Maya Abu al-Hayyat on Absent Mothers, the End of Love, and Palestinian Liberation

By Layla Faraj

The Palestinian poet, editor novelist, and picture-book author Maya Abu al-Hayyat has seen several books arrive in English translation in recent years, including the poetry collection You Can Be the Last Leaf (tr. Fady Joudah) and the novel No One Knows Their Blood Type (tr. Hazem Jamjoum), as well as the anthology she edited for Comma Press, The Book of Ramallah.

Here, Maya talks about truth and lies, love and indifference, the role of teenagers in Palestinian liberation, and the politics of translation.

In one of your poems, you state that only art can lie as it tells the truth, calling to mind Emily Dickinson’s poem where she famously writes ‘Tell the truth but tell it slant’. In a moment where truths feel scarce, how can writing’s “lies” rise to the moment? 

Maya Abu al-Hayyat: It is possible that writing’s invisible ties between imagination and reality, and between falsehood and truth, is the space that allows you to slip in all that you long to say, all the awful truths that no one dares to speak transparently without the risk of doing themselves harm. I have always played in that space. In writing, I am one of the most courageous women in disclosing Palestinian reality. In reality, I am a big coward. All the shock has transformed me into an alarm clock, shaken awake by the sounds and screams and blinding lights: I believe that I have survived until this moment because of this space, which has allowed me to live between lies and truth, making me believe that I can swing between the two undetected.

Fady Joudah begins his introduction to your work ‘You Can Be the Last Leaf’ by saying that you ‘live in Arabic and reside in Jerusalem’. As I read through different works of yours, I noticed that you are careful with how you choose words for houses and homes, residing and resting. Whether it be your characters Jumana and Yara who move from country to country, explicitly calling to question the idea of a homeland or a personal home, or the voice in your poems who makes “houses” out of people, there is a preoccupation with what these terms can mean beyond the spatial. Can you tell me more about what these words evoke for you? 

Maya: I have lived in ten houses thus far, real houses made from stone and reinforced cement, but I can’t point to one of them and say: “This is my house.” It’s strange that you should ask me this question now, as I am preparing to move into another house in Jerusalem. What is even stranger is that this house, a house that I found after much difficulty due to the dwindling number of Arab homes in Jerusalem, is Shireen Abu Akleh’s house. I find great symbolism in this move, because I did not know Shireen outside of events with mutual friends, but now I live in the house that she picked to be her house in Jerusalem.

The truth is that I am very excited to live in that house. It’s as if I am going to live inside a poem pregnant with meaning, creating a window between me and Shireen where I will complete her dreams of life in this house. I imagine tens of works that I can possibly write while I’m there. Perhaps I’ll write a book titled Living in Shireen’s House.

To return to the discussion on my houses and homes, this has been my life’s constant dilemma. I’ve moved from place to place, and in the new houses and places I lived, I was continuously searching for myself. I used to connect homes to people, probably because I was afraid of losing homes, but that is always what happened.

In many of your poems and the novel No One Knows Their Blood Type, teachers are often painted as interfering between mother and child, getting in the way of a mother’s own ideas of parenting. Can you speak more on the role of the teacher in your literary works?

Maya: This brings us back to the truth, lies, and the beautification of the two. Here, my views differ from those of teachers. Perhaps because they are carrying (or are forced to carry) traditional views imposed by regulations and curricula, which are then forcibly disseminated among countless students, so that they might all become a single type of obedient child. You often find a teacher capable of creating that space in their minds, just like the professor Abu Hafaya in my novel Glitter, which you have yet to read. His character is considered a savior, but, at the same time, it’s controlling, and it’s capable of sparking an obsession that makes his students submit to him without a second thought. The idea of a teacher is a very authoritarian and frightening idea.

Mothers, the longing felt by mothers, the longing for a mother: your writing discusses them all. Similarly you write of children, their suffering and their violent realities. What ideas or thoughts can the character of a mother open up, or the relationship between mother and child, that other characters cannot? What particularly interests you about this relationship?

Maya: Well, in this arena, I am a special case. I lived the first twenty years of my life not knowing a single thing about my mother. I was unable to speak about her or ask about her existence or non-existence. It got to a point where I wished that she were dead so that I might speak about her or feel sadness over her in a normal way, so that I might place a photo of her in a picture frame. For that reason, my biggest worry in life for the entirety of my childhood and teenage years was finding her or finding a replacement for that large vacancy in my body called ‘mother’. I used to compensate for her absence with a love that verged on clinginess for my teachers, or my parent’s mothers, or any person I could adore the same way a daughter adores her mother. What would life look like if I had a mother? I have built my whole life and all my thinking around this one controlling thought of not having this great being in my life, the being that I thought would save me from everything.

The notion of motherhood has changed for me with the passage of time and the events that took place before I met my mother and after the fact; the moment when the twins were born during their exhausting childhood, and after they grew older and became a home, an obstacle, a refuge, and a fear.

I watch psychological trauma videos on social media, which violently analyze everything that I have been through and determine my emotional relationships accordingly. I agree with them the majority of the time, especially concerning my desire to please others. It’s as though I am always looking for a person or a man to whom I can justify my atrocious actions, as though I am looking for my mother and father so that I might tell them: I am good and kind! Please look at me and love me! However, with my own daughters, I ask them to never do such a thing with me or anyone else.

My relationship with my daughter Katherine is complex and perhaps wonderful. I learn from her how to be a bitch, as if I am finding my true personality through her. She frees me from my fears and allows me to be the real Maya, something my own mother could never do for me. I do wish I could save her from this burden: the burden of being my mother.

The character of a teenage radical or teenage protester is one that appears in many of your poems and in No One Knows Their Blood Type. Why is it that you are drawn to this character, and what does the character of a teenager grant you, the writer? Is it possible to say certain things through a teenager that it might not be possible to say through other characters? 

Maya: I love the teenage character. I was at the memorial for the poet Zakaria Mohammad a week ago, and I was telling his sweet wife Salma about how I was always in awe of Zakaria’s ability to remain a teenager despite being in his seventies. I was jealous of him. I couldn’t understand how an old and wise poet like him could behave the way teenagers do: he could act without thinking, say things that no one dared to say, and slam the door even in the face of the wealthy and powerful. I was extremely jealous of him, perhaps because I did not get to be a crude, reckless, and illogical teenager. I was tamed by fear and the desire to please those around me, especially those who were domineering.

We need of a lot of teenagers in order to liberate Palestine. We need more of those people who are crazy and don’t think with logic or reason, because the logic that they try to impose on us requires us to submit to the logic of power and to the idea that we can do nothing but lose. This logic will only lead us to one place: annihilation.

But I am also thinking of the teenagers I used to see standing behind the news reporters at the beginning of the war on Gaza, the ones whose eyes were full of curiosity and the desire to live the normal life that they’d left behind not too long ago. They have yet to become men, but they are no longer children, either. The confused look in their eyes still kills me. We have tricked them, forcing them to grow up only to fall into the trap that is called our reality.

Etel Adan writes in her novel Sitt Marie Rose that “Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a stream flows into a river, it’s love and it’s violence.” Your work discusses both love and violence so frequently, I found myself coming back to this quote. How do you see the relationship between love and violence in your work: poetry, short prose, novels?

Maya: I tried to answer this question, but I couldn’t. Then, by chance, I found this poem that I once wrote.

Only in Fairuz songs

do lovers part in the winter

or at a crossroads

In reality

a lover sleeps and wakes

and love has ended

In reality

love ends without much noise

love ends when pain comes to its end.

One sound that I listened for throughout your work is that of snoring. You write that a snore can give a house “a name and a voice”; it is a sound that seems to bridge an older generation with a younger one; a snore offers the comforting presence of a parental figure and also, potentially, comedy or annoyance. What is it that snoring is telling us in your texts about resting and its relationship to family and home?

Maya: The strange thing is that I cannot stand the sound of snoring at all, it might even be one of my nightmares. My dad used to snore very loudly, and that was how I knew he was asleep and at home. We used to tiptoe each time we heard his snoring. When the snoring stopped, my father had died. I remember that each time I slept next to someone new, I would hold my breath to the point where I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t relax. It was a way to suppress my snoring (even though I do not snore).

To be your natural self in love, sleep, and death is to be able to snore comfortably. What a blessing it is to you and yet what a disaster for others.

In Hazem Jamjoum’s afterword to your upcoming novel, No One Knows Their Blood Type, he writes that the story “wasn’t written to illustrate victimhood” and that “it does not plead”. How did you experience his translation, and this description of what your work doesn’t do? Also, now that this story is being published in English eleven years after it came out in Arabic, how do you hope it will be met by an English-speaking audience given the present moment?

Maya: I think that all of the characters in the novel are victims despite the fact that most of them seem evil. I empathized with them all, even though I tore them apart. This novel caused me a lot of trouble and I assume it did the same for Hazem. Publishing it in Arabic was a nightmare for my family and for some Palestinians, especially those who lived through the Palestinian revolt during the periods that I wrote about in the novel, because my novel definitely doesn’t offer a stereotypical image of the characters, but it is not revolutionary either, in my opinion.

It was very difficult for it to be accepted by foreign publishing houses, since it is not the kind of novel that ‘sells,’ as it does not offer a traditional Palestinian victim. The novel therefore displeases those who stand with Palestine, just as it displeases those on the other side as well. There isn’t a single solid understanding of what the novel wants to say, especially since the language itself was a main character in the Arabic version. This novel was written in very austere and direct language, and its many voices not only played an essential role in transmitting the contradictory stories of the character but was also one of its most attractive qualities. This was a very difficult thing to translate into English, which could flatten the writing without giving a clear understanding of the power of simple narration. The narration in this novel is the only conveyor of events; it is a linear form of narration, but it finds a way to make you continue reading.

For that reason, I think it took a long time for the novel to finally be accepted, but Hazem was honest and passionate, a lover of the text. That was one of the reasons why I grew to love this more-than-wonderful experience with him. I love this novel very much, and I believe it is the novel that has best showcased my true voice. I hope that that comes through in the English. We were lucky to have met Hilary Plum through Fady Joudah, a revolutionary woman who enabled me to have a clearer understanding of the text in its different voices.