Sinan Antoon’s ‘Of Loss and Lavender’

Discussing Of Loss and Lavender

Sinan Antoon with Tugrul Mende

Of Loss and Lavender, by Sinan Antoon, translated by the author. Other Press, 2026.

In Sinan Antoon’s latest self-translated novel Of Loss and Lavender, set to be published with Other Press in March, two Iraqis struggle to forge a place for themselves in the United States after the Gulf War. In this conversation over e-mail, Prof. Antoon talks about the novel, the fraught nature of collective memory, the process of self-translation, and the sort of “security checkpoints” a book must pass through in the process of translation.

Can you tell us a little about the process of writing Khuzama (Of Loss and Lavender)? How did it begin? Was your approach with this book different from your previous novels?

Sinan Antoon:  There are always haunting moments or events that return years later to become the seeds for a text. In 1994, I saw a man in the suburbs of Virginia, where I was living at the time, who had lost his ear. I knew right away that he must be a refugee from Iraq. I’d read and heard that there were so many young men deserting the army in Iraq the regime instituted a cruel punishment to stem the tide. The man later spoke in an Iraqi dialect of Arabic. It was a visceral illustration of the wounds and visible scars refugees carry with them. His image kept haunting me. He reappeared when I started thinking about writing this novel.

I don’t think my approach is that different in this novel. There are elaborations and variations on strategies and themes I explored in earlier works. Writing the novel took much longer than I thought it would for various reasons (surprise!).

A few of your titles have shifted significantly in translation. The Pomegranate Alone to The Corpse Washer; Ya Maryam to The Baghdad Eucharist. How did this become Of Loss and Lavender, and what resonances does that bring? More generally, what are your thoughts about the changing of titles in translation?

SA: It is the publishers who usually insist on what they think is the best (i.e. more profitable) title. I would have preferred The Pomegranate Alone over The Corpse Washer, for Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman. The French translations (from Actes Sud) did not change the titles: Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman is Seul le Grenadier and Ya Maryam is Ave Maria. I had suggested that we keep Fihris, for example, as is, because there is no one word that would encompass فهرس, but the publisher refused. I suggested The Book of Collateral Damage. In the case of the most recent novel, Khuzama, my agent pointed out that “lavender” doesn’t have the same resonance in English and would be somewhat flat, and I agree. Again, keeping the title untranslated is generally unacceptable, so I came up with a few suggestions, and we settled on “Of Loss and Lavender.” I’m happy with it.

Translated books must cross linguistic and cultural borders and, like migrants, have to pass through checkpoints. There are times when they pass through with minimal violence and without being forced to pay a price or relinquish what they carry. Works from the global south are too often subjected to additional scrutiny and violence and must give up too much to pass through!

Like The Pomegranate Alone (or The Corpse Washer), Of Loss and Lavender was a self-translation. Why did you want to take this on yourself? Have your feelings about self-translation shifted at all, in the interim?

SA: My feelings have always been the same. I would prefer to always translate my own works, but in the past I either didn’t have the time due to work obligations or lacked the emotional energy to return to the work, and I happened to receive an offer from a translator and agreed.

I’jaam, The Pomegranate Alone, Ya Maryam, and The Book of Collateral Damage are mostly set in Iraq, even if the latter is scholar at Harvard and later a professor in New York. But Of Loss and Lavender is embedded in the United States. Why this shift?

SA: All my works so far have been about Iraq and Iraqis. There are five million or so Iraqis who live in the diaspora and carry Iraq with them. This novel is about two of them. While two thirds of it is about the lives of these two refugees in Detroit, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, they both recall memories and events that take place in Iraq. As you mentioned earlier, Fihris (The Book of Collateral Damage) was shuttling between New York and Baghdad. So it’s not a total shift. Characters beckon and I follow them wherever they may be or go!

Are there Iraqi works you’ve read recently that particularly engage you?

SA: I liked two works: A Swiss Summer by Inaam Kachachi and Restitching the Butterfly by Duna Ghali.

How does your academic work intersect with your fiction?

SA: I used to feel somewhat bitter, early on, since my academic work and obligations consume most of my time and mental space and leave very little for writing. But I’ve made peace with it. Teaching and reading texts that I love is a treat.

The book focuses mainly on two characters, Omar and Sami. Both are quite different in their characters but face similar issues in exile. Where do you draw inspiration to form these characters? Do you find yourself in them?

SA: I’ve always been interested in the vastly different life trajectories of refugees in host countries, especially in the US, and how they are shaped by class background, education, generation, etc. Another crucial question I explore, not just in this novel but in a previous one, is how the meaning and memory of one’s homeland is also overdetermined by one’s status, class, and mis/fortunes. Some adjust and acclimate, but others never do. The “golden age” for an individual (or a group) was a nightmare for others. The violence and destruction of institutions, structures, and social fabric unleashed and caused by the US invasion and occupation of 2003 plunged Iraqis into chaos and shattered their lives and collective memory, too. History and collective memory are always a contested landscape. This is more visceral in societies shattered by dictatorship and wars. Who are the victims and who are the victimizers and how is guilt and suffering assigned and recognized? There are no easy answers. I wanted to juxtapose a victim of dictatorship (Omar) for whom home/land was a nightmare to escape, and a victim of the US invasion and its aftermath (Sami), who was forced to leave and will always long for home/land.

The trickiness of establishing a new identity in exile is a prominent theme in your new novel. Omar doesn’t want to be attached to Iraq and claims he comes from somewhere else. Where does his alienation from his home country come from and did you experience this with other characters you came across in your life? 

SA: In the first few months after my arrival in the US From Iraq in 1991, I heard someone speak the Iraqi dialect. I had sorely missed hearing the language (it was the pre-digital era), but when I approached him, he answered me in English, claiming that he didn’t speak Arabic and wasn’t from Iraq. It was very telling. The relationships refugees and immigrants have with their home countries differ, so do the strategies and defense mechanisms they adopt. Some decide, or are forced, to sever the bonds. Others hold on.

Your novel is set in the context of the US invasions of Iraq and jumps sometimes between timelines. What made you use this technique of shuttling forth and back in time, and how much has debate and discussion around the war changed in recent years?

SA: The novel spans the 1990s all through the years right after the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. I’m not a fan of linearity. The two main characters of this novel are both haunted by the past. One of them wants to erase it completely, while the other is struggling to preserve it. They are going back and forth. As for the war, or wars, they are almost forgotten in the United States of Amnesia. If there are victims, it’s the veterans who fought the war. Iraqi civilians, like other barbarians, don’t count in Rome.

Tugrul Mende is a regular contributor to ArabLit.