On Liberation as Writing Technique

On Liberation as Writing Technique

In Conversation with

Fatma Qandil and Adam Talib

This month, Hoopoe Fiction publishes Empty Cages, written by Fatma Qandil and translated by Adam Talib. Although Qandil has long been known as a gifted poet, this book — which won the 2022 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature — was her first novel.

Tomorrow, we’ll have an excerpt from Empty Cages. Today, we share Fatma Qandil and Adam Talib’s wide-ranging discussion with Tugrul Mende, which touches on: the method behind Qandil’s writing, standing on the shoulders of other women writers, why this book was a challenge to translate, and the joy of being read by a younger generation.

Fatma Qandil’s answers translated to English by Adam Talib.

Tugrul Mende: Fatma, you’re a poet (much as your narrator tells her uncle when he offers to get her a job at a fancy hotel). What made you want to leap into prose?

Fatma Qandil: I wouldn’t call this a leap from poetry into prose, in all honesty. I’ve been writing poetry for years, but in the form of prose-poems, which often contain long narrative passages. Personally, I don’t pay much attention to the boundaries between literary genres. Not even when I write academic essays or criticism. I’m more inclined to the view that criticism is a text in its own right running parallel to the original.

I’ve got a smorgasbord of writerly techniques at my disposal, so why on earth should I limit myself to just a few? Or even to a single genre? Each new text demands its own technique and style. To get back to your question, from my perspective, writing the novel just felt like an extension of what I’d been doing in poetry. It’s an amalgam of techniques or tone that best suited the story I wanted to tell. The novel is just another facet of the experimentation that I’ve engaged in for my entire career. I’ve written plays before, and I even thought I might end up a playwright, but I changed my mind and returned to poetry, and now I’ve gone and written a novel. I might change my mind about that, too. It’s not that there isn’t any method to my writing, though. There’s always been a method. It’s liberation.

TM: There has been a blossoming of Arab women’s life-writing, especially Egyptian women’s life-writing, from the time of Latifa al-Zayyat, Safynaz Kazem, and Nawal El Saadawi, for instance, through to writers like Randa Shaath and Iman Mersal. Why did you want your poet-narrator to be joining this and writing her life story—against the advice of some of her friends? Against, for instance, the advice of the novelist who wants her to write it in the third person?

FQ: I forget about all the warnings and taboos when I sit down to write. It’s after I finish that I start to get worried. As the novel was going to press—on the eve of confrontation, you could say—I reminded myself that I’d been attacked before for my poetry and that this time it would be no different. Face it head on, I told myself. It’s always the same. I’m sure the other women writers whom you mentioned faced similar experiences. Writing about your inner self and your life in a conservative society that views women in a particular way is a dangerous activity, and it opens you up to a wide range of criticism. The gentlest of these is to be marginalized, but that’s simply the fate we have to face up to.

You mentioned Latifa al-Zayyat, so let me take this opportunity to say that she blazed a trail for all the women who came after her. I even thought about dedicating Empty Cages to her. It felt like I was carrying on the work that she started somehow. By discussing certain topics that she couldn’t have back then; forcing open doors that had been firmly shut. Contributing to her mission of speaking the unspeakable, the shameful, the scandalous. Addressing herself to the supposed moral consensus. Latifa al-Zayyat blazed a trail. There’s more to being a writer than just creating a work that’s pleasing and novel. You have to blaze a trail for the next generation. The next generation will find solutions or workarounds and they’ll develop the path for others. That’s what Iman Mersal has done in her books How to Mend: Motherhood and Its Ghosts and Traces of Enayat. I hope to have done my part in Empty Cages.

TM: Adam, when did you first hear about Empty Cages and what made you decide to take on this translation?

AT: I was honored to serve on the jury of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in the year that Fatma’s novel won, and I certainly imagined translating parts of it when I was reading it for the first time. When Hoopoe offered me the chance to translate it, I leapt at the opportunity. Even before I’d gotten around to reading the novel, people had been recommending it to me as it was one of the buzziest novels of the year when it came out. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to have translated this beautiful work of literature and I’m also really happy that I had the chance to get to know and work with Fatma Qandil. I just really enjoy her voice.

TM: At the Leila Promoting Arabic Literature in Europe website it says that Empty Cages reminds readers of Annie Ernaux. What do you find in that comparison? Or is there another you would make?

FQ: Can I jump in here, if you don’t mind? When I first encountered the work of Annie Ernaux thirty years ago, I said to myself, “Here’s a writer on the other side of the world who makes me feel like I’m not alone.” Reading her felt like grabbing hold of a rope that I haven’t let go of since. She calmed my nerves.

Of course, you can never isolate a single source or influence on your writing. There are books that I read as a young woman that I’ll always remember: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Rousseau’s The Confessions, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Naguib Mahfouz’s Echoes of an Autobiography. And there are others that I’ve forgotten, which had a big impact on my writing. I’ve been trying to re-write them all somehow. No writer starts from scratch. That much I’m certain of. And I’m certain that in my work, I’m always trying to re-write what’s come before me. To take ownership of it. Call that certainty, or call it delusion. It doesn’t matter. Both are very good reasons to create!

AT: I actually wrote that copy for the website so I can’t really comment on it!

TM: How different was it to approach writing this, a full-length novel, vs. writing poetry, or a collection of poetry? Do you plan to continue writing prose?

FQ: As I’ve said, I’ve always tried to combine poetry and prose in my work, but Empty Cages is quite different. There’s no doubt about that. As a scholar of literature and an avid reader of novels, I made studied choices about the book’s fairly simple structure and unornamented language, but there are lots of short sentences in the novel that read like poetry. You won’t find a lot of declarative sentences in the novel like you would in most prose works. The sentences in Empty Cages remain open to interpretation. They’re open-ended in the way that poems can be.

There are other technical considerations in poetry writing like how to begin and how to end, how to distill a thought in as few words as possible, how to convey a feeling through an image or a metaphor, etc. if we’re talking about the process of writing. In poetry, you can hide by saying something while refusing to say it, but when it came to the novel, I didn’t want to hide. I wanted to tell a story. I wasn’t going to let anything go past until I’d explored it fully. You can write a poem in a single evening and forget you’d ever written it, but a novel takes sustained effort over months, or years. In the end, it took less than a year because the poet in me bashed it out in just three months. You might even call it the longest poem I’ve ever written. I don’t know if I’m going to continue writing prose. I think it’ll depend on what I’m trying to convey. As I said earlier, I’m not really hung up on categories, be they literary categories, or my own identity, whether I fit in as a poet or a novelist. I try to follow my intuition or my heart and everything else just follows.

TM: Adam, what elements of this book, stylistically, did you work to echo in the English? How would you describe its rhythm, its sound?

AT: That’s an excellent question and one that I would love to give a detailed and expansive answer on, but for the sake of brevity, let me just say that, in terms of style, this was one of the hardest translations I’ve ever worked on. There is a very mature and confident economy in the writing of this novel, which also becomes a theme quite early on, and so the style and the larger artistic project, let’s say, are intimately and explicitly connected in the mind of the reader. I dealt with a problem that I don’t usually face in the translation of Arabic literary texts, and it forced me to really re-consider certain aesthetic and translational assumptions that had accumulated in my mind over the years. I learned a lot about expression and dialogue from translating this novel, even though you may miss those techniques the first time you read it.

TM: How did you work together through this process?

FQ: I had a lot of fun working with Adam because I think we both went into the project feeling like friends. He didn’t bother me with every niggling detail, and he was patient on the occasions when I’d digress from my answers and take him for a walk down memory lane. I explained to him lots of things about Egyptian culture, which he already knew as I came to learn over our long conversations, so I felt less need to do that over time. I have full confidence in his translation, even though I still haven’t seen it, because I really trust him. We did this as a team.

TM: Adam, what were the particular challenges you came across in the translation? Was there any time you wanted to thicken or gloss the translation, for instance, where you felt non-Egyptian or non-Arabophone readers might be at a loss?

AT: I do occasionally try to introduce a gloss when I’m translating, but they usually don’t fit in a sentence without gumming something else up. I’m sure I glossed a few things here and there in the novel, probably antiquated details of the Egyptian education system, but I doubt the rich texture of middle-class life we find in the novel will actually distract anyone from its main thrust.

TM: Fatima, can you tell us a bit about people’s reactions to Empty Cages? Because it is in the first person—and there is a first-person narrator—do readers conflate this with your life? Was this part of your intention?

FQ: I was terrified when the book came out. I knew that I was going to face harsh criticism and that it was completely predictable that people would read my life into the novel. It certainly contains a confessional element, and it touches on topics that are largely taboo.

There were two critical pieces in the first month, but I thought that was just the beginning, and then for two months there was nothing. Silence. I was preparing myself for the worst when the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly, every day brought a new celebratory review and the thing that I found most wonderful and most surprising was that the book was a hit with younger readers. As I’d grown older, I’d begun to worry that only people my own age would want to read my work. I thought that was how writers’ careers always ended, celebrated by their peers and derided by their successors. The love I’ve received from readers in their 20s and 30s really took me by surprise and I carry it in my heart. That’s what motivates me to keep going.

TM: What are you working on next?

FQ: I’m working on two books at the moment. One is a book of poems, and the other is a work of criticism. I hope to finish both over the summer. Then I’ve got a lot of other scattered bits of writing that I need to read through and decide what’s worth publishing. In other words, I’ve got to tidy up my desk. I need to clear some space for a new project.

Tugrul Mende is a regular contributor to ArabLit.