In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.
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Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?
Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.
To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.
RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?
NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.
All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.
RJ: A significant portion of the story takes place in the area of Burj Hammoud. Why did you feel drawn to this area, and why did you select it as the setting for your novel?
NB: I wanted the novel’s events to take place in neighborhoods like Burj Hammoud, Al-Naba’a, and Karantina because they represent the underbelly of the city, constituting the capital’s outer belt and northern suburb before joining [administrative] Greater Beirut. Mister N goes to these areas from his bourgeois neighborhood, Achrafieh, looking to replace an item that broke down in his bathroom. By doing so, he ends up discovering the hidden, dark side that lurks behind the city’s bright façade—areas crowded with refugees, migrant workers, legal and illegal laborers from countries in Asia and Africa, people fleeing the region’s different wars, as well as Lebanese who left their various villages in search for livelihood in the capital. In this immense human dump, where the wretched of the Earth and its pariahs live and speak in every tongue, Mister N will find an opportunity to identify with and disappear into other people’s pain. In fact, by turning himself into a scapegoat and becoming another victim among them, Mister N goes on to feel capable of absolving his narrow subjectivity and his family’s constricted past—with a mother that never wanted or loved him and a weak, defeated father—to become a member of this giant, detached [human] vessel, swimming without direction or destination toward its fate.
RJ: Building on the previous question, Mister N has a fraught relationship with Beirut and its rapidly changing urban landscape. What is your personal relationship to the Lebanese capital, and how has it changed, if at all, over the last few years?
NB: Beirut is our curse. It is a never-ending and persistent ache. It is the burden and pain of every Lebanese, laden with broken promises, immense disappointments, and countless losses. I was forced out of Beirut during the civil war, and after I decided to come back to the city in 2010, it forced me out once again in the summer of 2021. What this beautiful Mediterranean city has lived through and all that it continues to endure is unimaginable and unbearable. It is the free, creative, and unique capital that resembles no other, but it is also the criminal, killer, and brutal city whose children escape—tirelessly and relentlessly. Though we are currently watching Beirut drown and take its final breaths, its light slowly extinguished, we remain drawn to this city, still seeking a return to its embrace. There is no consolation for Beirut’s loss. It was the most beautiful dream given to the Lebanese people and Arabs alike. Unfortunately, the dream turned into a nightmare. Beirut cannot be replaced. There is no forgetting, salvation, or consolation.
RJ: Perhaps there is no forgetting or salvation or consolation, but can we find hope in Beirut? Despite the difficulties and the dark times that this city and Lebanon more generally are experiencing, we sometimes feel the need to excavate pockets of hope in order to push through and move forward, even if our ability to withstand these difficulties is fading day by day. Where does Mister N look for silver linings in Beirut, and where does he find them? Do you find that you are able to remain hopeful about Beirut and if so, how?
NB: I would be lying if I said that I still hold space for hope when I think of Beirut or of Lebanon. We must admit to this truth because it reflects the reality around us, and denial leads nowhere. We are living through one of the darkest and most difficult times that our country has ever experienced. Famine and poverty are knocking on the doors of many Lebanese households, whose only means of resisting complete collapse are the remittances from family members living abroad. The country is held hostage by a mafia, the state’s role is completely absent, institutions have collapsed, and what once made this small country special is long gone. Banks hijacked the Lebanese people’s savings, people live in darkness and without basic services, electricity, or medicine . . . and you speak to me of hope? I do not know how long this dark tunnel—the same tunnel we entered at the beginning of the civil war in 1975—will stretch. There is little hope that remains, and if it does exist, perhaps its glimmers come from Lebanese in the diaspora and from the youth who demonstrated during the 2019 uprisings, who continue to prove their capacity for growing, maturing, [and surviving] beyond all expectations. My generation has lost all hope and is in deep despair, but this does not mean that change is impossible in the distant future, even if we cannot foresee or imagine these possibilities at the moment.
RJ: I read the novel in both Arabic and English, and they presented different experiences overall—perhaps because readers relate to language in unique ways based on personal histories and backgrounds. In both cases, however, I felt like the novel was akin to a much-needed emotional catharsis. What do you hope readers get out of the text, and out of Mister N’s struggles?
NB: I believe you mean catharsis in the way of the Greek tragedy, and perhaps this is the general purpose of literature and of reading. Regarding the translation, I personally did not feel that the English and Arabic versions of the text presented different experiences. Of course, every translation adds and removes a little, gives and takes, so that the translated text can find itself in harmony with the original. This is what my translator Luke Leafgren and my editor Jeremy Davies mastered to a large extent through their close collaboration.
I am certain that readers of the English version of Mister N will find that the novel speaks to them, because its concerns are universal even if the contexts are specific. The novel contends with the fate of the weak, vulnerable, and the poor in all parts of the world. It tackles the dilemma that literature faces when dealing with so much destruction and devastation, a situation that European writers similarly grappled with in the wake of the two World Wars—which brought the world to its knees and almost ended it. The main questions that Mister N poses are eternal: What drives an individual to commit all this evil? Can literature do something about it? And is there any meaning left when faced with the death of innocent people?
This interview was translated from the Arabic by Reem Joudi.
Najwa Barakat was born in Lebanon in 1961. After receiving a degree in theatre at the Fine Arts Institute in Beirut, she moved to Paris and studied cinema at Le Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français. She has hosted cultural programs produced by Radio France Internationale (RFI), the BBC, and Al Jazeera, and is the author of seven novels as well as the Arabic translator of Albert Camus’s notebooks. She lives in Paris.
Reem Joudi is a media researcher and writer based in Lebanon. She received her BSFS in international economics from Georgetown University and her M.A. in media studies from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual culture, digital media, urban studies, and affect theory.
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