Short story writer, poet, memoirist, and translator Mai Serhan was born to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother, and raised between the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Going on to study between Cairo, New York, and Oxford and work in Cairo, Dubai, and China, this mapping of her personal cartography and her transnational lineage transcends the borders of postcolonial nation-states—and so does her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, which touches among national histories, letters, and the personal essay.
In this interview, I asked Serhan about her book in the landscape of the larger Arab memoir from the diaspora; the languages and genders that thrive in the liminalities of modern Egyptian literature; state censorship in publishing and the consequent rise of the literary blog; and translating the songs of Egyptian composer Sayyed Darwish as well as the letters of Palestinian activist Ali Shaath.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The language of contemporary Egyptian literature, de facto, is Modern Standard Arabic—but there are writers who write in colloquial Egyptian Arabic and Ṣaʽīdi Arabic, echoing the lived reality of Egyptians in a gamut of dialects. Can you tell us the lingual milieu you write from—and how your decision to write in English come in?
Mai Serhan (MS): Let me first map my geo-genealogical gamut. I was born to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, and carried a Lebanese passport for most of my life, since it is where my father’s family moved after 1948, and Egyptian mothers did not have the right to pass their nationality down to their children until 2009. When the Lebanese Civil War broke in 1975, my paternal grandparents moved to Cyprus where they waited for the war to end for fourteen years. It is there that I spent all my summers and Christmases as a child and teenager. The rest of my Palestinian family would fly into Limassol from all corners of the world—Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, the UK, and the US—and I spent all my formative years exposed to these different registers around me. After university, I joined my father in China where he worked in the export business, and I got to help him until the final year of his life. We travelled far and wide there, meeting with many of his Arab clients. After his death, I moved to Lebanon briefly, then Dubai where I worked as an English copywriter, then to New York where I studied screenwriting at New York University, eventually ending up in Oxford for my Creative Writing degree. All these places have deeply informed my upbringing—which is quite an international one.
I write in English because I went to a private British school, then to American and British universities. It’s the language I have been formally trained in all my life, both academically and professionally. I know how to express myself very well in Arabic, but the written word is definitely more present to me in English; it’s the language that has housed my scholarly and creative pursuits the most. That said, I am able to slip between Arabic and English with total ease and I am the bicultural product of both the East and West—and pretty much everything in between as well.
If we were to speak of my memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, specifically, I would say the choice to write in English was a political one first and foremost; I wanted to address the English-speaking world, to debunk its many myths about land and people, and to promote awareness, compassion and understanding when it comes to Palestine and Palestinians.
AMMD: The ancient literature of Egypt is a wealth of narratives, tales, instructions and lamentations, love poems and songs, dialogues, religious hymns, autobiographies from stelaes and tombs, guidebooks to the afterlife, scribal traditions, and demotic writings. Today, it has also morphed into other forms. As a writer-practitioner and editor-critic, what is your take on the recent rise of literary sub/genres such as the mudawwanāt adabiyya´ (literary blogs) or ῾adab al-mudawwana´ (blog literature), which took part in the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime?
MS: Many will look down on literary blogs but I prefer to be curious. Why is this form emerging now? Why is it expanding? How is it reshaping the literary field? What are the multiple socio-economic and political realities that inform it? In other words, what does it tell us about the world we live in? Beyond it being good or bad literature, I am interested in observing, expounding on the ifs and buts, and hopefully drawing from these shifts, and others, to inspire people with artful and urgent content.
I’d also like to raise some other questions: do you have doubt that there are plenty of diamonds in the rough, just waiting to be found in this virtual ocean of words? Do you doubt that they have important stories to tell? To me, this raises bigger questions about power and democratization. I’ve been privileged in the kind of access I’ve had to education, but writing is an essential form of self-expression and it should be available to everyone. If you don’t like what you’re reading, just move on to something you’d like to read.
AMMD: The modern Egyptian literary canon spans from the Neoclassicists (al-Bārūdī, Shawqī) to the realists (al-Māzinī, al-῾Aqqād), from Nagīb Mahfūz to Youssef Zieden, from the Dīwān School to the al-Sufūr group—mostly writings in Arabic, by Arab men. What has been done so far to depart from this androcentric, Arab-dominated canon?
MS: There are plenty of brilliant women writers as well, beginning with Latifa El Zayat who wrote The Open Door, Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot, Alifah Rifaat’s A Distant View of the Minaret, and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun—the last two are works originally in English.
I’m not saying the literary field in Egypt is not androcentric, but these are some powerful writers with memorable texts in the Egyptian canon. There’s also Radwa Ashour, Reem Bassiouny, May El Telmissany, and Iman Mersal. As an Anglophone writer myself, I see many incredibly talented Egyptian women writers writing in English today. There’s Noor Naga who wrote If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, poets such as Sara ElKamel and Nour Kamel, and many others. They may not be canonized just yet, but I believe they are well on their way to leaving their mark.
That said, unfortunately, female writers writing in English do not have enough access to resources and institutions that support their practice here in Egypt. Our market remains in the West where a lot of weight is now put on ‘diversity.’ That goes for funds, grants, literary awards, and publications. Getting published in the West also relates to the idea of power versus democratization. The West is now a relatively safe and free conduit for Egyptian and Arab writers of different sexual orientations and political views opposing to the regime.
AMMD: An excerpt from your forthcoming memoir Return is a Thing of Amber is titled “I Have Never Been to the Place Where I am From, But I Will Imagine It For Us”; it was a finalist at the Narratively Memoir Prize 2022, and featured by Memoir Monday newsletter and Foreign Bodies. Can you tell us more on this memoiristic merge of the personal and the politico-historical?
MS: The personal is always political, as they say. Palestine in particular is obviously a politically charged topic, but it is also a very personal one to me. Being Palestinian but having never been to Palestine, it obscured and complicated my sense of identity. My father never spoke to me about Palestine—it was too hard for him as I came to understand later. All he said was that we had horse stables and a wine cellar back in Acre. I grew up thinking that’s all there was to it, and his silence didn’t indicate more at the time. As a result, there were integral parts of my psychological make-up that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know why I felt or acted differently, and grew up struggling, not quite able to fit in anywhere.
I only stumbled upon my roots by coincidence after my father passed away. There’s a key scene in Return is Thing of Amber where I read Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun and burst into tears. It’s because I come across the battle for my village, al-Kabri in Acre, and discover that my grandfather was a popular political leader. I did not know this vital piece of information. The entire village was stationed around his house on May 20, 1948, the day al-Kabri fell. “If we had fought throughout Palestine the way al-Kabri fought, we would not have lost the country,” it read. It was then that things clicked into place. I became curious about excavating and knowing more, and began to relate to others’ stories of displacement. I came to understand my Palestinianness as a site of intergenerational trauma.
My story was revealed to me first through one narrative, then many others. In time, I eventually became aware that I am part of a much larger group. More than seventy million Palestinians live in diaspora today, and their stories are largely unheard. It was at that point that I decided to write about it. I had a lot I needed to clarify, plenty of stereotypes to debunk, a narrative that was screaming at me to rewrite, and others like me who I needed to reach out to.
AMMD: Return is a Thing of Amber was originally titled The Renegades: A Story of Palestinian Diaspora. Why the change in title?
MS: Titling is a tricky. You need one as you start to write because it keeps you focused, but then when you’re done, you have a much better understanding of the entire scope of the work. The Renegades served me well while writing, but it also always felt too straightforward and boring. My memoir is not bound by genre; it moves between prose and poetry, and from historical account to letter, to essay, and at the center of it all is an action-packed plot. This movement necessitated a break with genre abd the use of different forms of address and language registers. Ultimately, The Renegades did not reflect its tone. When I was done with the writing, I found that the theme of “return” was a lot more urgent. How do you return when your reality denies you the right—it is through the story and all the tools available to me as a writer, language being the most vital one. This is the ultimate message.
As for “amber,” it relates to anger, the main emotion informing the narrative and the relationships that populate it. My father’s sense of loss and grief over his exile from Palestine were never properly communicated nor resolved. He was never given the space and opportunity to heal, and as a result, it ended up manifesting into anger, ravaging all his relationships, and ultimately, his body as well. Amber here is a reference to this anger. Amber is also fossil, which I associate with his ailing body, and its indelible effect on me. It is a scent that trails after me wherever I go. It is the color of an abated fire once I sit down to write the story and try to heal from all this ancestral baggage.
AMMD: Let’s talk about Rowayat (colloquial Egyptian Arabic for “stories”), the Anglophone literary journal where you currently serve as managing editor. Can you speak about the shifts in the journal’s editorial focus through the years: from print to online; from featuring Egyptian writers to expanding to Southwest Asia and North Africa, then to being transnational; and from being founded in Cairo at the aftermath of the Arab Spring to now being based at the unceded land of the Mohawk Nation in Canada?
MS: Readers come to Rowayat to read writing from and about our region and its diaspora. The journal has always been committed to building community through storytelling in all its forms and to enabling multiple voices to be heard. Our desire to have a space for young readers, too, is because of their increasing presence online. We would like them to know that there is a future in literature for them and through them. They need to know their stories matter, too.
As for expanding to the SWANA region, our realities are all intertwined given our shared postcolonial context, and the colonial languages which we speak remain very much part of our every day. So instead of denying these voices, we embrace all forms of expression in all languages. Shifting to an online platform is part of fulfilling these goals. It has enabled us to reach a much wider audience. In doing so, we are walking in the footsteps of many feminists of color who have paved the way for transnational solidarity through all forms of art.
Finally, to answer your question about moving our base: literary production is a difficult pursuit. The move to Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) was to facilitate grant applications, funding, and financial transparency.
AMMD: Pre-Arab Spring, independent Egyptian journals and magazines had been running underground because of the “state’s encroaching grip on the cultural field.“ To evade government surveillance, licensing laws, and civilian espionage, these publications were “often hand-written, copied by stencil and handed out in cafés.” Is that still true today?
MS: Definitely. The State’s grip evolves in the same way that we have evolved. Electronic surveillance is a problem, but in the case of literature, there still remains a great deal of freedom of expression in all languages. Usually, a banned book will become even more popular, and the State is aware of these dynamics.
AMMD: As an Egyptian Anglophone writer and publisher, how was your experience in finding readership outside Egypt’s academe?
MS: It’s been magical. They say writing is a handshake across the ocean. It connects you with strangers, and I find this to be wonderfully true of my experience. If I were to speak of Return is a Thing of Amber in particular, I would say that it has an international scope, moving across eight different countries and dealing with issues of displacement, trauma, and healing—which many could relate to, and thus I’ve had readers reach out to me from unexpected places after an excerpt got published in Narratively.
One of the more memorable connections was from Israel. A distant cousin whom I did not know prior to the publication found me on Facebook and told me how her great-grandmother left on the same truck as my family from Palestine to Lebanon in 1948, and how she managed to return to Acre a few months later and stay there. Together, we were able to make connections in our family tree and contrast our experiences. Incredibly, on paper, she is now British-Israeli while I am Lebanese-Egyptian.
Social media has made these connections so accessible to both readers and writers, and Twitter especially is a hub for writers, poets, translators, literary journals, agents, and publishers. You follow each other, read the work of one another, share it, get to collaborate, and exchange news and opportunities. It was through social media, for example, that I discovered the beautiful writing of Fatima ElKalay who recently published the short story collection Dessert for Three; the brilliant If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga; Sara ElKamel’s powerful chapbook Field of No Justice and her translation of the Mona Kareem’s poetry, I Will Not Fold These Maps; Nour Kamel’s Noon; and Yasmine Zohdi’s creative nonfiction pieces particularly “What We Talk About When We Talk About Trees.” Later, when I joined Rowayat, I got to work with Fatima ElKalay and Sara ElKamel as poetry editors and solicited the work of Yasmine Zohdi (“Forty Days of Mourning a Cat with a Black Face and the Eyes of a Sage”) and Nour Kamel (“Raet Meets Me at Behoos”).
As for local Egyptian Anglophone journals, magazines, and anthologies, there aren’t any. Sukoon publishes from Dubai, ArabLit Quarterly from Morocco, Rusted Radishes from Beirut. Still, they all publish Egyptian writing within the scope of Arab literature.
AMMD: I want to know more about your translation process for This is What Has Come to Be, a musico-literary archive of the selected songs (composed around the 1919 Egyptian Revolution against the British Empire) of singer-composer Sayyed Darwish. Maintaining extra-textual qualities aside, how different is translating song lyrics from translating poetry or prose—especially those meant for the page? And how did you, the translator, capture what Peter Low calls (in Translating Song: Lyrics and Texts, 2016) both the verbal and the musical dimensions co-present in songs? Would you say that “translating song lyrics is a refinement of torture” is accurate?
MS: I would agree that the task was torturous. The lyrics are more than a hundred years old, culturally-specific to the laborers and artisans of turn of the century Alexandria. They are also influenced by the cosmopolitanism of the time, with Turkish, Greek, French, Armenian, Italian and English influences. They were riddled with puns and word transmutation over time and space.
You also must remember that Sayyed Darwish was the composer, not the lyricist. The lyricists were Badie Khairy, Bairam el-Tounsy, Mustafa Sadiq al-Rifai and others. As such, translating music was an integral part of this exercise. I listened to the music over and over again, got a sense of its energy, mood, spirit, central pulse, its emotional impact and cultural resonance, and I tried to bring all this to the page. Poetry is an untranslatable form at the end of the day. There’s always loss and gain and you can’t help but mangle the words, shift the emphasis, omit, deliberately mistranslate, insert whole new lines—and on a few occasions, write a whole new poem or song. Ultimately, I approached this project the way I would a poetry translation, taking into consideration metaphor, meter, and form as well.
AMMD: And you also translated the letters of the late Palestinian activist Ali Shaath for ArabLit Quarterly. How does that experience vary from songs among other texts?
MS: The letters of Ali Shaath were intimate, the way letters are, more so because he was writing to his wife. He wrote to her about his trip back to Jerusalem following the occupation, and his letters are faithful, loving, and full of longing. He detailed to her what he saw, how it made him feel, who he met, what had become of certain people they knew, and the shocking realities of occupation.
I could tell right away that he was fond of writing and the Arabic language. He had style, albeit an archaic one. It was over-sentimental and fond of repetitions, full of stock phrases that appeal chiefly to emotions—but it had the weight and eloquence of classical Arabic. These properties were evident to me, and I tried to carry them all across. Sound is always important and I did pay close attention to pace and rhythm; however, I did not have to worry about metaphor, meter, form, and all the elements that go into the making of a poem.
Mai Serhan is a Cairo-based Palestinian-Egyptian writer, editor, translator, and scholar. She holds a BA in English & Comparative Literature and MA in Arabic Studies from the American University in Cairo and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She has authored CAIRO: the undelivered letters (winner of the 2022 Poetry Chapbook Prize of New York-based Center for Book Arts) and the forthcoming Return is a Thing of Amber (an excerpt of which was finalist for the Narratively Memoir Prize 2022), and is the translator of This is What Has Come to Be (American University in Cairo Press, 2018), a collection of Sayyed Darwish’s song lyrics. Published in Narratively, ArabLit Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Flash Fiction Magazine, Rusted Radishes, Lunch Ticket, and Oxford Magazine, she has received support from Winter Tangerine, Poet’s House, Poets & Writers, The Palestine Museum US, Wellstone Center in the Redwoods in California, and Vermont Studio Center. Her website is https://maiserhan.com.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines, is an editor-at-large at Asymptote. Author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021) and a nominee to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essay, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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