On Post-War Writing, Women’s Stories, and Translation: A Talk with Iman Humaydan

Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer, researcher, and academic. She is the cofounder of PEN Lebanon and was its president between 2015 and 2023. She was also a board member of PEN International from 2017 to 2023. She worked as a cultural journalist and was a judge for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2022. She taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, and since 2015 has taught creative writing in the Paris 8 University Saint Denis, France. She is the author of B as in Beirut, Wild Mulberries, Other Lives,  and The Weight of Paradise, which received the Katara Prize for literature in 2016. She also edited the anthology Beirut Noir for Akashic Books. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Georgian, Armenian, and Dutch. Her latest novel, Songs for Darkness, was published in Arabic by Saqi Books in 2023 and is forthcoming in English translation by Michelle Hartman for Interlink Publishing. In March 2025, the novel will also come out in French by Verticales/Gallimard.

Hiyem Cheurfa in an assistant professor of comparative literature and postcolonial studies at Larbi Tebessi University, Algeria. She is the author of Contemporary Arab Women’s Life Writing and the Politics of Resistance (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Iman and Hiyem met in Arles, France, in December 2023 at Collège International des Traducteurs Littéraires where they both acted as jury members for the LEILA project: a European cooperative project which aims to promote the translation and dissemination of Contemporary Arabic Literature in Europe. This conversation took place via email in the months following their first meeting (particularly in June 2024).

Hiyem Cheurfa: How would you like to introduce yourself for this interview?

Iman Humaydan: I am a writer who is committed to human causes, mainly women’s rights.

H.C: As a committed writer, what inspires your creative endeavors?

I.H: I am inspired by forgotten places, missing persons, books I cannot put down until finished, memories of times when living simply was a possibility, and stories about the hope for a better world where we can all live.

H.C: You belong to the post-war generation of Lebanese intellectuals; how does your personal experience of the Civil War, particularly as a woman, influence your writing, or how is it reflected in the experiences of the characters that you create?

I.H: My first novel B as in Beirut reflects my experience during the Lebanese Civil War. It was a painful memory for me, where I had to move many times with my children from one house to another, fleeing the bombardment. For me, the Civil War was a unique experience where one fights for life in the midst of chaos, violence, and death. The war ended, but its scars marked my memory and my writing. B as in Beirut was a healing writing experience, a cathartic process, through which I wanted to overcome these scars by writing them down, documenting them, trying to evade forgetfulness. To let go of a painful experience one must voice it and share ones’ stories of pain with others. In this novel, B as in Beirut, four women characters tell their stories during the Civil War. Through their daily, and most mundane, routines, they protected life and its deep meaning in a time where armed men were destroying life everywhere. Women insisted that life must continue; they had babies, brought them up, educated them, and protected them from violence. I call my women characters messengers for life and peace.

H.C:  In your novels, particularly B as in Beirut (1997), Wild Mulberries (2001), and Songs for Darkness (2024), you position the lives of your characters amidst or between different wars, such as World War I, World War II, and the Lebanese Civil War, in a way that reflects not only the history of the characters and their families, but a wider history of Lebanese villages, the country, and the world. Why did you make such choices?

I.H: In my novels, I always wanted to revisit our collective history and the history of Lebanon. I wanted the stories to be told by women. Women never had the power to tell history or inscribe it. History is men’s work. That is the reason why, in my novels, I worked to intentionally situate women in the center of history and gave them the freedom to tell, recount, narrate, and unfold what has not been told before, or what has been told before but as a grand narrative, far from women’s witnessing. Violence is not only the symptom of war. In times of peace, women have been subjected to different forms of violence, and History – with a capital H – insisted on neglecting this fact. Women were deprived from narrating their stories, and the stories of the places in which they dwelt and witnessed. One of my missions as a woman writer is to change that.

H.C:  Speaking of “missions,” in my book on Arab women’s resistance literature, I argue that the experience of war imposes new roles and duties on women writers suffering socio-political oppression, some of whom embrace the identity of the author-activist through writing about themselves and about other women against oppressive powers (including systematic silencing of women). Do you identify with such a role?

I.H: Definitely, one of my roles in writing is to unveil the silence and to give women voice and a creative space to tell their stories and position their point of view and opinion at the center of these stories. I have been working to achieve this goal since my early writings. Before my first novel appeared, I wrote and published short stories in which I questioned the grand narratives as manifestations of patriarchy. In Wild Mulberries, my second novel, it is the young woman narrator, Sarah, who tells the story of patriarchal violence not only against women but also against the young men in the family who dreamed of traveling and going away from patriarchal authority.

H.C:  Tell us a little bit about your latest novel, Songs for Darkness, which was published in Arabic by Saqi Books this year and is forthcoming in English and French translations. What inspired you to write this novel?

I.H: It is a novel for which I needed to do a lot of research before starting to write. This is mainly because it covers a period that starts from the year 1908 until 1982.  Songs for Darkness tells the story of four women characters from four generations belonging to the same family. The youngest, Asmahan, tells the story of the family while the history of Lebanon lurks in the background.  I had many questions related to the recurrent violence in modern Lebanon, both regional and local. I stated the research on the history of Lebanon in 2020, three years before publishing the novel. It was during the COVID pandemic, when public libraries were closed. So, I had to write to many people I do not personally know for my research – I got their names from friends – to ask about precise things related to the early years of the 20^th century. For example, I was particularly interested to know more about the turmoil in Lebanon in 1958, or about the unsuccessful coup d’etat that took place on the New Year’s Eve of 1960/1961. I researched the movement of trains and their stations in the Arab world, as well as the cinemas during the fifties and the sixties in Beirut. It was important to let the women characters tell these stories away from the grand narratives or the mainstream approaches.

H.C:  As you have just explained, in Songs for Darkness, there is no single central character. Instead, four generations of women from the same family share the spotlight. Why was this important?

I.H: It was important for me to present a certain period that starts in the early years of the 20^th Century and ends when the Israeli army entered the Lebanese capital in 1982. This period of almost 75 years was decisive for the modern history of Lebanon, as it carried with it two World Wars, as well as the birth of Grand Lebanon in 1926, its independence in 1943, and the Civil War that started in 1975. I needed to create more than one female character to be able to cover through their voices and words the historical period I chose for my novel.

H.C:  The novel is a transgenerational narrative that addresses gender issues like women’s labor, forced marriage, and domestic abuse—do you agree with describing it as feminist?

I.H: I do agree indeed. It is a feminist novel. To be more precise, it is a novel of intersectional feminism, where gender issues intersect with class. These issues also intersect with political violence in Lebanon and in the region which, in turn, affect women in so many ways and render them more vulnerable.

H.C:  Indeed, women’s vulnerability is very much prominent in Songs for Darkness, particularly through the trope of loss. The specters of death and loss haunt this novel, but several instances of (re)birth and renewal are also encountered, how do you address and embrace these contradictions?

I.H: I was brought up in a culture that puts so much emphasis on life and death as a part of a cycle. In my community, people believe that when one dies, he or she will be reincarnated. Maybe these spiritual dimensions of my culture affected my approach to things in life, and my approach to writing. I think contradictions are part of our life. Just like paradoxes.

H.C:  Traditional songs and Arabic music play an important part in the story of the novel as they represent a refuge for the female characters who are subjugated to different forms of violence – domestic, emotional, and socio-political – and a way to overcome the continuous sense of loss that they experience through different generations. What does music mean to you and how does it inspire your writing?

I.H: I grew up with music. I have listened to music since I was a child. In my family, music was an integral part of many scenes; the sound of music is mixed with women sitting together and telling stories to each other, with children playing, and with the sound of rain hitting our house rooftops. Listening to songs was like traveling to other places and other worlds while we were still at home. Songs are a force that becomes stronger when women’s voices accompany the singer’s voice. The first character in Songs for Darkness, Shahira used to sing to accept her destiny and forced marriage. Singing made her believe that she was stronger than her fate. Singing in this sense has a magical power.

When I was a child, I remember that there was a little radio up on an old shelf in the kitchen and it was on the whole day. I listened mainly to Asmahan when I was a teen, then to Fairuz and other women singers. Now, I listen to music while I am writing; maybe my taste has changed. I prefer music more than songs while writing.

H.C:  In addition to music, references to literature are omnipresent in Songs for Darkness. Layla is an avid reader who makes multiple references to prominent literary texts, including Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, amongst others. Could you tell us about the significance of this? And were you particularly influenced by other authors in crafting this novel?

I.H: I am not sure that I chose these particular titles or books for a certain purpose other than that it happened that I read them at Layla’s age. When I was crafting the character of Layla, these different titles came to my mind because they were an important part of my library on my family’s bookshelves when I was her age. I read these books when I was in my early 20s. They were related to my youth, when I used to spend summers reading in a tent on the rooftop of my parents’ house.

And I do not think I was influenced by other authors while writing this novel. Actually, I was reading lot of history books on modern Lebanon at the time of writing it, as I mentioned before, mainly as background research.

H.C:  We met in Arles where we both acted as jury members for the LEILA project for the translation of Arabic Literature into European Languages. How important is translation for you, as a reader and as an author?

I.H: It makes me happy to be a part of such an important project like LEILA. I cannot imagine a world without translation. It is the way of bringing the whole world to us as readers, giving us the opportunity to have access to human experiences through reading world literature. As an author, the translation of my novels into many international languages widened my readership and gave my work the opportunity to go beyond the local reader (of Arabic) to an international one; and that’s what every writer wishes. As an author who writes in Arabic, translation is the only way to communicate with readers all over the world who do not understand my language.

H.C:  Tell us a bit about your experience as a judge with the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF).

I.H: It was during the 2022, and it was rich experience. The committee of judges included different persons of different specialties. This rich diversity was an added value for our final decision. Choosing the novel Bread on Uncle’s Milad Table by the Libyan writer Mohamed Alnaas was a good sign, showing a new approach towards masculinity and gender roles in the Arab world.

H.C:   What do you envision and/or hope for regarding the position of Arabic literature on the international scene?

I.H: I hope more translations take place. As we know, translation from Arabic into European languages is coming almost at the lower end of the translation ladder. The sad thing is that Western readers get interested in an Arabic novel when there is war or a violent event taking place in the country of origin of a particular writer. As if the work of an Arab writer is perceived as a social document or commentary and is read for the sake of knowing what is going on. I dream of the day that our works, as Arab authors, are read for their proper value as literature with a capital L.