The Affair

"The plot essentially charts an affair that goes on for several years between a young woman and an older man who is a bit of an intellectual. They meet mainly in what she calls ‘the slum’, even though they’re both—by the description of the circles they move in—more affluent. Like the Salwa Al Neimi book, there is not a consistent chronological development, it’s quite choppy. But it’s a series of meetings and strong emotions and scenes that she places together. So: not too heavy on plot, I’d say, but there is some. She is quite a phenomenon. Her CV is extraordinary, she’s the one Nobel Prize nominee in the collection among many prize-adorned writers. Her work aside, I was keen to include her because she is a Francophone writer from the Arab world, which leads to a double prejudice (it being written by an Arab writer in another European tongue). Not enough Francophone writing comes through, partly because there’s a lack of translation into English. It used to be around 3% of the total for fiction publications, but this has thankfully increased. I’ve been very keen to read as many Francophone North African and Lebanese writers as possible. El Khayat also falls into another ‘minority’ bracket as she, like Samira Negrouche, an Algerian poet I included in We Wrote In Symbols , is of Amazigh/Berber origin. El Khayat’s a psychiatrist, writer and poet. She was very much influenced by Marguerite Duras’s The Lover . The Affair has been described as the first book by an Arab woman to chart an affair like this, the first erotic novel. She published it initially under a pseudonym, Lyne Tywa, in the 90s. What I loved about it is that she describes these quite ludicrous situations she gets into because of this man. On one level she holds him in contempt, because when she talks to him she finds him really boring. But she gets drawn back into this slum and to him bossing her around in bed. Because of her psychiatric background she loves to analyse and stand outside the characters, asking ‘what’s going on at this point in time? What is the logic? Or is there nothing logical about this situation at all?’ I asked her about this; she said: “I was married, had a daughter. It seemed just impossible to face the society and family under my name.” And in that period, Morocco was experiencing what she called les Années de plomb —literally ‘years of lead’—harsh political times. It was written in 1985 and not published until the mid 1990s. I do think it’s a real problem with all writing, and particularly erotic writing, that the general mode of critique now is to constantly ask people if this is something that happened to them. Is this autobiographical? The expectation that fiction writers are creating fiction seems to be reduced. For some writers it can be freeing to dissociate yourself from the work. There’s one writer in my anthology, Nedjma, who has never revealed her name and where she is. So some people will keep the cover even after success. Maybe Ghita El Khayat felt she’d grown enough in prestige to weather the storm—or she was a bit older, and I think that’s sometimes freeing. Older women are less likely to be under attack for writing works like this. Personally I would have found it more difficult when I was younger. Yes. The erotic activities of fictive characters stick on female writers in a way that other activities of their characters wouldn’t, crime writers being a key example. Unlike carrying out or solving murders, most people have sex, but female writers are shamed for writing about this most basic of human activities. Given that we are being globally inundated with extreme male visions of sex through the porn industry, it is a bit much that women can’t put their desires across. Initially, we were thinking of the subtitle of ‘Lust and Erotica’ for the collection, but erotica is really quite distinctive; the idea of titillation/turning on the reader is central to it. I also found that there was a tradition of Arab erotica by men, for example The Old Man’s Rejuvenation , by the 13th century Egyptian writer Al-Tifashi. Although there is a big Arab tradition of male erotology—partly connected to the idea of sexuality needing to be embraced for the harmony of society and the balance of wellbeing—female narrators were used by these men. So that, as a body of work, could give rise to the label, but the modern stuff doesn’t. For us, it’s more about the erotic as it arises. It’s more general."