A Conversation about ‘I’m Here With You,’ a Bilingual Fiction Podcast
The series “أنا معاك / I’m Here With You” is, as its creators write, “an immersive audio drama exploring the personal stories of four people who call a mental health helpline looking for support.” The four stories — composed by Angham Mardi and translated to English by Lauren Pepperell — are available on Spotify, Soundcloud and Youtube. ArabLit editor Marcia Lynx Qualey talked to Angham Mardi and Lauren Pepperell about the series, its creation, and its creation in/for two languages.
Marcia: Could you talk a little bit about the origin of أنا معاك / I’m Here With You? How did the idea come about, and how did it take this shape (as a short fictional podcast series)?
Angham: Lauren and I have played around with audio stories both together and separately for a few years. At first, we just narrated short stories to music but then began developing the idea to incorporate sound design as integral to the story and script. When the New Conversations, UK-Egypt, creative partnership program appeared, we saw it as an opportunity to make a full audio fiction series in Arabic and English. We wanted to create stories centered on real-life issues told from the perspective of realistic characters and experiment with form: the real and unreal, the ordinary and strange. We invited a new team of collaborators with experience in audio and theater in both languages, from the UK and Egypt, to support us. Our aim was to create a sonically interesting fiction series for audiences in both contexts.
Lauren: From the beginning we knew that we wanted each episode to explore a different character’s personal story. Angham came up with the idea of a mental health helpline as a framework for the series, as an intimate context in which the characters could speak freely and honestly about their problems. The title—أنا معاك / I’m Here With You—came up as a eureka moment in our first discussion about it. Originally, we had imagined much heavier stories in more dramatic situations. We later decided we wanted the stories to have broader themes and resonate with everyday issues, told through the particular details of each individual character.
Marcia: I alternated listening to the series in Arabic and in English, and when I listened in English, I saw Sara, for instance, in a small town in England, but when I listened in Arabic, I imagined Sara living in an apartment in Mohandiseen. How did you imagine the audience(s) for this series? As you wove them together, did you imagine them as stories that could exist in multiple places at once? Certainly the names could.
Angham: For this project, it was crucial to weave the stories together in a way that rendered them familiar to both Arabic and English-speaking audiences. I wanted the listeners to feel like they knew the characters or that the characters reminded them of someone they had run into somewhere. So, for that reason, I intentionally did not situate the characters in a specific named location or point in time. I wanted there to be space for the listeners to create their own images of each scene in a way that could be compatible with their own surroundings and still resonate with the temporality and actions of the main characters. I clouded some details in order to centralize a message that’s important to me: the protagonists in each episode exist everywhere.
Lauren: It’s really pleasing to hear that you could imagine the characters in totally different locations and contexts. That was the intended effect. We wanted the characters’ stories to be relatable somehow to any listener, even if the specifics are different. We didn’t want the audience to feel like they were listening in on other people’s problems in a faraway place. We wanted the stories to be provocative and weave the uncomfortable in with the familiar across very different contexts.
Marcia: Did the way you imagined the audience shape the stories you chose? Why these four people, of different ages?
Angham: I tried to capture the human journey in its entirety: from birth, for example, when Joe says it feels like just yesterday he was a baby crying at childbirth, to death, as spoken about by Sara, who fears dying because of the way her friend died. The human journey seems exhausting and filled with events that are difficult to talk about. I shaped the characters as if they were one person covering all aspects of life with different feelings and thoughts.
Lauren: We wanted these stories, as a whole, to span class, age and gender and also resonate with audiences in different contexts. We wanted the characters’ stories to be very different to each other but contain themes that are common causes of fear, shame, hurt and vulnerability. Layla’s story focuses on the appearance, physicality, and body-perfectionism of a young woman and her sense of self and purpose when it changes, in her case dramatically. Joe’s story deals with the everyday family and financial stresses of a working-class man whose worth is pitted against his ability to be strong and a financial provider. Sara’s story explores intergenerational domestic violence through the voice of an older mother, herself abuser and abused, and the consequences over time. Noah’s story looks at someone who dedicates his life to listening to others but doesn’t find the support he’s looking for.
Marcia: One of the things I found really compelling is that I didn’t pity any of these characters, that they were all complex (and in some cases not very “likable”). Another thing is that these few minutes on a crisis hotline doesn’t fix anyone or create easy solutions. I would think there might be a temptation to have resolution – but you avoid that. How did you decide how you wanted them to end?
Angham: If the audience pitied the characters it would have broken their relationship to them. Humans are predominately biased. I just wanted the stories to be judged fairly and impartially. Life is not just the oppressor versus the oppressed or the perpetrator versus the victim. Some people are victims of themselves, and often do not know who the perpetrator is in their stories. When you search inside the characters’ stories, you may find all the solutions and answers. This doesn’t mean we should have no empathy. The main goal here is to provide support in the simplest possible ways, such as listening. It is a large part of recovery. You don’t have to be a hero to help. Being human is enough.
Lauren: We wanted to create a momentary snapshot into the thoughts and feelings of individuals during moments of crisis, vulnerability and struggle with the everyday. The idea was to provide a mirror to some issues in that moment and not dictate a finite ending or give the audience closure on these issues. We left each episode open to different outcomes. The aim was to lay bare some realistic and uncomfortable emotions about personal and societal problems and let the audience decide how they feel about them, and leave them questioning how these issues could be redressed, rather than presenting those answers for them. We didn’t want the dynamic between the helpline support worker and the caller in crisis to be a savior-victim or rescuer-rescued scenario at all, or for the helpline support worker to be presented as someone who could single-handedly make everything better.
Not every problem has an immediate solution, especially issues relating to trauma, chronic stress, or grief. Sometimes it’s important just to let others vent about the difficult things they’re going through.
Marcia: How did the translation process work? What were the challenges of making the stories work in both English and Arabic? Is it different to translate for audio vs. translating for paper?
Lauren: After we finalized the Arabic scripts, the group in Alexandria began recording with Arabic voice actors and I started translating the scripts into English. I discussed translation issues with Angham throughout the process. She was open to discussing anything and everything. I could ask her opinion, make suggestions, and ask a lot of questions, no matter how trivial. We were co-producers for the project, so I had been involved in some of the storyboarding and feedback sessions when the Arabic scripts were drafted. I was able to flag up anything which seemed unclear in terms of meaning, sequencing, context or sound, and we also discussed how to make the stories work in Arabic and English at that stage. But it’s interesting how different questions and comprehension issues come up in the process of translation. You may think you understood a phrase until you rewrite it in English using different lexical, structural, and textual norms. It makes you analyze the meanings of words and the intentions of the writer a lot more. Colloquial phrases, expressions and references can be tricky to translate. Staying close to the original and rendering the translation in spoken English fluently were antagonistic priorities that were sometimes challenging to reconcile.
The stories were scripted in Egyptian Arabic, and narrated by voice actors from Alexandria. Although no town, city or country is mentioned, the stories contain Egyptian expressions and, in places, do relate to Egypt-specific contexts. This presented some challenges when making language choices to define the different characters in the translation. I wasn’t creating Egyptian characters located in Egypt or adapting the story to a particular UK location. The sound design also had to work across different contexts. We had interesting discussions and revisions in the post-production stage about how to render the background sounds and music. The idea wasn’t to create universal characters and sounds. We wanted the stories to have their own specifities and also work in both languages. We actively recruited voice actors with different accents in the English versions. They each added their interpretations of the characters and brought more diversity to the audio.
Translating for audio is very different to translating read-only texts. In audio, short and clear sentences are a top priority. Long, complex sentences will be difficult to say aloud convincingly and risk being difficult to understand. It also might distract listeners from tuning in to what happens next and cause them to lose track of the plot. Whereas, readers can take their time, pause and reflect. That might be the aim of a written text. Also, in audio, you need to provide context quickly so that listeners are not suspended in the air or doing mental backflips if, for example, they had envisioned characters standing in the lounge at the beginning of a sentence and find out they’re actually sat in the bedroom by the end of it. As you are generally only dealing with the spoken word, the entire context has to be built through the words of the speaker and surrounding sounds. And you need to consider the nonverbal layers: tone of voice, accents, and paralanguage—such as laughing, crying or shouting or even the sound of breathing, sighs or gasps—as well as sound effects, music, and silence. The same words could be said with anger, shame or sorrow; in the same way that sound effects or music can totally change the tone. The voice and sound directions were scripted in the original, but took on new life and nuances when recorded by the voice actors and implemented by the sound designer. After translating the script, I could listen to the Arabic audio and reassess the English translation before we started working with the UK-based voice actors.
I love audio because it brings stories alive with sounds. I think audio fiction still has a lot of uncharted territory and scope for genre-bending. It would be interesting to see more Arabic and English short stories scripted specifically for audio.
Lauren: What was a priority for you when thinking about scripting for audio?
Angham: I prioritized delivering a clear message that was to the point and wouldn’t confuse the mind of the listener. My goal was to create a direct, uninterrupted line between the characters’ thoughts and the audience. It was always amazing to see the way sounds were incorporated into the stories. I had great confidence in Mahmoud El Saghir, our sound designer, who also composed the music for the series. He is a wonderful person who loves working with sound. He pays attention to the smallest details. He added a lot of soul to all the stories and made the work rich and interesting to listen to.
Lauren: Could you talk more about your writing process: how did you develop the characters’ backstory and what was your strategy for shaping four time-bound storylines of similar lengths for different characters? I have some idea, but I wasn’t physically there when you scripted the stories. We’d discuss a concept together and then you would disappear for a week or so, reemerge with a pretty polished and well-crafted story, and often need several days to recover. I think it’s interesting to know more about your writing process, your strategy and how it felt for you?
Angham: At first, they were just scattered ideas. I drew the faces of the characters on a piece of paper and then set it aside. They weren’t characters I knew personally. All I knew was they were people I had met at some point but I couldn’t remember them. After that, I started writing down their personalities, their characteristics, and what problems exhausted them. Even though the characters are fictional, I can say that they are very real to me. One day, I was walking in the street and met a man lighting a cigarette and looking at his phone, and I knew he was Joe. When I went to the hospital for a medical examination and saw a young woman in a wheelchair looking sad, I knew it was Layla. Even Sara, I remember seeing her drinking tea on the balcony of her house, with her cat next to her.
I wrote down everything I could think of about the characters. There were a lot of details and events that were cyclical and returned to the starting point again. Then I squeezed everything into a specific number of minutes for each episode, so that each story was given the same amount of space as the other, as a way to be fair and do them justice as well. The episodes would have been much longer if I had included everything I’d originally written about the characters. I was keen to provide as much information as I could in a short period so that the listeners wouldn’t be confused or bored. The quality of the words was much more important than the quantity.
During the writing process, I felt like I was conjuring up spirits. While writing, I’d conjure the character inside me as if we were one person. I’d feel everything they felt. When I wrote the first episode, Layla, I really felt like I couldn’t walk normally. When I finish writing, I’m not able to go back to daily life easily. I need some time to recover from the influence of the characters on my psychological and physical state. I love it, to be honest. I feel like the different emotions fuel my heart and make me stronger. I call it the ritual of activating the humanity within me.
Marcia: Anything more you’d like to add?
Angham & Lauren: Yes, special thanks to all our collaborators on the project, including: Eslam Mikhemar from el-Qaadah Theatre Collective, Alexandria, and Sara El Sheekh from Alleyway Radical Theatre, London, who supported us recruit voice actors and acted in the series; all the other voice actors in Egypt and the UK; and Mahmoud El Saghir in Alexandria who supported us on all aspects of sound, creating the sound design and music, with support from Mo at AB Studios for the UK-based recordings.
Angham Mardi is from Alexandria, Egypt, and writes poetry, short stories and plays in Arabic. She was awarded a New Conversations, UK-Egypt creative partnership grant to script and co-produce an audio fiction series and scripted an audio story for Splash & Ripple’s Play Inside 2. Angham has written a chapbook collection of over 40 poems in MSA and Egyptian Dialect. She performs and narrates her work live and online.
Lauren Pepperell is a freelance Arabic (MSA/ECA) to English translator, subtitler and podcast-enthusiast who co-founded Komet Kashakeel. She translates fiction and non-fiction audio, audio-visual, and written texts. She was awarded the New Conversations grant to co-produce and translate an audio fiction series presented at the D-CAF Egypt festival 2023. Lauren hosted a Stories in Translation series on The Green Room Alexandria Podcast, translated for Splash & Ripple’s Play Inside 2 and interned with Kerning Cultures Podcast. She holds an Arabic-English Translation Studies MA (Distinction) from Leicester University.
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