I Sweep the Sun Off Rooftops

"Hanan al-Shaykh has written several novels and several short story collections. She’s well established. And she broke a lot of taboos. She was the first Arab woman writer that I read in my teens, translated from Arabic. Many of her books are set in Beirut, and some of which are quite harsh— with politically severe backgrounds. But the characters have this ‘deep life force,’ to use Audre Lorde’s terminology about how she defines the erotic. Al Shaykh has an incredible spirit and is funny. Her female characters are inventive, creative, tender, absurd. She can dwell on a moment and extrapolate out into quite obscure thoughts… she’s not afraid to be a little bit ludicrous on occasion, which I appreciate. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This collection is set between Beirut, Africa , Cairo. In the story I included in We Wrote In Symbols , a woman tries to excite her husband by making him watch Japanese erotic films, after being encouraged by her friend who is much wilder than she is. Another one of the stories is a love story about a woman whose husband left her for another woman just before he died. During a memorial to the woman’s mother, all these crazy theatrical friends of her mother pile into her flat and start trying to raise the dead with an ouiji board, and she manages, kind of negligently, to contact her dead husband, and she asks him: did you love me? She wants to keep him in the cup, but the others are like ‘no, you’ve got to let him go back to the spirit world.’ There’s such energy in her writing. She’s daring without trying to be overtly provocative. Her brand of feminism is a sort of charm offensive that you can’t resist. The language writers of Arab origin I chose are based on a number of factors—where the writer was educated, where they live, what country they come from, but none of this is clear-cut anymore. It’s ironic that if you compare Salwa al Neimi and Rita al Khayat, the former is based in Paris and writes in Arabic, the latter is based in Morocco and writes in French. It is a terrible generalisation, but in terms of prose, I would say the Francophone and Arabic language writers are more playful when it comes to chronology and less concerned with having a taut plot. The reader is encouraged to float and dive into the test. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s also a different question that’s to do with positioning. When you have an Arab writer working in English, there’s a an expectation that you are explaining your country, your culture, the politics. English language writers are often expected to carry the narrative of justification, or an explanation. In Ahdaf Soueif’s novel, you have these large sections which are to do with the politics of the time: what happened in the ’67 and ’73 wars. It’s a breakdown full of interesting details, like miscommunications between the generals, that develop an overall picture for the outside reader. Edward Said talked about the importance for writers to reclaim their history, to bear witness, not just for outsider (non-Arab) readerships, but also for the Arab readers. It is a question of bringing history to life, in the way that it was lived, rather than in the way the media of that country or outside countries tell you that it was lived. Arabic does not always translate well into English. I am very proud of the quality of the translations in our anthology. I couldn’t have got better translators: Prof. Marilyn Booth, Prof. Wen-chin Ouyang, Alice Guthrie, Claire Cobham, Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger, Sophie Lewis. They are responsible for translating not just the words, but the sensibilities, the atmosphere, the era. Translators have always been our gateways to other cultures and they provide an invaluable role as such. I think that English language readers with puritanical sensibilities can be put off when there’s an indulgence in sentimentality. It’s seen as indulgent. Another cultural gap in women’s writing is that it’s seen to be off-putting to have a narrator who is really happy about being beautiful, but why should it be? Some of the writers, going back hundreds of years, have this approach that it’s what God gave you, so enjoy it. But that too can alienate an English-speaking reader. They’re like: get over yourself, stop being vain. So sometimes it’s cultural, sometimes it’s linguistic. In We Wrote In Symbols , we sought to find texts that bridged that gap while encouraging the reader to feel these primitive yearnings through the hearts, bodies and words of another region of the world."