking this. You see, this is the problem with creation. There are three stages to any creation: pre-creation, the process of creation, and the process of seeing it in hindsight. And they don’t necessarily reveal the same picture. And relationships with the actual and the metaphorical shift, too. Boats have meant different things in my pieces – and different things, of course, to the audiences viewing them.

I made a model of the Bibby Stockholm barge out of sardine tins, called Keep Them at Bay. I was playing with language, with material, with scale to respond to this inhuman solution. Another piece: on the day the Rwanda Bill was agreed, I made a performance called Stop the Bombs, Not the Boats: I took children’s milk bottles, filled them with red ink, and threw them onto a flattened tent so that it was bleeding, and walked with the stained tent to the top of Castle Hill. That piece is about the boat – the metaphor of the boat – even if it doesn’t use the image of the boat. And then there is the 101^st piece for the British Museum’s 100 objects series, Dark Water, Burning World, the little boats made from bicycle mudguards with their burnt matchstick people. And Precarious Passage, one of these boats sailing through a hole burnt in the book A History of the World in 100 Objects. Actually, I happen to have it with me here now [holds up book in left hand, boat in right hand, and places the boat through the hole in the book]. This is both image and metaphor. You see, migration is not a current issue. It is the history of humanity, and the history of life – cells migrate, trees migrate, ideas migrate. For me, this boat is not a scale model. It is a scale metaphor. We are all emigrants from our first home, the womb.

And here’s another piece – Siege Two, which is made from a typewriter, and is dedicated to Marie Colvin, who lost her life in Homs [holds up piece]. If you look [turns piece in the air], it has another shape in the form of a boat. I showed this at the Venice Biennale, in this form – as a sailing, destructed, very fragile boat. I remember being confronted by many questions when I went to the Biennale and saw a real refugee boat that had been rescued. Barca Nostra (‘Our Boat’) by Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. That was not an easy thing. It was so emotional, so suffocating. There isn’t a place for imagination anymore, when reality is surrounding you like this. It took me some time to digest it. I’m having difficulty even thinking about it now. So I suppose I have found that there is a difference between a piece that takes you to something but leaves you to continue making your own journey, and a piece that is in your face, does not let you escape from it, that goes at an aggressive speed, but in our times, I think there is a room and a need for both approaches.

The immediacy of the confrontation – a collapse of image and metaphor into nothing other than that immediacy.

Yes. I think of the carpenter from Lampedusa, Francesco Tuccio, who after 11 October 2013, when 311 people died in the boat that sank there, made crosses for the Eritrean and Somali survivors using wood from the wreck. And then made a sculpture, a large cross, where you can still see the paint on the wood.  The Cross was donated by him to the collection of the British Museum. His was a boat made into a cross; mine was a bicycle mudguard made into a boat. I know I am touching but not answering your question fully. And that’s because this is still an ongoing question for me.

Thank you. It’s such a generous answer. And of course it is ongoing – past, yes, and present, yes, but also ongoing and future. I’d like to end by asking you a question to do with tense and time. It’s something right there in the title of Urgent Archive. There’s a story behind that title (and maybe you can talk about that), but I want to ask specifically about the contradiction in it – of archiving, and its sense of slowness and past and permanence, and of urgency. Is it a viable task to archive the present? To have an ongoing archival practice? Or must this always be a retroactive, retrospective endeavour? I don’t want to pre-empt your answer, but I realise we’ve spoken about how a found object isn’t just a thing of a moment; that it is a thing of the past discovered in the present for use in a future, those timelines always butting up against each other. So, a horrible question: is, as artists, there a moral incumbency of archiving as we go, of archiving the emergency and urgency of the present, or can we leave that, for posterity, to the future, as an act for the future?

Ah – a very lovely question. You know, I only encountered the word ‘oxymoron’ very recently. I’m a work-in-progress too – I don’t shy away from that. I think of the phrase ‘leave to remain’, as I say that.

As you reference, the title of Urgent Archive is about Mansour al-Omari, a human rights journalist who recorded the names of his fellow prisoners using ragged strips of cloth and blood as an ink. But the interest in the word ‘archive’ also comes from my interest in seeds. Because seeds are an archive of themselves – archiving their past, their present, their future. In this tiny universe are three tenses all at once. But now let me go back: the first piece I did in relationship to Syria is called Excavating the Present, and it’s all to do with X-ray images, and how mothers in Syria have to collect the body parts of their children in order to mourn them. You know, in many languages there’s no distinction between past and present. And I wonder if the word ‘archive’ is a Western construction of how to deal with the past. It’s such an elusive word. It sounds out that word ‘ark’ at its start – it has a kind of motion in it, of life in it. And life is not fixed: it has multiple tenses in it. My intention is not the past; it is the present, and how one can construct a past or a future from it.

I’ll give you another example. For one of my pieces, I took Aleppo Citadel, and the destruction of Aleppo before the earthquake, and made it out of Aleppo soap. This is a form that transmits itself throughout time: it shrinks, it is discoloured. It’s an interesting archive.

I’ll tell you one more story, and then I will finish. I planted some wheat outside Kettle’s Yard a while ago. I had planned to go and harvest it and make bread though this piece, and tell the story of the bombing of Aleppo Seed Bank and how, ICARDA having lost control of it in 2016, it managed to retrieve the first accession from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to initiate regeneration and reconstitute the full profile of the collection in Syria. But Syrian wheat and the English weather didn’t work out. It died. And I didn’t want the piece to be about death. So I decided to construct an artist book/ herbarium out of it. I was all prepared and ready to make a performance piece out of this yesterday. But an hour before my arrival, the gardeners unknowingly cleared everything away. I was a little devastated, but I realised there where tiny fragments of the wheat, tiny little remains, from which I wanted to create an archive. These tiny fragments told a story of the whole. I know I’m scratching a tiny mark on the surface of this colossal loss, and that’s what I must do as an artist.

Thank you for these beautiful questions.

Thank you for these beautiful answers, and this beautiful one to end. I’ll tell you what I thought as I sat with the phrase ‘urgent archive’: only when you don’t see life as urgent do you think of archiving as a future act about the past. When you know and see and live emergency, archiving becomes such an obvious emergency act. Timelines capitulate. It isn’t about recording what has gone, isn’t about thinking or rethinking for whom this archive is created: it is simply about a moment, and a moment of preservation. And I think there is something very beautiful about seeing the ways in which artistic practice can be an act of preserving in the present, within which time past, present and future can fall where it may. Sorry – I shouldn’t steal the last word.

OK, I’ll steal it back. You remember your first question about regret? And my answer about that book in Damascus that was so torn to pieces? I see this now: that book was archiving the destruction before it happened. It was sending me a message that I didn’t hear. It was hidden, and was only passing by the market in Old Damascus. This fleeting encounter taught me that one must be present, and almost alert, to sense the hidden. This is why I am trying to make an herbarium out of the fragments of wheat. You see, look at this [holds up a single fragment of a stalk of wheat]. You would just walk past this without noticing it. But though it might sound pretentious, I am going to make a meal from this. A meal for the mind’s eye.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post The Mud of Old Damascus Became My Mud: A Conversation with Issam Kourbaj appeared first on English PEN.

I think that if I could go back to those days, I would do the same thing all over again. I never regret going back to Syria – being there at the frontline, and in the middle of the war – nor do I regret leaving. I always tried to stay alive, but with my personal condition I had to do what needed to be done, despite the fear. By that token, in returning and sharing in death and people’s pain, through my discussions with them and with the fighters, I gained a greater understanding of the Syrian issue. Yes, fear was my hero. I always say that I don’t like the word ‘brave’; I see it as an invention of war. I prefer to say, ‘People’s fear within the dilemma of human survival, and in our existential questions about death and life’.

Yes, I saw Syria’s future the moment I went back in 2012. I saw that we were embarking upon the country’s division  via an international struggle to loot its wealth, gas being one of the most important parts of this. What frightens me most ten years on is the utter indifference to what has happened, as the international community keeps repeating what it terms “political realism” around the rehabilitation of Bashar Al-Assad, ignoring the war crimes that have been committed in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of victims have been forgotten. Life goes on as if nothing happened. What tortures me most, genuinely, is indifference towards the pain and suffering of others.

Something particularly compelling about Planet of Clay, your most recent novel, is the voice of the central character, Rima; that the narrative – one both of witness, and of lyrical fantasy – is delivered through the voice of a young girl, and indeed through the voice of a non-verbal individual. Could you talk to me a little about Rima? About why the voice of the novel is a girl’s, a child’s, a silent one?

Rima isn’t just a girl in the context of the novel. She talks about her childhood, but also about her adolescence, about growing up. In the novel she is a young woman, and a child, and the woman she will become in the future. The idea of her being silent and tied up emanates from the nature of the society in which she lives. It is a symbol of the story of most women in the Arab world. She is silent as an act of protest against the world, which doesn’t listen to her, doesn’t want to hear her or even to see her. She doesn’t want to stop walking because she wants her freedom. Rima is a fantastical, complicated, and confusing character, who is more than just a story about a girl in the war.

This is also one of the problems we see throughout the West: How does the other world see us? It doesn’t see the nature of composition and the novelistic labour that went into constructing the text. Instead, it sees politics, and it wants to speak about politics. This is how the West sees us: as political topics, even in our literature. Rima’s story is the story of a young girl in the war, but the most important thing, to me, was how I told the story artistically. I invented a brain game that was like unpicking a puzzle in Rima’s story, a story that relates to violence without touching upon blood; a story that says that the imagination is more powerful than reality and war, and conquers them both.

In Arabic, the novel is called Al-Masha’a. ‘Al-Masha’un’, or ‘The Walkers’, were Aristotle’s followers. Rima doesn’t stop walking because she is also claiming freedom of thought. Usually, when there is a discussion about women’s issues in the Arab world, we speak about their sexual freedom, or legal equality with men. Rima wants to liberate her mind, and to go beyond it, so she objects, and her method of objecting to societal violence and the violence of war is to stop talking and to walk without stopping. This is the opposite to what has been said about Rima in the media – she is not ill, nor does he have a disability.

The form/genre of Planet of Clay felt, to me, like it had come from the same breath as the characters and plot and language – that these things were all born in the same moment, tightly braided together. I sensed that this had something to do with the radical force of imagination, and that it had something to say of both the ways in which storytelling and literature and the imagination are besieged by conflict, but also about the sustaining force of stories, literature and the imagination in contexts of conflict. Would you agree with that? Can the “literary” do something to bespeak these contexts in a way that the “documentary” can’t?

Literature has a magical power. This power rests in reinterpreting the world from a different aesthetic viewpoint and originating a more sensitive relationship with the outside world. In my project of documenting the Syrian war through books like A Woman in the Crossfire and The Crossing, or even Nineteen Women, I tried to convey the reality of the experience of war and revolution. It was clear to me that these are archival works; they are books that speak about history and victims, and they demand justice and truth.

But my relationship with my novels is a different matter. When I write a novel, I am thinking of literature specifically: I consider the language, the construction of the phrase, the artistic and novelistic composition, producing a different linguistic narrative. My focus is the power of the imagination, and the words’ power in giving the text its uniqueness. This is my primary concern, and the themes, how to convey fact, all the other things, come afterwards. I think that the novel can communicate and translate human feelings beyond the capability of any other form, because the fundamental root of writing a novel is absolute freedom, the unlimited individuality of the writer, without condition or constraint, because the writer’s space is vast enough to create their own planet with their text.

There’s a moment full of horrific complexity in Planet of Clay: the moment in which, after the chemical attack, women die because their hijabs and clothes have been permeated by the chemicals, but the men will not remove them because it is haram. It feels like so many things are being said here – intersecting things, complex things, nuanced things. Would you be able to talk about that a little?

This is one of the scenes that I worked on the most. Deleting and rewriting it was exhausting. It is a scene based on confirmed evidence, told to me by a number of women who witnessed and survived the massacre in August 2013, one of whom was a lawyer and my friend, Razan Zeitouna. It gives an idea of the position of women in the war, and opens a wider window onto the multifaceted and complex violence that women face, and which Rima, in some way, was the fantastical character capable of narrating. She would not be able to narrate it if her strangeness was less; her strangeness balances out the strangeness and complexity of the violence she is narrating. When I read what was written about Rima – that it is the story of a sick little girl telling a story about the war – I though it was the most fatuous thing I had heard.

The truth is that women die in this scene because the men decide not to remove their clothes – it is considered haram, and it goes against their religion and their shari’a (so they say). It was one of the most difficult scenes. Of course, the sensitivity of the scene here is that if the women’s clothes had been removed, the sarin gas would not have penetrated their bodies so quickly, and they might have lived. But the women are left to die. Why? So that their female bodies will not be made naked! Appalling! You can imagine the situation: the Assad regime’s planes were dropping chemical weapons, and at the same time women were living under these horrific conditions. I sometimes thought of omitting this scene because it was so hideous, but I found it represents our situation accurately. We live between the fangs of these monsters, made up from a dictatorship, religious extremism, a patriarchal society…

How closely did you collaborate with Leri Price, the English-language translator of Planet of Clay, as she was translating?

For me, Leri isn’t just a translator. Leri is my writing partner in English. We discussed phrases, concepts and technical terms, even some words that were written in ‘amiya (spoken Syrian Arabic). There was a great cooperation between me and her, but she doesn’t need me much. Her relationship to Arabic literature is outstanding. I trust her, and after discussing I leave her with the freedom to make her own choices. This was my first experience with her, and we are collaborating on my new novel. I hope that she will remain my translator because we work well together, and I have complete trust and confidence in her. [Translator’s note: I feel the same about working with Samar!]

This is the first novel you have written since the revolution, but you have been a novelist for much longer than that. How was that return – was it a kind of ‘return’? Has fiction been burning bright inside you all this time?

Yes, I stopped writing novels after 2010, since the beginning of the revolutions in the Arab world. My last novel, Laha al-Miraya [translated by Samar’s agent Yasmina Jraissati as In Her Mirrors, not yet available in English] was published at the end of 2010. At the beginning of the revolution in Spring 2011, I stopped. I was entirely taken up by what was happening in Syria, I was writing articles and books that documented the revolution and the war, and I was occupied with establishing a civil society foundation that empowers women in refugee camps and in regions hit by war. Its name is Women Now for Development, and it has taken up much of my time, but all the while I was in pain. Being kept away from writing novels was like a second exile; like my being was living in exile from my soul, as if I wasn’t me. Those violent years didn’t give me time even to look at myself and reflect on what had happened. Writing novels had been a continual fundamental of my life; even though I have several identities (as an activist, a journalist), when I look deep inside my soul I know that my fundamental identity was and still is a novelist. So when I wrote this novel it was like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. Yes, through writing the novel I returned to myself, and I think I am better as a result.

I started by asking about fear. I’d like to end by asking: what gives you comfort? What gives you hope?

Fear, for me, is the term I am trying to understand now – in the dilemma of human existence, and because I think that I am still living in fear. I witnessed a revolution and horrifying war. I have come right up to the cruelty and savagery of the human being. I know it in all its states, and I am aware that I have lost a lot of hope. That experience, what has happened in Syria, and the disasters currently going on around the world, have all confirmed to me that I live in a time that I call the epoch of human shame. Yes, I think that the indifference to the pain of others that I have seen and experienced in the reactions of the international community to what is going on in Syria, while I work and write on the Syrian issue, has made me have a different relationship with life.

I don’t think of hope very much, and I am not optimistic about what is happening in this new world, which has witnessed the birth of a humanity with unclear features. My relationship with hope is simple: it is to work against the indifference of others to the pain of victims. For myself specifically, I have hope that through my words and my writing, novels and otherwise, I can give meaning to words, such as saying that we have been fighting for justice, and democracy, and freedom for the Syrian people. I only beg this: that I don’t let the indifferent world change me. That is hope, for me – reclaiming the meanings and power of words, and the importance of literature. And I judge this to be a kind of implicit hope.

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novels include Cinnamon (2012) and Planet of Clay (2021). Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (2012) and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015). Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards—notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award, the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards.

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Price’s translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and winner of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was shortlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award. Price’s other recent translations include Sarab by award-winning writer Raja Alem.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post The Epoch of Human Shame: An Interview with Samar Yazbek appeared first on English PEN.

We will go back to a year before this bag was filled with dreams, and I will talk to the girl who is sitting by the window, writing ‘The Story of Al-Yarmouk’ after sailing her cloak in The Book of Gaza. Troubled serenity is turning to memory as she tries to write the story of that camp.

Melodies in her ears, she yearns for a soft childhood crossing the streets between the shops; the bean and chickpea shop; the photos of Arab artists hanging on its walls. Ideas are packed within her, between places, between times, between the possible and the impossible.

Did she leave or not? Come back or not? Does she still cross the memory? Or has she crossed it into a reality that wasn’t hoped for?

Explosions shake the region, vibrating imaginations, thoughts and emotions. The melodies disappear, and though the thunder of planes and incendiary balloons remains, she doesn’t fear those planes or their missiles.

An email catches her: Why don’t you write under the bombardment? She starts to write – politics at times, literature at others. The first time with English PEN: she publishes her diaries of the conflict on their site – ‘Life in War’, she calls it – and a short story, ‘Umm Ahmed: Newsflash’. She wrote the story in record time while the planes were destroyed; that steadfast mother in her kitchen had become a window of news, having watched it all for weeks from her tiny screen.

A great flame drowns the house with a haze of glass and wood. And the pressure in her ears – she didn’t hear the explosion, but it hit the air in her body, hit everything.

Language can no longer bear this in literature. Literature preceded language’s grammar, came back and struck its meaning. Metaphor withers, punctuation marks cry, chopping up sentences. The spaces disappear.

She doesn’t complete the Al-Yarmouk story. She leaves at dawn every day to regain the blue space between the sky and the sea. The waves are angry while the air hits her face. Her body has swelled to the extent that she collides with all the building of the city. Please, tell me: Who am I? What happened?

Months pass, then she writes ‘Pen and Notebook’ while watching the workers reconstruct a building. It had been levelled to the ground, the stones surrounding her house in every direction. The story started with the cart of the children who collected the stones.

Then comes ‘Our Milk’ – the milk that sprinkled the walls of The King David Hotel in Jerusalem in the forties, mixing with blood when the guitar strings are played. Then the Israeli soldier buying flowers from a Palestinian worker in ‘White Lilies’. ‘Black Grapes’ – a mother crosses bypasses to cross the separation wall and harvest her grapes in the West Bank. ‘Mirror’, where refugees from Palestine and Golan Heights go to places where refugees go. Intransigence and openness in ‘A Summerland Moon’. ‘The Long Braid’ – a girl curls up all the strings of melodies as she searches for a lost homeland. ‘Breastfeeding’ – religion and society punish the milk. The magic eye above the door, the fire from the stove, the anxious mother and daughters, and the uncle’s boots painting scenes: ‘June 14^th’.

She doesn’t stop writing – goes back and completes the Al-Yarmouk story, then writes longer pieces. She no longer spends time with her family. For years, she rarely sees her siblings. She chooses a space and time parallel to the presence of everyone around her, begins to disassemble and synthesise.

A lengthy discussion with Charis Bryden about translating metaphor – about how the English language captures the eloquence of the imagination of the Arabic language. Every scene is a painting, which a musical melody stands behind, which moves its characters, when their creator sits afar from them and sees what they will tell them.

The wheels of the car drive her, carrying her alongside her father to the British Consulate, where she receives the first visa printed in her passport, dated 2015, in order to attend Durham Book Festival. Her eyes fill with doubt while her heart burns for the lost ease of opening or closing a door. She tries to exit through the Beit Hanoun Erez crossing, then the Egyptian Rafah crossing, but she doesn’t succeed.

With a smile refusing to reveal her sadness on her lips, the bag is unloaded.

It was emptied after ‘The Sea Cloak’, where that cloak swells the girl’s senses, exhausted from rowing, while the tufts of her hair confuse her vision. It was emptied after ‘Umm Ahmad: Newsflash’ and ‘Life in War’, where women make Qatayef with rose water, pistachios, and a little butter.

It is 2018. She has followed all the necessary procedures to get a visa for the UK, but she has been rejected once, twice, three times – she can’t count anymore. She no longer wants to despair at the rejection.

It is the media – the solidarity of those voices that support her cause – that prompt her visa to be granted. There’s only one day left before she has to be at the Festival. Two weeks ago, she had informed the crossing of her intention to travel, and had submitted the papers and her invitation. It’s three o’clock, and she finally has the visa in her possession. Then it’s half past three, and her phone rings: Your name, now, at the crossing. The bag isn’t ready.

Her brother’s leg is broken (he had been trying to repair a broken motor causing power cuts at a health facility) and he is at home. Her sister is taking a day off – for the first time in many years. They come to pack the bag with her while she empties her closet. She doesn’t know what the weather is like there. She fears for her ability to return to Gaza.

She calls a taxi and goes to the crossing. She’s the last passenger. She answers the questions of the Hamas security, then the National Authority, then sleeps a night in the Rafah hall. She will be granted a pass to cross at dawn. She’s the last traveller in the hall.

She crosses a desert road, the sun devouring her eyes. How many times has this bag been emptied of its belongings? At every checkpoint along the road.

Getting the bus won’t guarantee that she catches the plane. That Al-Araishi who makes coffee and tea looks at her and asks, ‘Why are you still standing? Everyone is sleeping. You must be thirsty – you didn’t drink anything’. ‘I don’t want to sleep’, she replies. ‘I’m waiting for approval to pass’. He tells her he will drive her for 250 dollars; she is worried about the risk, but nevertheless offers him 150. They agree, and that is the way.

A day on a very difficult road, and she reaches a hotel close to the airport. She knows nothing about Egypt and its hotels. She books a room, and everyone looks at her dirty clothes and the chaos of her hair. There were two children in the car, eating and pouring milk and chocolate on her. She smells foul.

What a beautiful bath. Allergy medicine relieves the redness in her eyes caused by the salt of the air in the Sinai desert. Another car for the airport.

For the first time, she sees the electronic boards that guide passengers at the airport. No one is waiting for her at Heathrow; she takes another plane up to Edinburgh.

There, the coldness of the air sweeps through her, shrinking every part of her body, the frost after the desert flame bringing her back to her birthplace.

In the taxi, she looks at each and every tree on the sides of the roads. How she longs for nature that isn’t eaten by borders.

She arrives at the hotel and steals some of its warmth. The Festival celebrates her arrival, a crowded lounge listening to what she says. She is on her own, a human regardless of the place. She isn’t begging for support and solidarity; she has just wanted to say: We still live and endure, through our dignity.

The crossing is closed. She is forced to postpone things for ten days. She was meant to return to Gaza two days after arriving for the Festival – the same time it took her to get to Edinburgh. She catches a train for the first time on her own. She doesn’t know how to book it – doesn’t have an electronic payment card, only carries dollars. She recalls entering a store to buy something and being told ‘We only take pounds, our country’s currency’. ‘What pride’, she thinks to herself. ‘This is independence. How I long for a currency for our country’.

She arrives at the home of a Palestinian writer, where his Hungarian wife receives her with deep passion and devotion to Palestine. She is tired – she gave a lot of media interviews in Edinburgh.

She walks the streets of London. How precious it is to walk freely.

She returns to Gaza. At El-Arish again, she spends the night on the sidewalk; people sleep in the open air, exchanges of fire sound, and the barking of stray dogs fill the night in the Sinai desert. But she insists on standing. A soldier fires bullets next to her to force her to sleep or sit down. On the contrary, the sound of this bullet awakens her reassurance, and she keeps standing. The children are lying under the feet of the elderly on pieces of worn cloth; a wildfire of glass surrounds them; others try to relieve themselves behind car doors, but the moonlight reveals the secrets of darkness, no matter how much its walls turn around their breath.

The surprise of 2019: Edinburgh International Book Festival wants to host the launch of The Sea Cloak and Other Stories.

She gets a visa, but her name at the crossing is crossed out (more than once). She pays to be able to travel.

Ali Smith tells her: ‘I know that many voices such as yours exist in the Middle East, and that we haven’t yet heard most of them’. She smiles and points with her fingers: ‘“Black Grape”, “White Lily”; small details, big events. While I was on the train, I tried hard to catch my breath reading your stories’.

In turn, she asks her, ‘What should I add to my writing?’

‘Nothing, just keep writing’.

Val McDermid embraces her firmly – ‘You’re Brave’.

At successive events, there are Kurdish refugees from Syria.

I am reminded of my name – ‘Newroz’ – and what it means for the Kurds. I read my stories to them, and my heart weeps bitterly for the Arab world, and then I silence my grief.

I book a train to London, without saying to the hotel receptionist – who helped me carry my bag last time – ‘How do you book a train?’. My bag is lighter this time; I came more aware of the weather.

There are many who are still like that girl, their bags overloaded with everything you can’t imagine.

Finally, I forward a question that I didn’t answer, asked by a senior New York Times staffer in London, when I met him in Edinburgh: ‘Why all this media attention? Is it because of the visa delay, or are they interested in your stories? I am still drawing this answer.

Nayrouz Qarmout is a journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner. Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she was ‘returned’ to the Gaza Strip at the age of 11 as part of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accord, where she now lives. She has worked in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy, law, and the media. She has won a number of prizes including the Creative Women’s Award for her debut collection The Sea Cloak, which was the bestseller at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019.

This PEN Transmissions commission is supported by the British Council.

About the British Council

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. We work with over 100 countries in the fields of arts and culture, English language, education and civil society. Last year we reached over 80 million people directly and 791 million people overall including online, broadcasts and publications. We make a positive contribution to the countries we work with – changing lives by creating opportunities, building connections and engendering trust. Founded in 1934 we are a UK charity governed by Royal Charter and a UK public body. We receive a 15 per cent core funding grant from the UK government. britishcouncil.org

The post For the Stories, or for the Visa Delays? appeared first on English PEN.

Sophia is a novel about freedom and its oppression under a dictatorship. It’s less about abstract debate than about the fate of people: freedom shapes people and empowers them to perform higher tasks; their oppression deforms them and reduces their goals to bare survival. But freedom is indivisible. One cannot be politically free if one is religiously or nationally unfree. One can pretend or imagine that one is free in an unfree society because of one’s wealth, but one is, ultimately, a slave of the oppressors. One can lose all rights and wealth, and find oneself, the next day, in prison.

These interactions are realised through formal, generic ones. Sophia is, at bottom, thrilling, novelistic storytelling: it’s driven by plot, epic forms, and it’s readily readable and consumable. But it’s also deeply ideological (or, perhaps, ideocritical). You write about heavy things via lightness, and I want to ask how the parts of your self – the political thinker and the storyteller – combine in the act of writing?

With this question, you touch upon a very important decision I have made for my writing. Many literary critics will wake up only in the next century, and understand that it is possible to tell complicated stories with lightness and to avoid boredom and moral preaching, even when the content or subject matter is heavy. My hope is completely fulfilled knowing that my readers love my books. Of course, as a political person, I fight for dignity, freedom, democracy and the preservation of nature, and against racism. And I believe that the more committed you are, the more exciting your writing will be. 

What good will it do me if my readers throw down the book after three pages? But your question goes even deeper. I have always to put my humanitarian views aside in the development of the characters to ensure they remain credible and believable. This the case in Sophia: Salman is a complicated person, and at times appears as a swindler engaged in fraud. And that’s how he should appear. You can’t write a good novel with all the characters being angels.

Readers of this conversation are receiving it in English. What’s your relationship to language – to German and Arabic? It strikes me as significant that you write in German, but that you founded Swallow Editions, a press that brings new Arabic voices to anglophone readers.

I have a strong love affair with language. As a child, I spoke Aramaic with my parents, Arabic on the street and at school, and French in the Lebanese monastery (it was my father’s dream that I become a priest). Later, English was added (unfortunately taught by an unqualified teacher). So German became my fifth language. Arab publishers rejected my novels, so I decided to learn literary German and make it my language. It took me years to master it.

My aim with Swallow Editions is to introduce the work of young, talented Arab novelists to the English-speaking world. Because the novels published under Swallow Editions are translated into English, they can reach a much wider audience. But I am also happy that all the novels are published in German language, too.

Translation’s virtue rests in its ability to share contexts and narratives across national and linguistic borders – to foster understanding and exchange. But I want also to discuss the risk that carries. Political and military exchanges and interventions between Western Europe and the Middle East have been accompanied by certain (often problematic) narratives. Does literary exchange carry risks of imperialism and homogenisation? If so, how do we avoid them?

Translation is a great – but underrecognised – art. The translation must reinvent the story, make it understandable to readers of another culture, without causing any loss of original substance. Unlike military intervention, which always destroys something, translation is an attempt to build a very delicate, sensible bridge. But, as soon as the translation puts the host country’s own national interests above the original language of a work, the bridge collapses. The damage remains small because it concerns only this one translation of the novel. If the original novel is a piece of art with enduring value, it will be discovered and translated correctly.

For twenty years, I have rejected all offers from Arab publishers to publish my work, because they always want to make changes and censor my work. In my experience, if the translator censors or changes a work, they become a henchman of the dictatorship. However, after a long search, I found my current publisher, Manshourat al-Jamal of Camel Publications, who does not censor a word I write.

In other interviews with you which I’ve read, the conversation has turned quickly from the literary to the strictly political. I’m aware that’s what I’ve just done, but I want to ask how you find that tendency – to talk to you as a writer, first, but hastily to ask you instead, as a Syrian in Germany, about the situation in Syria?

Thank you for your very sensitive wording. I sometimes find it frustrating that some journalists come to their own conclusions or statements without having done their homework. Instead of taking their own stand against the dictatorship, they expect it from me. That is the reason why I reject many interviews. And this is also the reason why I only conduct interviews via email, which I can check very carefully. I often send the questions back unanswered. I have written a lot about, and have been very vocal against, dictatorship, but making myself a source of information for journalists who are unwilling to take the time to do proper research is a disposession of my literary work.

And so, finally, to submit fully to that tendency, I want to ask about exile and return. I think of Salah Al-Hamdani, who also left the Arabic world for political imperatives in the 1970s, settled in Western Europe (France), and wrote about the country of his birth in the language of his adopted home. He frequently discusses his one return to Iraq, to see his family. This is something you’ve not been able yet to do. In 2011, you said that, should the Assad regime fall, you would ‘go back, but as a visitor’. How has this hope for return shifted in the last eight years?

My answer remains the same: if I returned to the places of my childhood, I would only do so to see them again and share them with my wife and son. But after eight years of tragic war, the hope for a peaceful development has faded away. Sophia describes the impossibility of return. I have sewn all the experiences of my friends in exile, all my feelings, desires and fears, dreams and nightmares into the novel, and sent Salman on the journey that I always wanted and feared.

With this novel, I return to Damascus. I don’t return physically, but with my longing. That’s what I’ve been doing for forty years.

Rafik Schami was born in Damascus in 1946, came to Germany in 1971 to study, and stayed on to become a leading German novelist and a pivotal figure in the European migrant literature movement. His novels have been translated into over 40 languages and have received numerous international literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize. His translated works published by Interlink include Damascus Nights, The Calligrapher’s Secret, A Hand Full of Stars, and The Dark Side of Love, which was a 2010 Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

Photo credit: Arne Wesenberg

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