I wrote my memoir, Huna, in English, which is to say I wrote it inside a contradiction. Huna is a memoir of the Egyptian revolution, six years of political imprisonment in Egypt, and my US exile. It enters English already burdened by the ways such stories are often received in this language: the Arab prison memoir as a torture spectacle for a detached reader on the other side of the world, where suffering can be safely consumed, at worst, as evidence of the Other’s barbarity, and, at best, as a well-intentioned exercise in goodwill empathy with the unfortunate Other “over there.” It’s a genre that often recalls what the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah described to me recently as a “parody of the self,” the self made to perform a recognizable, palatable version of its wound, even in dissent, in order to be legible.
That tension of writing Huna in English sharpened during the past years of genocide in Gaza. English was not only the language used to lubricate the killing, euphemize it, and authorize it; it was right there, stamped onto the missiles and rockets genociding Palestinian kin. It became impossible to write on as though this tension had not permeated my every line.
Western publishing tends to carry this pressure toward legibility: a bit of translation here, another italicization there, a footnote, perhaps, a handrail before the assumed target reader enters the foreign room. I’m not resistant to explanation, per se, on the contrary: it can indeed be craft, care, part of what a writer owes a reader. But in the particular political tension of this story, in this language, moving through this literary marketplace, uncritical explanation can also demand a steep price from one’s dignity.
How transparent must a world make itself before the assumed reader deems it worthy of encounter? This is what the duality of the ‘anbara’s language and content reaches toward: an invitation toward, more than anything, a mode of relation between author and reader. So, while writing Huna, the question was no longer only why I had chosen English, but what English demanded from the book in return.
I have written elsewhere that “when I reach for Arabic, I reach for radical love; when I reach for English, I reach for currency.” Currency as circulation, political reach, the ability to name. Also, the ability to build transnational solidarity across the very borders crushing our bodies. The craft problem, then, was how to write, imperfectly, a dignified work of literature in the currency of English without allowing English to become its sovereign.
I found it helpful to think alongside Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity”: that a text need not submit to transparency before intimacy can begin. Why equate the sense of welcome into a text with mastery and conquest of the writer, rather than view opacity as an invitation into another kind of relation? And so, sometimes I elaborated when elaboration felt like care.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
