Episode Description:
For more information about our Between the Lines summer camp, go to bit.ly/btl24.
Today’s guest is Mansoura Ez-Eldin. We discussed writing about dreams and other unreal things, Ez-Eldin’s career and the impact of moving from a very small town to Cairo at a young age, mentorship among writers, the role of public criticism, and the state of Arabic literature in translation, among other topics.
Bio: Mansoura Ez-Eldin (fiction; nonfiction, editor; Egypt), nominated by Beirut39 among the 39 Best Arab-language Writers Under 40, is an award-winning and widely translated author of 10 books. WALKS IN SHANGHAI: ON THE MEANING OF DISTANCE BETWEEN EGYPT AND CHINA won the 2021 Ibn Battuta Prize for travel literature; in 2014, the Sharjah International Book Fair nominated her EMERALD MOUNTAIN as Best Arabic Novel. Her writing has appeared, among other places, in The New York Times, A Public Space, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Granta. She is the managing editor of the cultural weekly Akhbar Al-Adab and, since 2003, its book review editor. A grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State funds her participation.
Read Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s English writing sample: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/EZ%20ELDIN_sample_final_formatted.pdf.
Read Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s writing sample in the original language: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Mansoura%20Ez-Eldin%20sample%20original.pdf.
Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.
IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support.
Learn more about IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.
Episode Transcript:
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by T. Bless & the Professionals]
Mike Meginnis:
You're listening to Say The World: an International Writing Podcast. I'm Mike Meginnis, Communications Coordinator at the International Writing Program and most recently the author of the novel Drowning Practice.
Christopher Merrill:
And I'm Christopher Merrill, Director of the International Writing Program and author most recently of a book-length poem titled On the Road to Lviv.
MM:
The substance of today's episode is going to be an interview with the very talented Egyptian novelist, editor, [and] book reviewer Mansoura Ez-Eldin. First, we want to let you know about our Between the Lines program. Between the Lines is a creative writing summer camp for young writers who will be between the ages of fifteen and eighteen years old this summer. The program brings together US-based students and students from around the world to learn together from our renowned staff of internationally acclaimed writers.
CM:
And this is the first year since 2019 that the program takes place entirely in person on the University of Iowa campus. There will be two sections of Between the Lines. The first will run from June 9 through June 22. And the second will run from June 30 through July 14.
MM:
The reason that we're talking about this now is that applications are open for US-based students, and they should be open by the time that you're hearing this for international students as well. The list of participating countries is different each year. This year, the list is Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, France, Hungary, India, Laos, Morocco, Mozambique, Pakistan, Qatar, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. You can learn how to apply at bit.ly/btl24. That's all lowercase, .ly/btl24. And that list is of course there for your easy reference just in case you didn't have your pencil out while I was reading that off.
CM:
And in the course of this interview, Mansoura speaks at some length about the delicate art of mentorship, which gives me a chance to say something about my mentor, the wonderful poet Brewster Ghiselin, and editor of the influential symposium, The Creative Process. I had remembered so clearly the ways in which he would go through different drafts of poems that he'd written over the course of a very long life, show me the changes he was making line to line, year to year, and I learned more about how to make a poem from his attempt to just show what it was he had learned in what he called a long life of discovery. So we pass on this trade of writing.
MM:
Yeah, I honestly don't know how much I told you about this. It feels like it's probably come up because I like to, I like to explain this to people almost as a warning. But you may remember that I was homeschooled from kindergarten through basically up until undergraduate. The first time that I was in a formal classroom with an actual teacher was when I went to get my undergraduate degree in creative writing. And so I came there, and I had a bunch of people there who were really important to me, Dan Barden, who still works there. Robert Stapleton is still there, Susan Neville, who's a professor emeritus now, but they were all massively important to me, because they were sort of helping me to just like, learn how to be not only a functional writer, but like a student and a human being all at once. I had to catch up on a lot of things. And I remember, at one point, Dan Barton said to students in a class that I was in that I had been raised by wolves, and what they should do if they wanted to, like, have some really good writing was they should follow me around, listen to what I talked about. And then they should do writing on that basis. And like, what good that did me was not clear! But that was his advice. And then later, he also gave me advice that I could use for my own work that was really important.
CM:
What a great story. You want to say where that was?
MM:
Oh, yeah, that was at Butler University in Indianapolis. That was where I went. That was where I met my partner. It's, um, it's a place I think of fondly.
CM:
Yeah, yeah. Those are the formative experiences when we find that teacher. I'm always thinking of, I had as a teacher, William Matthews, who has a poem, in which he says, "And while I'm at it, I'd like to thank my teachers, though not all of them, and they know who they are."
MM:
Yes, there is there is sort of an anti-mentor in my life who kind of ticked me off, and has had to send me a congratulatory email, and the dark pleasure I took in very magnanimously replying, "Thank you." That was an all-time high. And with that confession out of the way, let's talk to Mansoura.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
Mansoura Ez-Eldin:
Basateen Al Basra.
CM:
The Orchards of Basra.
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
Yesterday I ate a moon. I remember a street in which a few people were scattered like extras in a silent film, in which I was the only hero, spying on them through a hole in a wall separating me from life.
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
I remember raising my head toward the sky and seeing a double moon or, to be more precise, a moon with its own reflection beside it, the two clinging together as if there was a hidden mirror joining them
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
I noticed two other reflections of the pair, one on the right and the other on the left. I was surprised that my sky should have six moons in it, or rather three pairs of moons. But it was only a mild surprise, like opening the door to our apartment and finding a black cat waiting on the stairs.
ME:
My name is Mansoura Ez-Eldin. I am a writer from Egypt. I was born in the Nile Delta, in a tiny village, and I moved to Cairo when I was eighteen years old to live on my own and to study journalism and begin my career in writing. I was surrounded by many wonderful storytellers when I was young. My grandfather, my mother, my uncle, they used to tell me a lot of wonderful stories about goblins, ghosts, and the fairies that inhabited the Nile. So, when I was a child, I didn't know where reality ended and where the fictional begins. So this influenced me a lot when I became a writer. In my writing, I sort of make a marriage between dreams and reality, and trying to make use of this wonderful heritage of oral tales and stories. And I also am influenced a lot by the Islamic heritage about metaphysics, dreams, and all these fantastical tales and heritage. When I write, I try to make use of this, of the Arab, all the Arab tradition of storytelling, and mix it with postmodern techniques of storytelling. I until now have ten books, six novels, three collections of short stories, and a book of travel writing about my two visits to China. I [have] won a lot of literary awards, and was shortlisted to a lot of literary awards as well, including the Arabic Booker Prize, and the Sheikh Zayad Award for literature. And my most recent work, Basateen Al Basra, or The Orchards of Basra, is shortlisted now for the Arabic Literature Award in France.
MM:
Thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate the chance to talk with you.
ME:
Thank you for having me.
MM:
You mentioned the importance of dreams and sort of the space in between reality and the sort of dream space. And that was something that I did want to ask you about, I read that there was an early period, there was an early encounter, in your—early in your university career, where you got a copy of the book that was mentioned in this passage that we read, The Great Book of Interpretation of Dreams, and whatever it was, that you were consulting it frequently and had been spending a lot of time with it. I just wonder if you could talk about your relationship with this book, and what it was like then and maybe how the relationship has changed now as you've written about it.
ME:
Ah, okay. When I moved to Cairo, I, this city was quite intimidating for me. I was a country girl who moved alone. And this is, to live alone, and this is not usual or common in Egypt, especially back in the 90s. So, I want to, like, tame the city through walking its streets and write about—and writing about it. About the city and the streets and everything I encountered there. So, one day, I found a copy of this book, and without thinking, I bought it and where, ah, well. From my first reading, I felt like captivated, you know? Because this is, I didn't feel that it's only about about dreams. That is a fantastic piece of art. Because in Islamic culture, when we interpret a dream, we don't, we sometimes, like—it's like a study in language, the nature of language. So I made this dream about the angels who are picking jasmine from al-Basrah, a famous city in Iraq, and I knew that I will write a novel or something in the future about this dream. This dream stayed with me for about twenty-five years. And when I was in Shanghai in 2018, I began writing this novel. This dream is very fleeting in the book. No one knows anything about the one who dreams, about the dreamer. So I try to imagine a life for this dream, you know? So I wrote about, I invented some fictional character called Yazid ibn Abihi, who dreamed this dream and went to Al-Hassan al-Basri. And I was faithful to the interpretation that was mentioned in the book. But I invented another character whose name is Hisham Khatab, and he is the narrator of this, that we just read, where I've just read. Hisham Khatab lives in Cairo, between Cairo and Minya in Egypt, nowadays and he believes that he is Yazidi ibn Abihi, and he lived in the Old Basra thirteen centuries ago. So the book is about this. And when I researched it, I know Al-Hassan al-Basri is very famous [inaudible] imam in the Islamic history, and he was very close to Wasil ibn Ata. He was like the mentor of Wasil ibn Ata. Wasil ibn Ata was the leader of a philosophical Islamic school. This Islamic school was very progressive; they questioned everything. They questioned the nature of gods. They asked very challenging questions about the nature of Quran. Is Quran invented, or is it divine? And you know, but, this school was repressed. And no one talks a lot about about it now. So I wanted to write about this school of philosophy. And it was a hard mission for me because I needed to work a lot and research a lot, but I love this challenge. And there is a chapter in the novel, which is narrated by Wasil ibn Ata. Wasil ibn Ata was a very eloquent man and thinker, but he wasn't able to pronounce the letter R. So he avoided it altogether. And in the chapter which he is the narrator in, I avoided this letter in writing. So I love to play with writing, you know?
ME:
Yeah, it's great to have that constraint. That was something that I was thinking about too, when I was, when I was reading the sample that you provided. Because I think that when you write about dreams, there is a tendency to feel a lack of constraint, that can be a challenge in itself, right? There's sort of like, anything could happen next, I could eat the moon. Right.
ME:
Yeah.
MM:
And then. And then. So the question becomes: what are the constraints that are going to be productive for writing in that sort of mode? So that's one constraint that was really productive. I'm curious if there are other constraints or rules that you try to follow when you're writing in sort of that dream space or that mode that are productive and helpful for you.
ME:
Okay, when writing the first manuscript, I tried to liberate myself, totally, I tried to go after my imagination, to follow it. And when I began writing the second and third manuscript, I began to put my hand on the main questions of the novel. So I researched more and more, but every sentence in this introduction of the opening of the novel has something to do with the plot of the Islamic Interpretation of Dreams, eating the moon has something to do with the mother. And there is a very complex relationship between the narrator and his mother in this novel. And by the end of the novel, this sentence will be more, will be clearer.
CM:
So did the research involve traveling to Basra, or thinking—traveling into the historical reaches of Basra?
ME:
I wish I was I was able to travel to Basra. I was invited into 2017 to go by a German organization to mentor a work—a creative writing workshop. But Iraq didn't give me the visa, due to some political problems with Egypt.
MM:
Sure.
ME:
So I, I didn't travel, but I was writing about a city that is—that doesn't exist now. When all of Basra was destroyed centuries ago, and the actual, the new one is not the same city. So I relied on the old books and a lot of writing about the city. How they used to live, and mainly about this school of philosophy on the Islamic philosophy in general because Iraq, Basra and Baghdad, were like, the two credits of Islamic philosophy.
ME:
So out of necessity, you invent anew?
ME:
Yeah. A new city, sort of, yeah.
CM:
It's interesting to me that you were, you fell into this book about the great interpretation of dreams, I think, around the same time that Mahfouz started writing his Dreams of Departure.
ME:
Yes.
CM:
When we think about the story—[the] great Egyptian storytelling tradition, were those dreams at all useful to you in thinking about your journey as a writer?
ME:
And Naguib [Mahfouz] himself was a great source of inspiration for me. But, in my dealing with dreams, I rely more than him on Islamic culture. But Naguib himself was like an idol for me. I was a little girl who lived in a very isolated village. And when he won Nobel, this was for me, "Wow, I can do it." Or, or at least I can dream of doing it one day! And when I was a child, I used to read English, translated English and Russian novels. So I had like a sort of naive belief that novels should be written by Western writers. And they should be set in cities like London, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, you know. And then I came across Naguib Mahfouz and read his novels to discover, Whoa, there is a good Egyptian novelist who writes about people who resemble my family, my neighbors, you know.
ME:
And integrate a literary city like Cairo.
ME:
Yes, yes. I knew Cairo at first through his writing. And that was a very, very, very strange coincidence. My first day at Cairo University marked the day Naguib Mahfouz was near fatally asleep. This was my first day at Cairo University. And I read this as a sort of warning directed to me. You want to be a writer, "See, this is a fatal fright," or something like this.
CM:
And he was in such pain for the rest of his life that he wrote those dreams because he could only write for about thirty minutes.
ME:
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
CM:
Yeah. Yeah. But again, he made a virtue out of necessity, right?
MM:
You mentioned the experience of reading books in translation. And I have some jealousy when I hear that, although it's, it's kind of frustrating dynamic, right? So the thing that I feel the frustration of is, you know, growing up in the US reading fiction, there is a cultural starvation, really, right. Like, I was not reading things in translation, I was reading things written in English, that were from, you know, written by people in the US or in England. That was basically it. Right? That was where I started. And so we're sort of missing out. And at the same time, while we're not necessarily reading people from other places as much as we should be, we're sending stuff out everywhere, right? And creating that impression that yes, this is what literature is supposed to be. It's supposed to be written in English. It's supposed to be about New York City, or places like that. And so I wonder, because there was an interview—this was all the way back in 2011—where you spoke to The Rumpus. And you talked about the sort of situation of writers in Arabic. And I can sort of summarize what you saw the situation as at the time, but I don't want to like, hold you responsible for like what you described it as then. I'm curious, like, how you feel now, if things have changed in the past ten years, as far as the position of Arabic writing in translation around the world.
ME:
I can...Would you please remind me what I—?
ME:
Yes, yes.
ME:
I don't remember!
MM:
Yes, absolutely. So what you said at the time was, at least as they recorded it: "I can't tell why Arab writers are not widely read in America. The American publishing market seems to be really tough, especially for foreign literature. On the other hand, most of the Arab writers don't have agents and Arabic publishers, in general, are not professional enough, and don't work on promoting their publications outside the Arab world." And then you went on to say that there was also an issue of not always the best writing being selected because Western publishers and readers tended to kind of pick and choose, looking for specific themes. Because we were sort of saying like, well, you know, writing from this region should really just be social or political, and it shouldn't have broader artistic aims or larger artistic aims.
ME:
I think the situation is much better now. You know? Now we have a lot of Arab writers who are very famous, internationally, like Khaled Khalifa, Jokha Alharthi, [who] won the International Booker Prize, and many others. And I hope that in the future, where more Arab writers will be widely known in the West, and it's as well not only the West, but I noticed that most of the time Western publishing houses prefer—don't prefer experimental writing, you know? So, many wonderful Arabic novels are not translated just because they are daring, artistically daring, and experimental. I hope this will change soon as well.
MM:
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that it's improved some, but it's not surprising to me to hear that that's sort of another step that is maybe considered a little, a little too much by some publishers. I'm curious if there are particular writers that you—that haven't made that leap maybe because of that challenge that you'd like to see people be more aware of.
ME:
In Egypt, for example, we have Mustafa Zikri. Yasser Abdel Hafez, one of his novels is translated, but I think he deserves to be more known. And Mohamed Kheir. He was here last year. Also, Abdullah Nasser from Saudi Arabia, and the many writers from Lebanon, the late Jabbour Douiahy, and [inaudible] from Morocco.
ME:
Yeah, I actually read Mohammed Kheir's novel Slipping
ME:
Yes.
MM:
in translation after after he because he read from it while he was here last year, and I really loved the reading. And I did have that experience of it was translated it was beautifully translated. I was I was basically following it, but because it did have a slipperiness to it, a surrealism to it, it was really beautiful, but the whole time I was sort of haunted by the knowledge of how much I was missing about what was so great about it.
ME:
This is a problem of experimental or ambiguous writing. Yeah, yeah.
MM:
Yes, yeah.
CM:
And I like him. While he was here, he taught a songwriting workshop.
ME:
(Laugh) Yeah.
CM:
He's a larger than life character. I wonder if you could tell us a little something about how the literary culture has changed since the events of 2011 in the Arab Spring. Has a different kind of space opened up for Egyptian writers?
ME:
Yeah, I think there are positive changes and negative changes at the same time. After the revolution, everyone was talking about, the writers should write about so and so and so. "Egyptian novelists should write about," or not should, "must write about the revolution, about the change—the social changes." I don't believe in that when it comes to literature. Because every writer should be free to write about whatever he wants. And a huge historical event like a revolution needs time to be digested, and to be understood. You can't just write while the event is still in progress. So we had a lot of novels about politics and about the revolution, but they are not good enough, you know? And, on the other hand, the situation now concerning censorship, censorship is not good. So, I myself have a novel that I wrote in 2017. Until now, I can't publish it. Because I know it will not be published easily in Egypt now. So I keep it in my drawer...
CM:
Is that because of the subject matter, or—
ME:
Yeah, it's about the revolution, but not in a direct way.
CM:
In a similar vein, on my first trip to Cairo, I had a very interesting conversation with a scholar who was talking about the differences between classical Arabic and more demotic forms of the language. And he was arguing that writers, Arabic writers, needed to find ways to write in a more colloquial fashion. I wonder if that continues to be a subject of discourse and where you might stand on this.
ME:
Yeah, this is always a subject of discourse. But in Egypt, we are more progressive than other Arab countries, because we don't have this discrimination between the Egyptian dialect and the standard Arabic. The Egyptian writers are more daring and experimental when it comes to language, you know, to the degree that some writers and the greatest in the Arab world, countries like Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon, or Syria, consider that we, like, humiliate [the] Arabic language sometimes. But I don't, I don't believe in that. I feel that experimenting with language is very important, very vital for any language, you know? But sometimes, it's very dangerous or challenging when it comes to, ah, all the languages like [the] Arabic language, you know? It is like a holy language, the language of Quran. So sometimes we should be a bit careful when playing with it. In my novel, The Orchards of Basra, I juxtapose many different styles of Arabic language, one of them trying to be close to the old Arabic language in the time of Al-Jahiz, a classic, classical Arabic writer. And some of them are Standard Arabic in modern Egypt. And some of them, one of the narrators uses Egyptian dialect. So I prefer writing in the classical Arabic or the Standard Arabic, but sometimes I love when, when the novel I'm writing allows me to do so, to mix a lot of styles and ways of writing.
CM:
Ernest Hemingway said that Mark Twain was really the start of American literature and, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he said in the preface that he was happy to employ a half a dozen different dialects of southwest Missouri in his drive to get it how people actually spoke.
ME:
Do you know what? He was one of my idols when I was a child in Cairo, in my small village. Because when I read his novels, I felt that the Mississippi resembled the Nile. And that he's writing about these children that looked like me.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
I didn't notice until later that the sky the previous night was colored with a touch of turquoise worthy of a precious stone. And only then did it occur to me that I had eaten the moon. I had a loaf of bread in my hand on which I had put the moon, or was it a boiled egg?
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
I folded the bread and started to eat until I had finished it. I didn't dare look upward afterwards. Dark settled in, and I concluded that the light of my life had disappeared with the eaten moon. I stretched out on a stone basin, not far from the wall with a hole looking out over the street. It was shaded by a tree with flowers like orange bells, whose presence dominated a scene from which green leaves were absent.
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
A familiar voice rang in my head, telling me that the tree was called a bombax and that it flowered before it became green again. I don't know where this piece of information came to me from. I was just aware of a warmth deep inside me as if a moon was lighting up my inner darkness.
MM:
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your, sort of your day job. As I understand it, you're the managing editor and book review editor for—and please feel free to correct my pronunciation—Akhbar al-Adab?
ME:
Akhbar al-Adab, na'am ["yes" in Arabic].
MM:
And so you've said some interesting things about the role of criticism in literary life. And I wonder what sort of writing you are focused on publishing in that context and how you see the relationship of that work to your novels and fiction.
ME:
I am the book review editor at Akhbar al-Adab since 2003. And at the beginning, from 2005, I sort of edited a supplement about publishing in general, in the Arab world, and elsewhere. So I consider myself in direct contact with the publishing scene in the Arab world. Now, it's very different from when it used to be, in the beginning of this, in the beginning of this century. No one is interested in literary criticism now, because the, you know about books from Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, you know? But we continue to write about new books and new novels. When I became a book reviewer at first, I tried not to just rely on my taste as a writer because, you know, when I write—As a writer, I have, yeah, I might not like the direct novels, or a realistic novel, for example. So, no, I didn't want to only publish reviews about the books that I like. I relied on a lot of other reviewers and other critics to try as much as I can to reflect the diversity of the rich literary scene in Egypt and in the Arab world. But now I feel the situation is a bit chaotic because of Facebook and social media. And you know, sometimes, some writers pay to have positive reviews for groups on Facebook, and ah, I don't think this will benefit anyone, including these writers themselves.
CM:
So, what do you imagine the critic's role to be in such a case?
ME:
I think they should continue their work regardless of anything else. And some, some critics, some Egyptian critics are writing about this phenomenon, you know? They are trying to analyze what is happening and these changes. But the—Okay, maybe the ordinary readers don't pay attention to what is written, but I think it will be very vital in the future, when we try to look back at this era, for example, and know what is written, and how the critics dealt with it.
CM:
The failure of some critics to deal with it—honestly and at a level of intellectual engagement, that could spur different kinds of thinking.
ME:
Yeah, it's like the death of criticism now. Do you have same problem here?
CM:
Oh, we have a lot of social media. (Laughs)
MM:
You know, I feel like we've—you've talked about, in interviews, like 2019, one with ArabLit, a turn toward, a focus on, like, entirely positive criticism. And I think that there's a lot of that here too. I mean, I feel like the general feeling here is that, because it is so hard to get any attention for a book to begin with, and because the default is that a book is going to disappear, right? If you're going to talk about it, you might as well choose one to talk about that you like, which I do find, I think there's a truth to that, right? Like, there's a reality to, "It is helpful to—if you want to help books, focus on praising the ones that you would like to see thrive, and the writers that you'd like to see thrive." But there is, there's a lot lost in that, right? There's, there's a whole category of, like, thinking and conversation that becomes really difficult to have, and I would say, essentially doesn't happen publicly. I don't know if you feel the same, but like, I think it basically doesn't.
ME:
Yeah, do you know what? I am a book review editor in one of the most prestigious literary newspapers in the region. But I'm trying as well to make use of social media. I write a lot about what I read in social media, on Twitter and Facebook. And much to my surprise, the publishers themselves tell me: when I write about certain books, the sales increase. So, we can make use of this as well.
MM:
Yeah.
ME:
We, it's not the destiny or our fate to just complain, you know? We can make this platform work in a more just way, at least from our point of view. I try to write about, like short reviews or, or just say that, "You should pay attention to this young writer," for example. I think, one of my duties—
CM:
You can make or break a book. (Laughs)
ME:
No, no, no. I can't claim this, no! (Laughs) And I hope not!
MM:
That's not the goal.
ME:
I look at myself as a reader, an avid reader.
CM:
So, somewhere between a social media enterprise that looks like a publicity machine
ME:
Yes.
CM:
and something like hatchet jobs, there must be some happy middle where you can speak with some level of seriousness about why a book is important, and what its defining features might be, and what its shortcomings might be.
MM:
I wonder, too, in reading you talking about what is useful and exciting in literary criticism—and maybe the answer to this is, is no, which is totally fine, but I was curious—if there is an example of being, of being on the receiving end of criticism or a review that changed something about how you thought about your work or how you worked in the future. Is that, is that something that you've had the benefit of?
ME:
Yeah, of course, especially in the beginning of my career. When I began, I had a lot of encouragement, you know? From some of the most important writers in Egypt. I came to Cairo without knowing anything, without any connections. I was just trying, to try it and, I didn't even believe that I might be a writer, really. So, because I was an avid reader, and I knew that I was writing very naive, short stories—I knew that at the beginning. So, I kept writing and keeping my short stories in my drawer, until someone, a colleague of mine at the university, knew that I [was] writing short stories. And he was the one who used to win every competition at the university. And he got bored and wanted some competition. So he asked me to give him one of my short stories, because he [was] curious to read it. And I gave it to him. And he submitted it to a literary prize without telling me. And much to my surprise, and his surprise as well, I won the first place, and he came in the second place. This was, this was my beginning of writing because the jury members helped me to publish it. And I knew a lot of very, very famous writers, and they encouraged me, but there was one particular critic who told me I am not good enough, and I opted to believe him. You know? And now I think it was clever of me to believe him, because this made me improve myself. He told me, "Do you know why they are very happy with your writing? And always encouraging you?" And I asked, "Why? I don't know." He told me, "Because they saw you as themselves in your writing. You are imitating them. And they are happy that they have such a good pupil." You know? "You should find your own voice." And he was a very honest critic. And I was lucky to listen to him and try to find my own voice, you know. So criticism can help writers too. And sometimes, negative criticism is more important than positive.
CM:
What did it take for you to find your own voice? How did you go about doing that?
ME:
I try to write about what interested me most, you know? As I told you, I was raised in a very, like, mythological village, where dreams and reality were inseparable, you know? So, I tried to, to write about it. I wanted at first to imitate them. They were writing, ah, ordin—real good novels and short stories, but they wrote about the world as they see it, you know? I used to see the world different. For me, ghost stories were not just stories. They were like daily life details, for me, due to my upbringing. So, I believed this fictional reality. I don't know how to describe it, but I believed it and wrote about it the same way I listened to the stories of my grandmother and grandfather. And also I try to have my own style and writing. Since I was a kid, I was fascinated by the pre-Islamic poetry, for example. And I used to memorize it without fully understanding. So I worked in my language, to try to play with the language. Step by step. I hope that I found my voice! When I began writing, most of the Egyptian writing was realistic. So I began to mix the fantastical aspect with reality, and some writers didn't like this, because it was like, not realistic enough. And they used to only respect the pure reality. But for me, it wasn't unrealistic. This is reality! When we talk about dreams, our dreams are part of our reality. They are part of our identity. Our fears, our—even our hallucinations, are part of our characters and our personal history. So when I write about this, I write about reality. I don't remember who said this, maybe Danilo Kis, a Serbian writer. I love him a lot.
CM:
My hero.
ME:
Yeah. When I went to, when I stayed in Paris for three months, I used to visit his building. Every day. Because I love him. He said once that "reality is the unseen," you know? Our dreams, our hallucinations: this is part of our reality. And this is how I see reality. And I try to write it the way I see it, the way I interact with it.
CM:
It occurred to me that you, with that you have a journalism background and write about sometimes fantastic things in a very clear and accessible fashion, that's not unlike the wonderful Italian novelist, story writer, Dino Buzzati, who was also a journalist. And he wrote the most fantastic stories in the clearest possible, even simplest language, understanding that there is no divide between, in his case, the surreal and the real.
ME:
Yes.
CM:
And that language may be the bridge between those two worlds. Is that part of your process?
ME:
Yes, of course. And also, we can remember in this context, Gabriel García Márquez, he was a journalist as well.
CM:
Yeah, exactly.
ME:
And he once talked about that journalism helped him to be convincing. To be able to convince the reader of what he is writing, regardless of how fantastical it was. So I believe that journalism helped me in the same way: how to write about sometimes very fantastical, and maybe even unbelievable, things in a convincing way.
CM:
And also on deadline.
ME:
(Laughs) Oh, yes! Yeah, it helped me to write daily as well. And to be able to concentrate under pressure.
CM:
Under pressure. Exactly.
MM:
I wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit about your experience here in Iowa since you've joined the International Writing Program fall residency. How things have been going, what your experience has been.
ME:
Okay, I feel myself lucky to be here with you. I really love the city. You know, I just said, I've just said that I'm a farm girl, so I'm very happy to be here because Iowa has a lot of green areas, has a lot of trees, a lot of flowers. I am fascinated with all of this. This is my first time to see a black flower here in Iowa. And also it was very enriching to me to talk and discuss writing with other writers from all over the world, I feel that I am living now in a sort of shelter for writers and writing. I was very excited to the degree that it distracted me from writing. So I'll try to concentrate more in my writing during the next weeks. Also, I noticed that your corn is quite short.
MM:
It's short? I didn't know this.
ME:
Egyptian corn is very tall and it caused me nightmares when I was a child, because I once got lost in a cornfield. So being here in Iowa reminded me of this.
CM:
I think actually this year that is a function of drought because often the corn is quite high, but this year the drought has been so severe that it has not grown as well as the farmers would like it to.
ME:
But I'm very happy to be here, and I think it will be very fruitful for me as a writer, and it will enrich my experience.
MM:
If you don't mind me asking, I'm curious, with all the talk of dreams, whether you remember what you've been dreaming while you've been here, if things have changed being an Iowa as far as the things you're dreaming about.
ME:
Here I always dream about my kid. He is eleven years old. Maybe I am, I feel guilty because I left him in Cairo. So, I dream about him, and I dreamed about butterflies because before coming here I wrote a text about American butterflies, and it will be part of Infinite Dream Festival, and I'm so excited!
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
At that moment I connected with my paper self. I wasn't that hopeless, useless fellow who inhabited the words of my mother Leila when she directed her curses at me. Then again, she wasn't my mother at all. The moon that had settled deep inside me told me this and a lot more.
ME:
[Mansoura Ez-Eldin reads from The Orchards of Basra in the original Arabic.]
CM:
It urged me to ignore the headache and the fever and the nausea. It returned me to my identity and to a past dream in which I was both the subject and the dreamer. A dream that some of you may perhaps have come across between the covers of the Great [Book of] Interpretation of Dreams, attributed to Imam Muhammad ibn Sirin without being bothered about who saw it, and told it to Al-Hasan al-Basri.
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1 - DoGBeaT Remix" by DoGBeaT]
MM:
Say the World: an International Writing Podcast is a production of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you'd like to donate to the IWP, go to bit.li/iwp-support. Links to further information and additional credits for this episode are in the show notes.
