Radical Reading: Sara Salem Interviewed by MK Harb

At the height of the pandemic, I—like so many of us—looked for new sources of intrigue and intellectual pleasure. This manifested in finding Sara Salem’s research and reading practice, Radical Reading, which was a discovery of sheer joy; Salem views books and authors as companions, each with their own offerings of certain wisdom or radical thought. When she shares these authors, she carries a genuine enthusiasm that they might come with some revelation.  

I interviewed Salem as she sat in her cozy apartment in London wrapping up a semester of teaching at the London School of Economics. We discussed our lockdown anxieties and our experiences with gloomy weather until we arrived at the perennial topic: the art of reading. The interview continued through a series of emails and transformed into a beautiful constellation of authors, novelists, and activists. In what follows, Salem walks us through the many acts of reading—from discussing Angela Davis in Egypt to radicalizing publications in her own work, in addition to recommending her own selections of radical literature from the Arab world.

MK Harb (MKH): Reading is political, pleasurable, and daring. Inevitably, reading is engaged in meaning-making. How did you arrive at Radical Reading as a practice?

Sara Salem (SS): Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of spending long afternoons at home reading novels, and when I think back to those novels, I find it striking that so many of them were English literature classics. I especially remember spending so much time reading about the English countryside—to the extent that today, when I am there, or passing it on a train, I get the uncanny feeling that it’s a place I know intimately. Later, when I read Edward Said’s writing on Jane Austen and English literature more broadly—its elision, erasure, and at times open support of empire—it struck me that we can often read in ways that are completely disconnected from the lives we live. This tension was what first opened up entire new areas of reading that completely changed my life, among which was the history of empire across Africa; at the time I was living in Zambia, where I grew up, and often visited Egypt. Critical history books were probably my first introduction to what you call the practice of radical reading, of unsettling everything you know and have been taught in ways that begin to build an entirely different world.

I like that you say reading is engaged in meaning-making, because it has always been the primary way in which I try to make sense of something. Even more recently, as I’ve struggled with anxiety, reading above all became my way of grappling with what I was experiencing: what was the history of anxiety, how have different people understood it, and how have people lived with it? I realise, of course, that not everything can be learned from a book, but so far, I’ve found that what reading does provide is a window into the lives of people who might be experiencing something you are, making you feel less alone.

MKH: How do you reconcile reading for pleasure versus reading for academic and political insights? Do they intersect? Being idle has its own spatial practice of radicality at times, and I’m curious on how you navigate those constellations.

SS: This question really made me think! In my own life, I have always made the distinction of fiction as pleasure and non-fiction as academic/work-related. So, if I need to relax, or want to take some time off, I will instinctively reach for fiction, and if I want to start a new project, I think of which academic texts would be helpful. However, this began to change about five or six years ago, when I began to think more carefully about how fiction speaks to academic writing and research, as well as how non-fiction—unrelated to my own work—can be a great source of pleasure and relaxation. This has meant that they have begun to intersect much more, and it has enriched both my academic work and my leisure time.

MKH: In 1985, Egyptian novelist and activist Ahdaf Soueif wrote “Passing Through” for the London Review of Books, critiquing Nobel Laureate William Golding’s An Egyptian Journal for its orientalist fables. Soueif argued that Golding’s writing manifested a frustration with the lived experience of Egypt not matching his political fantasies. How do you utilize reading in your research and teaching practice to combat othering?

SS: This is an issue I am very conscious of because of my own background—my father is Egyptian, my mother is Dutch, and I grew up in Zambia, before moving to Cairo at the age of sixteen. Navigating these different spaces and histories is something I try to attend to, especially in light of the “othering” tendencies amongst works on Zambia and Egypt. To me, a lot of this starts with the sources you use, the readings you engage with, and the materials you search for; this can really determine early on where your research and teaching will go in terms of how critical and sensitive it is. Another big thing for me is the question of who I want to speak to, which conversations I want to be part of, and whose experiences I take seriously. All of this has a lot to do with who we read, when we read it, and how we read it. I think about reading as a form of conversation. In teaching, for instance, what we read becomes a way of thinking about things differently; in one of my classes, The Anticolonial Archive, we read radical archives that are often not considered archives at all—and by read, I mean listen, smell, touch, feel, in addition to reading visually. This process has a transformative effect over the course of the term; by the end of it, we think of an archive as something entirely different.

I also think that the way we read matters. Often, as academics, we are taught to read in order to criticise (not critique, although that’s the word that’s often used). It’s as if in finding mistakes, problems, or faults, we have engaged in proper and deep reading. I’ve increasingly thought more about what generous, kind, and vulnerable reading might look like instead—reading to engage and speak with someone, rather than find faults. This is not to say that there aren’t faults, but to assume that there always will be, and given this, can we read for something else instead? I love Julietta Singh’s idea of loving critique and what this opens up.

MKH: In your article “On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt,” you discuss the hierarchies at play in “universal sisterhood” and the orientalising impact of culture on Egyptian women. How does reading play out in feminist solidarity and activism, particularly in the Global South?

SS: I think one of my first introductions to the possibilities embedded within reading widely was in feminism—specifically the dominance of white feminism, and how its replication through fiction and non-fiction meant that one way of disrupting it was to read elsewhere. There is a rich history of feminist writing by feminists across the Global South, much of which has touched on so many of the debates we continue to have today. Seeing this as part of our inheritance is one way of creating more solidarity across time as well as space.

At the same time, I am conscious of how reading is not the only medium of knowledge. Through teaching the course on anticolonial archives, I have come to think much more about how writing in a particular form became dominant following the European empire, displacing many other forms of passing on knowledge. This is why other sensory experiences, such as listening or feeling, are just as important to connecting with people, and equally so when it comes to feminist activism.

MKH: Could you select for us a few radical publications from the Arab region?

SS: The first would have to be Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. This is my absolute favourite book on earth, and I re-read it at least once a year. It’s a book that does so many things; it’s a love story, a generational saga, a narrative about diaspora and movement, but it’s also about Egypt in the twentieth century. This book made the power of fiction so clear to me in that it can speak about politics and economics in ways that can be so much more evocative than non-fiction. I find also that Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels—especially Zaat and Warda—does the same.

I absolutely loved Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, for the way it captured a side of Cairo not often written about. More recently, I have been enjoying Adania Shibli’s novels, especially Minor Detail. What I loved about Minor Detail, as painful as it was to read, was precisely what its title suggests—that going back and tracing “minor details” can tell us so much about the past and the present. Alongside this, I have been re-reading Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness.

Arwa Salih’s memoir, The Stillborn, is a book I have been sitting with since I first read it. It has made me think so much about a whole range of things, from feminism to communism, and especially the ways in which women’s intimate lives become entangled within socialist and political activism, often with terrible outcomes.

There are so many more I could mention, but these are the ones that I have been thinking and feeling with most recently.

MKH: In the publishing world, we are slowly seeing the rise of progressive and political children’s books dealing with gender and sexuality, racial justice, and migration. As an academic, at what point in the educational process do you believe reading should take on a radical note?

SS: I think this should happen as early as possible. We are deeply formed by what is around us when we are children, and I truly believe that changing even a few of those norms would have a dramatic impact on the world. One of my favorite things to do when a friend has a baby is to check out the latest progressive children’s books and pick out a few to get them. It’s a beautiful thing to see so much more out there these days.

MKH: What ideological space does fiction or poetry occupy in Radical Reading?

SS: Fiction is my first love. It will always be one of the things that excites me the most, as it’s pleasurable, but also, for me, it’s always represented an important form of escapism. On Radical Reading I try to keep a balance between fiction and non-fiction, so that it doesn’t become too focused on academic work. It matters to me that the books are readable and also enjoyable to read, and sadly this isn’t always the case with academic work.

I have to admit that poetry has never been the first thing I go to when I’m in a bookstore or at a library; although I love listening to it, I haven’t connected with it as much as I would like to. I’m not sure I’ve ever posted a poetry book on the page, although I do share poems in my stories. Maybe this is a sign to start exploring!

MKH: I’d like to close up by discussing some of your recent work; you wrote an experimental essay with Race, Space and Architecture, looking at and unraveling urbanity and coloniality from the vantage point of the sky. It is part of a ghost publication series and it contains a seductive line that says “Not printed in Harare, Cairo, Cape Town or London.” How can publishing and publishing houses radicalise? Is it about accessibility?

SS: This has been my favourite piece of writing to date, so I’m glad you mentioned it! The “ghost publication series’” is by my dear friends and comrades Thandi Loewenson and Huda Tayob, and I think it speaks to what you mention here in terms of radicalising publishing. The most important thing is that it is open access—something that academia especially has to begin taking more seriously—and can be accessed anywhere without worrying about shipping rates, times, or availabilities. One of my biggest regrets was not thinking about this more carefully when I published my first book, in terms of pricing and availability outside of the Global North; it’s something I put at the top of my priority list when I signed a contract for my second book.

I also love the feeling “ghost books” evoke, in that they push against the materiality of things and speak to the fleeting and ephemeral nature of knowledge. As much as I love physical books, I sometimes wonder if a “ghost book” is a more honest representation of knowledge—it’s real when you write it, but who knows what happens after that? When my first book came out, I remember what terrified me the most was that it was a “real” thing out in the world that I could never go back to. It had a life and existence of its own.

Finally, I love how Thandi and Huda reference where the book is not printed—”Harare, Cairo, Cape Town, or London”—as a way to continue producing a genealogy, one that is personal to all of us, as a collective who created this book. To me, there is something very beautiful about that.

Sara Salem is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism. Her recently published book with Cambridge University Press is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020).

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 appears in BOMB Magazine,The Bombay Review, 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.