Prose Editor Amine Mohammed Bit sat down with writer and literary critic Omar Abu Samra to discuss a chapter from his upcoming book, ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, entitled “My Village, ‘Al-Shajarah,’” which was translated from the Arabic by Khader Barham. Abu Samra is a Palestinian writer, born in Haifa. He studies American and English literature in JGU in Mainz, Germany and published his first book “The First Trees” in 2023. He also works for Al-Araby Al-Jadid as a literary critic.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I. On Being a Writer of Technique
AB (The Columbia Review): There have been many renditions of Naji Al-Ali and the story of Al-Shajarah in Palestinian literature, so I wanted to ask you about this particular narrative: you invoke the Bible, and also use this really interesting mixture of both Classical and modern Arabic literary mannerism. For starters, what pushed you to write this piece?
OA (Omar Abu Samra): This story is a chapter from my upcoming book “I Am The Anthem”[‘Anahuwa ‘al-nasheed], which is going to be published soon. I published my first book three years ago in Lebanon, so this is my second book, and I decided to write a challenging one. So this was my intuition beyond the context, because context for me as a Palestinian is easy to possess, but the structure was really important to me.
In Arabic literature, they focus on the context, but the structure is really mainstream. They talk about chaos and war, but in a very superficial, repetitive way. So I was interested in Western literature, especially William Gaddis in American literature, Claude Simone in French literature—these kinds of authors of demanding syntaxes.
So I wanted to do this in my piece, and the topic, which was Naji Al-Ali or the village of Al-Shajarah where people were killed and displaced, was already one that I had in my memory. So the context for me was not that hard. But, to have this kind of poetic structure between symbolism, modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism–so all of these traditions I wanted to put together in one piece.
And this paragraph—this chapter—is from a book that covers 400, 500 pages. So this was my aim, to try to create something new and authentic and original for Arabic literature. If you see the chapter it’s one paragraph, which does not fit that much in Arabic literature. You will not find another piece in modern Arabic literature where they write this same structure.
I think the aim of the syntax of the piece, the approach of the syntax, is to create a different approach to the context. I am, I think, a writer of technique much more than context, butbecause I am Palestinian, and because the context is really harsh and vivid at the same time, and is really brutal, the context dominates much more than my way of writing.
AB: Thank you. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine in the Moroccan francophone literary tradition and the literary project of that era, but your piece provoked so many of the affects I feel when I read those authors. Like you said, this kind of method of writing the Arabic language really doesn’t exist, and it reminds me so much of how the writers of the Years of Lead were subverting the trends of modern French literature.
OA: I do know of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine books, such as Agadir for example, but he is, I think, much more of a poet than a prose writer. The French are geniuses, and they have really interesting writers. Claude Simon was expelled from L’Academie française even though he won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and his books are to me a kind of “upgraded” Faulkner.
I like Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde period of French literature, and many many others. And of course, Proust, the writer to whom we are all indebted. Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, though, not so much.
AB: For sure. I ask about Khair-Eddine specifically because, as one reads through ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, there is, like in Agadir, a remarkable emphasis on the visual. You at times cross out entire paragraphs, or use drawings and images. There’s also ten or so pages of just the verb forms [‘awzan] of one verb, which was so thrilling to read. This leads me to my next question, which is specifically about Arabic literary mannerism.
Throughout Al-Shajarah, you use saja’, repetition, and nzem in this work to create such a fluid sense of historical temporality. This stream-of-consciousness narrative is exceptionally rare in modern Arabic literature, and yet, the prose of the narrative almost reads anachronistically given its historical context, but also not necessarily so. Could you talk more about what kind of effect you were trying to produce by using these techniques?
OA: I have many many models in my mind, from many great authors in the West. Some of whom I’ve mentioned—William Gaddis, James Joyce, Faulkner, many of whom are not really taught in universities. I study literature in Germany, and they understand literary prowess within a limited set of criteria.
My main teacher, though, was the Qur’an, and my goal was to understand this language of the Qur’an—to use this language, and to fit it within a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is more common within Western literature. I also use a lot of pre-Islamic and post-Islamic poetry in order to make this fit into the text.
My approach was to write a challenging book, but the book was something that took shape over time. I think that this poetic prose, using all of these metaphors from the Qur’an, from the Bible, from even the Jewish Bible, really fits into the concept of Palestine. I really wanted to do it, and it fit, and it’s like a mathematical equation. You solve it, and it works. And it turned out for me that I started and I could not stop it. It was like a river for me, you know? And this is what I think makes the book, to me, special, is that it doesn’t have a beginning and it doesn’t have an end. I could easily add 400 or 500 pages to ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed without being distracted. I just wanted people to enjoy my sentences—the kind of euphoria and orgasm of sentences. When I fall in love with a writer, I fall in love with a sentence. I don’t fall in love with stories. I am not a storyteller. I write books. I write literature. So, I don’t care about stories, because the stories will appear without realizing it. The sentence was what was my aim.
II. Palestine as a Poem
AB: Your response reminds me, actually, of the last sentence of your book. Balad…tasbahu qasida’ [A country…becomes a poem], which I believe resonates so strongly with how you’ve framed your approach to the context that you’re writing in, but also your strong sense of voice and personality that shines through in your prose that is modeled in this text but also in the book overall.
OA: This sentence is incredibly important to me. Because what is the most beautiful thing in the world? I think, a poem. What is the most painful thing in the world? I think, a poem, as well. That’s why I always see Palestine as a poem. Because in a poem, you can suffer, and you can be sad, and you can cry. Only in a poem can you survive. This is the aim—regardless of whether you feel pain, or love, or feel whatever you feel. The poem is the only truth that we possess. This might be a bit vague, but while all else is transient, the poem is what survives. This is what we see in the Iliad, in Dante, in Vergil. This is why, perennially, I see Palestine as a poem. I myself wanted to be a poet, but I couldn’t, so this is why I write prose, which is the funny part.
AB: This definitely comes through. In the story, you write “here is Palestine, a homeland of endless pain”[huna filastin, mawtin la nihayiyaat al’alam], and later in the paragraph, you ask “But what is more beautiful? Gain or loss?”[ma al’ajmalu? alribh ‘aw alkhasara?]. This binary that you’re playing with, of both pleasure and pain, of jouissance–of pleasure to the point of pain, is so provocative. There’s almost something relational about this text, with regards to the pleasure of the reader, and so I think the metaphor of orgasm that you use is incredibly accurate.
OA: This is tricky. I am against binary-oppositions, but I use them subversively. I’m thinking of Deleuze here, where he talks about how Kant was a limited philosopher, but uses Kant’s vocabulary with the aim of meaning those terms’ opposites.
There are a lot of binary oppositions in this book, like heaven and hell, hate and love, but I use these systems as opposed to believing in them. Because, well, we as writers do not always write what we believe in. Otherwise, your writing will amount to a confession, and in my book, Iam not confessing, I am a witness. Wa hathi shahadati [And this is my testament]. And being a witness is advantageous because you can play, you can lie, et cetera.
AB: Absolutely. I don’t think this work falls victim to any kind of binary-opposition, in fact, on the contrary. For that reason, it reminds me so much of Abd Al-Qahir Al-Jurjani’s literary criticism and how he talks about reading the nzem–the construction–of a text, as opposed to reading for a particular argument that I find so fascinating.
This leads me to my next question, which is that ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed starts with a quotation from the Bible. You invoke various biblical quotes throughout Al-Shajarah, and the epigraphs from ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed are from the Bible, James Joyce, and Abu Nuwas. Upon reading Al-Shajarah, one may be inclined to argue that its project is solely of a subversive usage of Zionist indigeneity claims that cite the Bible. I think, however, that argument misses the point—which is that the goal is to reject any kind of absolute interpretation of a text altogether. Would you say that’s accurate? I also really want to hear more about why you invoke the Bible specifically.
OA: Yes. If you read Ulysses, Joyce uses the Bible as well. Ulysses is really my Bible as well. Sometimes, we writers don’t have aims, or brutal, or scary aims, but models. That’s why, sometimes, people get us wrong. If you speak to writers and ask them “why did you use this sentence?” or “what did you mean by this sentence?”—the writing process doesn’t work this way. I hate controlled prose. I’m against it.
For me, the beauty of a sentence, its function, as well as its meaning in a text is much more a question of harmony than meaning. Do I mean what I said? Well, maybe today I mean it, but tomorrow I won’t. Maybe today I don’t mean it, but tomorrow I will. Some may say that my writing is antisemitic, but that’s not the point. My point is not to criticize or label a certain group of people. My aim is to write a complex, poetic syntax regardless of whatever topic I’m writing about.
AB: I couldn’t agree more. It’s evident, just in reading this text, that it is so much more than any particular end goal or political thesis. This is a work of art, and the emphasis is technique regardless of the subject matter.
OA: I’m so glad that you see it in this way. This piece goes so far beyond even the Palestinian case. This text belongs to a certain group of writers that I have mentioned, which are not very well read, and you know that. And, ok, it could be that I’m obsessed with beauty, or that I obey beauty. It was not just, though, about the beauty of the syntax, but I believe that this is the only way in which one can write about chaos. A situation that is uncertain.
All of my prose is uncertain prose, because for me, literature is essentially uncertain. When literature becomes certain, it’s not good literature. This is why I do not like mainstream literature. If I wanted to be certain, I could just write the text in a direct manner. “And the Zionists did this and this and this.” I would have written the sentences differently, instead of switching betweenmonologues, to the language of the Bible, to postmodernist prose, to symbolism, to historical language, to the first, second, and third-person, et cetera, et cetera.
III. Against Beautiful Ideas
AB: Branching off a little bit more, when you invoke specific Biblical and Qur’anic quotations, it reminds me so much of the late style of Mahmoud Darwish, and specifically how towards the end of his career he started invoking the Qur’an often in works like Fi hadrat al-ghiyab (fabi’ayi ala’ rabikuma tukadhiban) or in ‘Ana yusuf ya ‘abi (ra’ayt ‘ahad eashar kawkaban walshams walqamar ra’aytuhum li sajidin).
OA: Yes, exactly, I’ve read them all. I actually only like one poem by Mahmoud Darwish, surprisingly. I’m writing a book about just this poem, alkhuruj min sahil almutawasit, specifically. I’m not a big fan of Mahmoud Darwish, for many reasons, but this one poem from all of these great collections inspires me. I think the poet who is most similar to me in the Middle East, who is both famous, infamous. and underrated, is Amal Dunqul. He’s great.
But yes, I’ve read Mahmoud Darwish, and I don’t know if something happened in my unconscious, but in this book I had three specific poetic models, which were Al-Mutanabbi, Abu Nuwas, and Najwan Darwish. As well as, like I said, Gaddis, Thomas Bernard, Joyce, in terms of my prose. There is a literature matrix in ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, which really puts all of my influences together.
AB: It almost feels like this text is a kind of communion of all of these writers, which you unite in an incredible act of translation into prose. To speak more about ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, could you talk more about the epigraph from Abu Nuwas, as well as the epigraph by Joyce “Lord, I am wet”?
OA: Again, this book exists beyond the Palestinian case. It is obsessed with both masculine and feminine beauty. There is a chapter about Bleckett’s Waiting for Godot, and it’s written in the same way, between a man and a woman.
In the final chapter, The Last Tongue of Ulysses, or The Way to Uçmag, which is heaven in all Turkish mythology, I am describing the beauty of a man, as well. So, I use both of these forms of beauty because Joyce included many sex scenes in Ulysses, and Abu Nuwas was gay and obsessed with masculine beauty, so I tried to combine these two contexts and allow the reader to analyze it on their own.
So this is why I stuck to these two figures, and regarding ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, there are many topics of which this is just one. There is the language of the Bible, of the Qur’an, modern language, syntax, beauty, the idea of beauty, Palestine, the wars, the fall of Haifa. In the Turkish case, being in Germany as well, being in Turkey, I talked about Ataturk, I talked about some revolutions in Turkey. If you read Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller, you will see that I utilize much from his approach.
A book, to me, is a biography. I will say that I hate this labeling—that a book is fiction, or a biography, or something. But, my approach towards writing as an idea, was like Henry Miller. So I just put some of my experiences, some of the places that I lived in, in the book, which was exactly what Henry Miller did, 100 years ago.
AB: I want to focus on a couple of throughlines here that I’ve noticed in our conversation. You’ve talked a lot about the Qur’an as a teacher, about writing as an idea separate from your focus on syntax, but also about beauty—how do you feel your love for beauty manifests in your writing, as the ultimate goal of creative production? Did all of these chapters start off as a beautiful idea?
OA: No, I don’t think so. You don’t have beautiful ideas. You write about beauty because you don’t have it, or you want to create it. A great example which will explain what beauty is to me is the book The Flame by Gabriele D’Annunzio. This book explains everything that I wanted to say and imply about beauty in my book.
Of course, I don’t think anything is beautiful. Beauty exists even in pain. What is beauty? I think, only writers and artists can understand this as a concept. Beauty that doesn’t mean something is beautiful—a kind of beauty that is complete even within a thing that is broken. A beauty that exists even in the absence of beauty. It’s transcendental. It’s dynamic, not static.
AB: I understand what you mean. Especially when we talk about aesthetics in the West as a study of beauty, there is a sort of underlying assumption that something that is beautiful is perfect. The Greeks, however, understood aesthetics not solely as the study of beauty but rather the study of appearances, including that which is both complete and incomplete.
OA: All of the great works that I’ve mentioned (and particularly, The Recognitions by Gaddis) are great precisely because they are incomplete. That is what makes them genius. If the text is complete, then you can’t negotiate it! You can’t talk about it. You can’t analyze it. You don’t have the space. So this is the aim of literature, to be uncertain, and to be incomplete. If it’s complete, there’s a problem. This is why I detest writers who will speak about their influences and techniques in their interviews, but won’t use them in their writing.
Like, if I speak about stream-of-consciousness in an interview, but I don’t include it in my text, that means that I lied. Everything that I’m telling you right now is exactly what I have in my books. You can not read Proust and write like Paul Coelho. This is a problem that bothers me, especially in the Middle East, but also in contemporary literature in the West. That’s why I’m against commercial literature.
And this is what Gaddis did, and what I’m trying to follow by saying I’m against this as well. Even though, maybe I won’t be famous. Maybe my chances of being published will be low. This book, ‘Ana huwa al-nasheed, ten publishers have refused it. Do you know why? Because “it’s too complicated,” “it’s not going to sell,” and “unfortunately, the Palestinian case does not matter,” and so on. I thought after publishing my first book, the second one would be easy to publish. That has not been the case. But I cannot compromise. Because once you compromise over something really valuable, like literature, you have lost. You can not write a text because your publisher wants you to, or your manager wants you to.
IV. Ambiguity, Extraneity, and Literary Freedom
AB: This approach towards literature, for me, is reminiscent of Jean Genet’s work and trajectory as a writer. Particularly his embrace of his extraneity. Could you talk more about how his approach figures into your work?
OA: I’ve read Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, as well as a huge introduction to the book by Jean Paul-Sartre. It’s a good book, but there are many prose writers that are better than him. There’s something that is not there for me. I really enjoyed it, but I enjoy writing that is much more philosophical, although he is a magnificent writer. You can’t compare him, though, to Claude Simon. When you read The Flanders Road, for example, it’s hard to find any other book that is able to match it. I like the French. Not Balzac, not Flaubert, but the others.
AB: On a related note, let’s talk about ambiguity in your work. I think you hit this perfect balance of uncertainty in your prose that grips the reader with this strong sense of anticipation that remains even when the text is over. Could you tell me more about how you cultivate anticipation, ambiguity, and uncertainty through your technique?
OA: I should say that I don’t care so much about the reader, and I’m not a writer for every reader. I don’t want this sentiment to breach into elitism, but I know my books are for a specific kind of person. Sometimes, I see myself as a modernist, others as a symbolist, a postmodernist—but I guess I like them all. Maybe I’m avant-garde. I don’t know if my books are vague, but they are nonlinear. I don’t want to call them vague or weird, but the correct word is nonlinear. If you read The Recognitions, it’s not a weird book. It’s not a shocking book in terms of what will happen. You don’t expect anything from this book. The book itself is made without any expectation. It’s a puzzle, and this kind of work is quite different.
AB: I agree. I don’t think you organize yourself according to any historical movement, but, from what I’m garnering, according to principles.
OA: Yes, and everybody says writers should be aware of their skills, but, and maybe this is quite naive but I really believe it, but I love this part of me that seeks to make my prose much more brave—much more free. I will give you an example. If you read The Time of the Hero, you can see that the first work of Llosa, when he was 24 years old, was really brave and free. Because he let himself do it, beyond the structure, beyond the skills.
But after this, he was much more aware of his writing, and then you can feel the difference between that and the first flame you have as a writer. And I don’t want to lose this! I want to write every book as if I still have this first flame. I don’t plan for my books. I don’t plan the topic. I don’t plan what syntax I want to use because, when you write a lot, you reach a certain point where this is your voice and these are your syntaxes.
Take, for example, the works of Thomas Bernard. They’re all the same book. I’m not kidding. You’re reading the same book. The same structure, the same kind of syntax, in a different kind of frame. The first book is talking about Austria. The second book is talking about a mother. The third book is talking about childhood. The same syntax, the same approach, no plot, you don’t have anything, but you keep it because this is the project. His syntax, his approach is the project. My case is similar. Every time that I’ve tried to write an idea, I’ve written its opposite. Every time. That is why I don’t plan. I don’t get stuck in prose, or monologue, or dialogue—I like them all. I don’t like to control my prose that much, because if I try to control it, I will lose something that I was born with.
That is why many writers, I think, are not good writers, because they work within a very specific schedule that says “I will write 300 pages, 400 pages, five chapters, this is the beginning, this is the end.” For me, this is not the case. I’m the kind of writer that can not end a book. Maybe all that I do is force myself to end a book. It’s something that I really hate. About myself, about being a writer—is that I put a last sentence. But this is something that you have to do.
AB: As a writer, you never really finish a work, you just stop. There is a certain trauma in separation from a work. In being taken away from a text that you’ve become attached to and becomes a part of yourself. Likewise, before we conclude, I wanted to again put this story in its broader context, which is that it is a chapter of your upcoming book. Was there anything about your book that you would like to add for our readers that would like to follow your work?
OA: No, that is all, thank you for this interview. I would just like to place extra emphasis on the models and writers that I’ve mentioned, who will serve as a guide for the reader in understanding my approach and influences.