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Publishing from the Fault Line

Publishing from the Fault Line

By Lynn Gaspard

 

For the past few days, I have found it difficult to concentrate on work. Like many others, I have been glued to the news, worried about what world leaders have unleashed in the Middle East.

I am the publisher and managing director of Saqi Books, an independent press showcasing voices from the Middle East and beyond. Saqi was founded more than 40 years ago by my parents, Andre and Salwa Gaspard, and their close friend Mai Ghoussoub, who had fled the civil war in Lebanon.

The strange reality of diaspora is that life continues even when your other home is in danger. Emails still need answering. There are contracts to be negotiated. LBF meetings prepped. But when the place you publish about is also the place you come from, the line between professional and personal life becomes blurred.

The work we do can feel small in moments like this – when the world seems to be falling apart, and when friends, family and colleagues are in danger. Yet it is in fact essential, because when the headlines eventually move on, the books will remain as testimony and memory.

War silences conversation and crushes nuance. It reduces lives to statistics. There is perhaps no greater act of dehumanization.

Earlier this week on Channel 4 News, a former Israeli prime minister described the unfolding violence as a “noble war,” a struggle between good and evil. Listening to that language, I was reminded of the rhetoric of the “war on terror” and the so-called “axis of evil.” In such a framing, where exactly do people like me and the writers we publish sit?

For decades, there has been a shift toward a harsher political climate, one shaped by fear and mistrust, if not outright hatred, of the other. Intellectual curiosity is replaced by certainty. Expertise is dismissed. Empathy and nuance are seen as weak.

Books remain one of the few spaces where that simplification can still be challenged. They rehumanize the lives that disappear behind headlines. A Gazan cookbook becomes a record of cultural memory. An Iranian memoir becomes a witness to history. A work of scholarship restores complexity. Every book is an argument that the people who live these histories deserve to tell them in their own voices.

Being a Middle East specialist publisher is rarely glamorous work, and it rarely produces instant commercial success. But over time, it shifts the conversation. Few things are more meaningful than hearing from readers who have discovered a world or perspective they had never encountered before, or who have been moved to tears because they have seen themselves represented for the first time.

For many writers and readers, Saqi has become a kind of home away from home. A space that fights for their voices and their cultures. That work feels particularly important now.

At a moment when countries in the Middle East face destruction, and as the laws and institutions that were meant to make us feel safe are eroded, publishing’s commitment to diversity, intellectual challenge, and critical thinking feels more urgent than ever.

For too long, the Middle East has been written about far more than it has been listened to.  But behind every war is a country full of lives that deserve to be seen not as headlines, but as human stories. And publishing remains one of the ways those stories survive.

Lynn Gaspard is the publisher and managing director of Saqi Books. She has worked in publishing for over two decades and is the editor of Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, a Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year. She previously served as a trustee of the Shubbak Festival and on English PEN’s Writers in Translation committee.