Hazem Jamjoum on Writing for Communities of Struggle

Writing for Communities of Struggle

Hazem Jamjoum on Publishing, Translation, and Political Literature

In Conversation with Mariam Tell

I first met Hazem at a coffee shop in Dublin this past November. He had been invited to give a talk at Trinity College, and I emailed him asking to meet before the lecture. Months later, we caught up in London, where he was planning the launch of a new publishing house, Safarjal Press. This conversation — in which we discussed plans and visions for this upcoming press — took place in early July. For more about Safarjal, follow them at @safarjalpress/.

Going back to the beginning of Safarjal Press, can you tell us a little bit more about how the project originated, and what your main intentions were in starting it?

Hazem Jamjoum: One definite part of it is that in many societies, including our own, parents and elders will talk about appreciating literary, creative and scholarly work, so long as it’s not their own children doing it. So one enticement to work on a publishing house was to help create a situation in which writers and poets and artists could go to their families and put some money on the table from their craft.

Another very important consideration in the moment we wanted to set up a publishing house was the genocide; there are these artists and poets and writers not just in Gaza but primarily in Gaza who we wanted to support because they are excellent. This was not meant as a kind of charitable act, we want to help in being one of the conveyors for them.

There are people that deserve to be celebrated and known in Arabic as well as in English and other languages, and you know there is an understanding – I wish this were not the case – that if you can be famous in the West you are more likely to be read in the Arabic original; so a small part of translating something like Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s book was the hope that if it’s published in English and people are talking about it in English, more people will read it in Arabic.

How do you think translation has altered your and your readers’ relationship to Arabic? Is there a part of you that worries, with the growing anglophone diaspora, that translation will render the original Arabic of a text obsolete?

HJ: I want to clarify that when I translate, I’m not translating for the West,  I’m not translating with the white suburban reader in mind. I’m happy for them to read this stuff, but the people I imagine as my readers and interlocutors when I’m translating are the Palestinian shatat, our word for the diaspora that I prefer to translate as the ‘dispersal’, as well as brown and Black and East Asian and South Asian and Latinx kids who can access English and are from communities of struggle. They’re not going to access the Arabic, but this Arabic has something to say to them. I don’t think that translating contributes to making the original obsolete; like I said, one of my main hopes in translating Abu al-Hayyat, and Kanafani for that matter, is so that people will see that it’s being read and discussed in other languages, so if they can read in Arabic, they would be curious to go read the original because they’re able to. People message me all the time now asking for the original Arabic version of Kanafani’s essay on the 1936 Revolution, and those are some of the messages I’m happiest to receive.

What practices inform your role as a translator, and what feels most crucial when you’re translating?

HJ: With literary writing, and especially in poetry, I think writers often render their sentences and verses in ways that give readers options, what they can imagine, what kinds of baggage each word or phrase can carry, and so on. So that when you read a line, you can allow yourself to interpret it in one of several ways, or several ways simultaneously. There’s a tremendous amount of suggestion built into these options. With Arabic you can also play with things like tahrik, the different diacritics that will affect how you sound a letter, or even with i‘jaam, as Sinan Antoon did with his first novel. You can leave options open for gender and case and even full-scale meaning; sometimes the change of a sound can just give you an entirely different word, like an existing word that just means something completely different or something adjacent if not completely different. Similarly with baggage and connotation of words and phrases, where you may have a nod or a full on reference to a particular sacred text or another literary work. Yet another level of play can come in at the level of what the words sound like when they’re sounded as distinct from when they’re silently read.

To render something so culturally specific in another language, which then opens onto a different set of cultural referents is actually impossible, you’re always approximating when you translate. For me, a big part of what it means to translate a literary or poetic text, and the joy I take from it, is to take that impossibility head on, to somehow preserve those options, that play, and since you most often can’t preserve those exact same options, to provide different ones that are somehow analogous in the language and cultural referents I’m translating into.

Talk about some of the barriers to having an Arabic translation-centered publishing house in the English-speaking world. What are some of the main differences in the treatment and publicizing of Arabic authors in Western press?

HJ: You have the exceptions, the one in a million who makes it big and achieves a kind of celebrity status and has enough name recognition that their stuff sells. But I think you’re more likely to get lucrative book deals if you are working in English or in one of the bigger European languages because if you can get a book contract with a big publisher then that’s a lot more money than it is with a small publisher; our publishers, even at their biggest, are not offering the kinds of book contracts that you know the big 5 publishers based in New York or London or Paris are going to offer you, so it means it just objectively is not lucrative to be a writer unless you can hit it lucky with a prestigious prize and bestseller.

The quality of your work often has little to do with getting published; we can think of many really terrible texts that have been marketed in a way that have made them best sellers, and then we can think of just as many incredible pieces of writing that very few have heard of or remember. There’s a fair bit of luck involved in whether you get nominated for a book award; who ends up being on the committee that’s reading your work; what those discussions are going to be like within that committee; and then political considerations relating to your work, especially when we’re talking about things like struggle in Palestine and revolutionary texts–the ones that are meant to provoke some discomfort and difficult soul-searching.

On the western literary and publishing scene, it often feels like Arabic cultural production is not given much space. It’s as if each non-western cultural-linguistic group gets a quota of one major writer, who gets something like a Nobel literature prize, and in the feminist moment we get about once a decade, you can add an additional woman writer if you’re lucky. Even within the Arab readership, just to flag that this is not just a western phenomenon, something as vast and deep and rich as Sudanese literature gets Tayyeb Saleh, but Season of Migration to the North was written sixty years ago! There’s been so much more since, yet go around and ask and very few will be able to name other authors, or even other books by the same author, and you’ll get blank stares. Back to western publishing, when our literature is given space, it’s usually for the kinds of texts that confirm what publishers assume as the biases held by their imagined readers; in our case, Arabs are generally pigeonholed into a set of concerns: patriarchy, misogyny, terrorism, violence, ‘backwardness’… so texts that give these themes the kind of treatment that allows the western reader to pat themselves on the back for being enlightened and saviour-like. This significantly narrows authors’ chances to get other kinds of work published, and ends up creating a kind of vicious cycle.

One other thing that needs to be added here is opportunism. Over the last two years, publishers realized that Palestine was a ‘hot topic’ so after years of rejecting Palestinian pitches, they went on the prowl for Palestinian content. Again, much of what they’ve looked for is the kind of writing that adheres to unwritten, and maybe sometimes written, rules of permissibility. Of course, given the fear of being slandered as anti-Jewish, these publishers have continued along the historic preference to publish white Jewish authors when they’re looking to include writings critical of Zionism, perpetuating Palestine as an intra-Jewish debate rather than helping showcase the richness of Palestinian literary excellence.

What about the publishing of Arabic texts in the Arabic-speaking world? Are there clear distinctions between the two cultural industries?

HJ: Arabic writers are doing everything we would wish they’d be doing: they’re experimenting and they’re not experimenting and they’re producing and they’re trying and they’re sweating; they’re playing and they’re engaging with their realities and trying to fulfill the role of public intellectual to chart possibilities and pose difficult questions and engage their broader societies around themes of queerness and sexual liberation and other topics long-considered taboo or untouchable. They are breaking these taboos, touching on these things, and not just this generation; this stuff’s been around, it just doesn’t get as celebrated or talked about, because at most we hear about such work when it gets banned, if at all. This is the issue with Arabic publishing: if you’re trying to publish in Arabic in the Arab world and you’re running afoul of the sensitivities of these fragile dictatorships in terms of facing a clerical establishment that’s going to freak out and clamp down on any mention of popular liberation or queerness, or that holds up a mirror to ableism or different deep-seated phobias, then these are the kinds of things that you need to contend with. As a result, this work doesn’t make it onto the shelf, and it doesn’t make it into the readers’ hands where you ultimately want it, or into the critics’ book review or into the publication where people are going to be likely to see it. This work doesn’t make it into the mainstream, so it remains exclusively insular because the apparatus that’s there to mediate it into the popular realm is the same apparatus set up to police it. Part of the fantasy of Safarjal is that being an Arabic publisher based outside of the Arab world might give us a certain amount of space to at least produce the kinds of texts that would otherwise get policed, and to convey them in a way where people might get to actually read them.

Mariam Tell is ArabLit’s Summer 2025 intern.