Karim Kattan is a writer and researcher who lives between Bethlehem and Paris. In 2014, he cofounded el-Atlal, an international residency in Jericho for artists and writers. His first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was published in 2017 by Elyzad. His first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, is forthcoming in January 2021.
Karim’s writing is like a rupture. He has the ability to discuss uncanny and often uneasy topics with a literary beauty. It would be limiting to categorize him solely as a “fiction writer,” as his writing spans across genres from nonfiction to academic, with works published in The Funambulist, +972 Magazine, and The Maine Review. I first discovered his writing on The Paris Review, in an essay about an abandoned and haunting yellow building on the road from Jericho to the Dead Sea. In it, he blurs the lines between fiction and reality, all while intertwining elements of storytelling and oral history. Karim weaves worlds together, creating a tapestry of ideologies that often seem on the verge of colliding, yet somehow converge. For Karim, the personal can be political, and he often skillfully uses oratory and intergenerational stories to address the fraught subject of erasure. A particularly alluring quality to his writing is his ability to play with transience, often expanding brief moments into larger and absorbing experiences.
The craft of writing is of tantamount importance for Karim. He often talked to me about the importance of humility both in writing and in general practice. He holds a devotional importance to editing and crafting sentences that both have a purpose while retaining an aesthetic beauty to them. He approaches the written text like a precarious manuscript that needs to be made relevant. In this interview, we discuss the craft of writing, desert landscapes, and the language of belonging.
—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon
MK Harb (MKH): Karim, tell me more about your writing process. How do you navigate writing for multiple audiences? You once said your PhD training has positively influenced your writing as a novelist. How is that? I view literary writing as expansive and breathable, while academic writing as compact . . .
Karim Kattan (KK): The best academic writing I have encountered is both compact and expansive. I used to be worried that academic writing, specifically the long-term process of a PhD, would have a negative impact on my fiction—that it would dry it up, as it were . . . Perhaps it has. But I don’t see a contradiction between the two, except insofar as they fall within different professional fields or industries.
Academic writing is a beautiful thing: at its best, it is concise, straightforward, and elegant. My fiction writing tends to be rather rambling, a bit all over the place. I think the discipline of academic writing has helped shape this into something that is at least readable.
It’s true that academic writing seems to have bad press in some circles (circles that, themselves, tend to value nonsensical, elitist writing—in much of the art world, for instance), as if it were an oppressive force or something, when it is the exact opposite of that. It is a process of liberation. Academic writing should make thought available to all, hence its simplicity and its demonstrativeness. Now, the university as an institution—especially the North American for-profit model—surely is oppressive in many ways. But not research.
Now the question of audiences is different; it has more to do, in my opinion, with the languages that one chooses to write in. I do not write the same thing for an English-speaking audience than I do for a French-speaking one. Especially as a Palestinian, I know that, whether I want it or not, my writing will be taken as representative of Palestinians in general (It’s not! It shouldn’t be!). For instance, I usually steer clear from some subjects when I write in French, because I know how they can be recuperated. However, that is a whole other debate.
MKH: Your research concerns literary imaginations of the desert in Mediterranean landscapes. Why the desert?
KK: It’s always difficult to explain why one ends up researching something. I have always been interested in space as a research topic. I did my masters in film studies, and my thesis focused on the metropolis in science fiction film. After that, I wanted to study the forest in literature, and somehow, by taking detours here and there, ended up studying the desert instead. Interestingly enough, forest and desert are two sides of the same coin, in many ways.
In Romance languages (especially French), you often do not have a distinction between the words for “wilderness” and “desert”. So, until the nineteenth century, what “désert” in French meant was both “desert” and “wilderness”; and in many ways, the forest was a désert. Anywhere far from the centers of power, where society didn’t reach or was overcome by nature, was a désert. You still have some lovely eighteenth-century parks around Paris called “déserts.”
Therefore, I guess I ended up studying the desert by looking for a way into the forest.
MKH: When I think of desert landscapes, I imagine Ghasan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and the punishing journey his protagonists endured. The desert in that narrative represents inherently political truth. Is that a theme you problematize in your research?
KK: It is a deadly journey. The desert is political, naturally. In many more ways than one. In Men in the Sun, the desert is a consciousness: obscure, malevolent, violent. It is, quite literally, hell and where the protagonists, and their ideals, go to die. It is a scathing critique of religion, of Arab regimes and their abandonment of Palestinians. They do not only die in the desert, they’re buried—rendered nameless and faceless—in a rubbish dump, far from the world of the living. There’s lots to say about Men in the Sun’s relevance today; reading the plight of refugees who die, through the fault of borders and irresponsible smugglers, as they cross the desert is not a far cry from seeing how the Mediterranean became a mass grave for the bodies of refugees.
Most of my research deals with the political aspects of the desert. They are endless. If one thinks of the North American desert—specifically in the United States—it is also the place where nuclear testing occurs, and where some of the many genocidal assaults on indigenous peoples took place. In Algeria, too, French nuclear testing took place in the desert at some point. More broadly, in many ways, the modern art of war was developed in the desert.
All spaces are political, of course. Landscape is an invention of European modernity, too. But the desert holds a very special power in the political imagination.
MKH: The question of geography largely looms in your work. Being from both Bethlehem and Paris, how do you reconcile an affinity to a place in writing?
KK: Part of the pleasure of writing (and of reading) is that it creates a sense of time and place. It’s very distinctive. It’s thick and lush. It’s different, say, from the sense of time and place that film creates.
I think our relationship to duration is evolving. Both because we’re learning more and more to engage with short-term content, and because—in the long run—we’re more than ever aware that we will either soon be extinct as a species, or that the world to come will be unrecognizable to us. Therefore, duration is something that often seems outside of our grasp. A lot of this is recovered in reading and writing. Time coalesces again into something dense; something, perhaps, boring at times. It’s a real pleasure, to feel time again.
It seems like I’m deviating from your question, but I’m increasingly aware (perhaps this is one of the effects of confinement), that the sense of place is also one of time. I try to cultivate this, in my reading practice and in my writing practice. It’s a luxury to be able to do so. When space seems to be constantly surveilled, removed, dangerous, time becomes essential.
MKH: You are fluent in Arabic, French, and English, and you recently started learning Japanese. Is language polyphonic to you? In what sounds does writing come to you?
KK: Writing is a craft. It’s sometimes fast, sometimes slow; sometimes pleasant and sometimes very painful. I don’t think writing comes to me in any language, but the one I chose to write in determines a lot of the form and content.
I find English very conducive to some types of writing, and French to others. I notice that my writing in English will be much more attuned to describing light, sound, texture. In French, it will tend to be more abstract. But either way there’s a very strong physicality. And languages carry with them the entirety of everything we’ve ever read; I sometimes surprise myself with a turn of phrase or a specific word used in a specific way, only to remember that it’s only something I read a long time ago.
I have a novel coming out in a couple of months. It’s a book I wrote over a year ago, called Le Palais des deux collines, and it’s about this guy who locks himself up in his family’s palace in the hills near Nablus in the West Bank as it is being invaded by settlers, and he sort of just goes mad. It could only have been written in French—it would sound very petulant and hectic in English.
I feel comfortable in words, though the process of writing means that you’ll always come up short of language.
MKH: You chose to write your debut collection of short stories in French. Why is that? The stories deal with love and disrupted languages. Is love a theme you tackle in French, or does it permeates across all your languages?
KK: I didn’t really choose. Literature is an industry; it comes with its constraints, opportunities, complications. It so happens that I met an incredible Francophone publisher, based in Tunis, Elyzad—and I just decided to submit three short stories to them; we made this book together.
The debut collection, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, feels like it was written by someone else. As for love, it’s just naturally a subject I’m interested in: love as a narrative. The book is all about these failed relationships and how they slowly crumble under the weight of the protagonists’ inability to communicate, and to tell their own stories. I think perhaps it’s actually a book about storytelling in intimacy, more than about love proper.
MKH: There is a strong element of disquiet in your fiction writing. Where does that come from?
KK: Although I don’t think any of my characters are me, they do have some aspects of myself here and there. Disquiet is my default mode of living. Being in the world is a disquieting experience. Being a Palestinian is, too—sometimes you feel like you’re part of something that is slowly evaporating, that is systematically being destroyed. It naturally would suffuse my writing. Palestine is often that, a quivering disquiet, something teetering on the verge of nothingness.
In all the latest things I’ve written, the characters are really quite anxious and angsty. The danger of that, I’d say, is that it can become quite complacent—especially when you write as a cis man, it’s so easy to erect disquiet, unease, as a polish to make your characters or writing seem interesting and deep when in fact they just come off as sulky and childish. There’s a lot of male writing like that. It’s insufferable. I hope I manage to avoid that.
MKH: What about the role of the author in constructing belonging? You are comfortable with writing across genres, but do you feel a pressure to represent Palestine in writing?
KK: I wouldn’t say there’s a pressure to represent Palestine. However, no matter what I do and what I write, it will always circle back to Palestine in the minds of my readers. I don’t know if I would have felt that pressure if I wrote in Arabic—probably, but differently.
I personally do feel like I don’t want my writing to be reductive. It’s about Palestine. It’s always about Palestine; because you just can’t up and decide that this huge, dark, all-swallowing hole, is not your main concern. But I want my narrators to be as naturally Palestinians as they are naturally gay, for example. It’s just my default narrator’s concerns.
Writers from some countries, like Palestine, bear the heavy burden of having to constantly testify; as if we don’t have access to fiction, only documentary. As if our only role were to perform, to a foreign audience (both Western and Arab), images of Palestine. I am not interested in that.
MKH: On the question of belonging, which Palestinian authors resonate with you and why?
KK: There are many authors I enjoy and admire. I remember discovering Raja Shehadeh as a teenager and being completely intoxicated with the fact that it was possible that someone wrote Strangers in the House. It was a revelation.
I think one of the authors I really connect with, or whose works resonate powerfully with me, is Hussein al-Barghouti. I only read him very late in life and it felt like finding a new family.
In one of his last works, I will be among the almond trees, Hussein’s mountains sing, they are filled with noises, with lantern-carrying djinns and magical beasts lurking in the mists. His Palestine is a landscape given back to its mythical roots, where Jesus and al-Khadr casually bring back to life a child who’s been murdered and cooked into a labbaniyeh. In this Palestine, seen through the eyes of Hussein struggling with cancer, it is perfectly believable that a viper did one day fly through the night sky, ululating to celebrate the fact that she killed one of his ancestors.
It’s a landscape aglow with the possibilities of magic. And the Palestine it testifies to—one still connected to powerful pagan roots, but also cosmopolitan in its beliefs, and incredibly diverse in every single little town—is the one I love and the one that has been disappearing fast. It’s dark, deep, full of mystery and light.
It’s amazing really that—as far as I know—he was never translated into English, and only partially into French, and those translated books are impossible to find.
MKH: I’d like to close up by asking a crucial question. Has a literary figure ever visited you in a dream? If so, what did they say?
KK: I don’t dream much, and when I do it’s very boring. And I don’t grant a lot of importance to literary figures per se. But to tie in with the previous question, I think I’d very much enjoy having dinner with Colette, Murasaki Shikibu, and Virginia Woolf. Now that would be a lot of fun, though there’d be some awkwardness.
Karim Kattan is a writer and researcher who lives between Bethlehem and Paris. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature. In 2014, he cofounded el-Atlal, an international residency in Jericho for artists and writers. His first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was published in 2017 by Elyzad. His first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, was published in January 2021.
MK Harb is a writer from Beirut, currently serving as editor-at-large for Lebanon at Asymptote. He received his Master of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2018. His fiction and nonfiction writing is published in BOMB Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic, Art Review Asia, Asymptote, and Jadaliyya. He is currently working on a collection of short stories pertaining to the Arabian Peninsula.
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