‘Writing Is Rediscovering the Tangible’
‘Writing Is Rediscovering the Tangible’
Ibrahim Alfraih in Conversation with Ahmed Alhokail
This interview with Ahmed Alhokail was conducted through a written exchange in Arabic and translated by the interviewer.
Born in the mid-1980s, Ahmed Alhokail is among the most distinctive Saudi writers of his generation. He has worked as a journalist and began his literary career by posting experimental short stories on his blog, later expanding into novels while continuing to write short fiction. His Turuq wa Mudun (Roads and Cities, 2019), a mosaic of stories charting the rapid urbanization of Najd, was described by ArabLit contributor Mohammad Alanazi as “one of the greatest works of Saudi fiction.” His most recent book, al-Hafa al-Mutilla ‘ala al-‘Alam (The Edge Overlooking the World, 2025), interweaves stories with autobiographical narratives. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2025 feature film Algaid.
What I admire most about Alhokail’s work is that it takes me back to a life I know and shows me how much of it I had missed. Everyday conversations, relationships between fathers and children, houses, jobs, and roads become subjects of sustained attention. He finds stories in the ordinary, making familiar details recognizable, newly revealed. His intimate narrative voice brings memory, place, and even the returning dead into everyday scenes, giving loss and time a felt presence.
His engagement with classical Arabic literature, especially its historical anecdotes and biographical dictionaries, has prompted me to think further about the roots of Arabic narrative and its possibilities. Together with his wide reading of world literature, this engagement raises a question: How can a writer draw on diverse literary traditions while keeping his voice rooted in the language and life he grew up with? Alhokail’s work invites me to read contemporary Saudi literature with confidence and curiosity, and to recognize more literary possibilities in the life around me. His books deserve to be translated and far more widely read.
This interview grew out of questions I wanted to put to Alhokail as an avid reader of his work. It is also part of my broader effort to introduce English-language readers to the range and variety of Saudi and other Arabic-language literatures. In our exchange, he talks about placing the ordinary at the center of the story, classical Arabic narratives as a living model, Najdi oral storytelling and the uncanny, and the “global reader.” -Ibrahim Alfraih
In The Edge Overlooking the World, you recall a night when you were eighteen, sitting on the curb of Riyadh’s Northern Ring Road, choosing between crushing your “wild notions” about falling in line or accepting them, along with the loneliness they would bring. Later you wrote Days and Books to imagine who you would have become if you had fallen in line. What did you discover about that ordinary man you never became?
Ahmed Alhokail: I discovered that he doesn’t exist and never did. I think everyone imagines an “alternate self,” which they tie to particular events or circumstances, as though their personality had been formed by them. I don’t want to get into philosophical and scientific complexities about the self, psychology, and physiology, but a large part of a person comes with them at birth, and there is no escaping it. Writers found in Freud, Jung, and the schools of psychoanalysis fertile material for drama, complexes, and character-building. But I’m a Najdi, a farmer’s son, deeply attached to what is tangible and proven. And I don’t think I’m a Popperian, either. Perhaps I’m more like a wanderer who picks things up at random, something here and something there, to fashion personal convictions shaped by a mixture of approaches. So I read them all in my youth, and I realized that what matters most to them is the “cause.” And the cause is complicated. When I go back to my earliest memories, I find temperament but not cause, the result but not the motive. I don’t remember why I love one thing and hate another, why I am or am not something.
I think the character of Nasser in Days and Books is an imagined literary exercise more than a belief in an “alternate self.” What we have in common is that I’m “ordinary” like him, even if my ordinariness is a different kind. That’s why I wanted the autobiographical parts of The Edge to be more candid, more tied to actual events. I wanted the reader who has grown used to confusing me with my characters to see me more clearly than before, so they might see where I resemble my characters and where I differ from them.
You present Nasser as an ordinary, marginal man, even though people like him make up much of the life around us. In what sense does the majority become the margin? And does the ordinary change once we place it at the center of the story?
AA: That’s the nature of life. The center gets the attention and the historical record. In every people’s history, more has been written about centers and prominent figures than about anyone else. And the center is small compared to the margins, and the weaker a literature, the more life it leaves in the margins. That’s why, from our own heritage, I love books like al-Tanukhi’s Nishwar al-Muhadara (The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge), which focuses on the margins of life in Baghdad, as much as I love the histories devoted to major events and figures. I loved Don Quixote because it turned its gaze on a marginal man who aspires to greatness, and I loved the European and American novel because it went down into the street and raised it to the level of high literature. The ordinary doesn’t change when we place it at the center. The characters of Knut Hamsun and John Cheever are still marginal, but they reveal the depth of life far from the grand political and military histories, and they widen your field of vision to take in margins that once seemed less important.
You worked as a journalist, and you’ve written that, at the time, you wanted to be like Norman Mailer. What did you carry from journalism into literature, and what did you try to shed?
AA: Our Saudi literature is far from realism, and when it does come close, its realism tends to be shallow and populist. Journalism gave me a frame of reference for understanding people and everyday events: what matters to them, what drives them, what frightens them, and what lies hidden beneath the surface. When you sit with someone complaining about the crumbling health services in his village, you see beyond the complaint. You see monotony, anxiety, an exhausting sense of inferiority to the city, and perhaps resentment of the circumstances that pushed him into this life. When you meet a creature of habit who spends time every day in his friends’ istiraha [a private recreational space used for social gatherings], you see the inertia of his social circle and an existential predicament that reveals more about him than is apparent on the surface. Journalism, along with my own life, gave me part of this frame of reference.
But I didn’t want to write popular or “lowbrow” literature, or what we mockingly call “tamees-bakery literature” [tamees is a type of flatbread]. I wanted to take this life, the life of the middle class in particular, and raise it to a higher level, to what we might call high literature.
Kafka, Hamsun, Musil, Bernhard, Pynchon, and Capote all appear in your writings. Which writers shaped you and changed the way you write? What does it mean for an Arab writer to be formed to such an extent by literature in translation? And how did Western literature, paradoxically, lead you to a new appreciation of Arabic literary heritage?
AA: I grew up in a traditional environment; I learned classical Arabic literature before anything else. But like others, I’m a child of my time. I grew up as the internet and films spread and globalization widened its reach, as my generation’s culture surged toward new worlds, and I found important literary touchstones in European and American literature, which had preceded us by many decades in the art of storytelling. I learned English to gain fuller access to it, and I studied its historical contexts and movements. I tried to keep a distance between myself and those writers. It was hard and exhausting, trying to be influenced and not influenced at the same time, but I always told myself: what happened to them didn’t happen to me, so their conclusions aren’t necessarily mine.
I translated Walser, Cheever, and Schulz, and I wrote essays on Sebald, Bernhard, and Hamsun, but I didn’t want to write like them. I saw them as masters of the craft who would set me on a road I would have to finish on my own. So I don’t think I left the heritage and then returned to it. But I was certainly captivated by those foreign literary influences; they drew me in for years and nearly made me forget the traditions I had grown up with.
In your essay “The Predicament of Authenticity,” you argue that ordinary individuals make up much of the classical Arabic tradition, and that reducing the art of Arabic narrative to One Thousand and One Nights reflects “an infuriating inferiority complex.” You say we must understand al-Jahiz the way the English understand Shakespeare, and then leave a question hanging: “But do you write like him?” Let me put your question back to you: What can a contemporary writer actually take from al-Jahiz?
AA: You don’t have to take anything from al-Jahiz, any more than you have to take anything from Kafka. You’re under no obligation to borrow from any writer, whatever their era. For me, writing comes down to the story of Abu Nuwas and his teacher Khalaf al-Ahmar, who told him to memorize ten thousand lines of poetry, then told him to forget them. You’ll be influenced, but not deliberately. I don’t want to get into theories of influence, and how everyone has read James Joyce even if they haven’t, because they’ve been shaped by narratives that Joyce shaped. But for me, writing means consuming thousands of texts—written, oral, and visual—and then forgetting them.
That’s why I drew on heritage in Roads and Cities; not because I wanted to write a purely Arab novel, but because I found an ideal structure for the novel in Arabic literary and folk traditions: to create a spine for the story and scatter hundreds of stories around it. I don’t want to write like al-Jahiz, but I also don’t want to write like the Nights, which Europeans loved because it fit their narrative conventions better than other forms did. I want to write as I wish, and what I wish is tied to my own experience and life.
Roads and Cities is a mosaic of many loosely connected stories in the manner of classical Arabic narrative, charting what rapid urbanization did to Najd. You’ve written that the storytelling methods of the Arabic tradition are ideally suited to creating “a vast mosaic of stories that captures society and how it has changed.” What does this form capture that a linear novel cannot?
AA: Arabs are storytellers at heart. There are many theories about why they paid less attention to the story than to poetry, but storytelling is in their nature. What astonishes me most about al-Jahiz, for example, is that he is an architect of narrative. When you read Kitab al-Hayawan (The Book of Animals), you see a spine, which is the animal, but the book is really about people and their relationship to animals, with poetry, prose, and stories scattered around this spine, leaving it and returning to it according to an organized plan that never upsets the balance between the two parallel lines.
I felt this method was ideal because Najdi life is also built on stories. I grew up in it. Their lives are full of stories, accounts, and poems passed down through generations; the stories are known as sabahin among settled communities and hajaya among the Bedouin. It seemed exciting to create a narrative that mirrored their way of building stories: a spine through which hundreds of stories pass: about them, their lives, the changes in their ways of living and thinking, so that the people themselves become the protagonists, rather than having the novel follow a single, tightly plotted storyline.
After reading the manuscript, a friend asked me why I hadn’t written it like Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, with protagonists who stand as enduring symbols for every type in society. But I didn’t want to write like Mahfouz, much as I admire him. I wanted the heroes to be the people themselves, without an intermediary. It might be less suspenseful, but for me it comes closer to the heart of the idea I was after.
In your story “From the Margin: The Life of Qatada al-Khurasani,” you write the biography of an obscure highwayman, attributing it to invented sources modeled on those that recur in the classical tradition. Then, in the last footnote, you all but shout: “The last fabricated source in the story, I swear to God.” You’ve also written that fabrication is common in classical Arabic narrative itself. Was your use of invented sources in “Qatada” an imitation of a classical technique or a parody of it?
AA: I believe Arabic literature is among the most diverse of human literatures. There are two kinds of history among the Arabs. One is the history of the transmitters, which you find in al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa‘d, al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri, and other historians, early and late. It is handed down through chains of narrators, and these are the foundational histories, whose main aim is to document and record. Then there is history as it appears in books of adab [literary compilations], a history full of invention and exaggeration. These are books that dramatize history, like Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs) and al-Basa’ir wa-l-Dhakha’ir (Insights and Treasures). One of the most beautiful books of stories is al-Jahshiyari’s al-Wuzara’ wa-l-Kuttab (Viziers and Secretaries). It’s a historical reference, but written in an astonishing narrative style; you’ll find the same stories in other books, but in al-Jahshiyari, they are sculpted in a way that feels almost theatrical. Al-Jahiz’s Book of Misers is dominated by invention; it’s said that most of it is al-Jahiz’s own making. Al-Balawi’s biography of Ibn Tulun reads like an inflated, dramatized life.
The Arabs understood the greatness of the story and the depth of its effect. They documented it through transmitters so that it would be as accurate a historical reference as possible, but in books of adab they told many invented and embellished stories that created this immense richness. So I don’t think the Arabs failed to discover “the novel.” I think they knew it, but they chose for it to take the form of a mosaic of stories scattered through books of adab. There’s a dialogue between the caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik and Yazid ibn Abi Muslim about his relationship with al-Hajjaj. If you put it in a play, you wouldn’t need to change a word.
The ordinary person in your stories is often a middle-class employee, caught between housing loans, the traffic on the way to work, and office humor. Why do you think this group, the largest of all, has remained the least visible in the Saudi novel, which was long preoccupied with the shocking and the taboo?
AA: The reasons are complex and hard to reduce to one. But in general, we are newcomers to the novel, and the strength of our literature lies in vernacular poetry, oral narrative, and perhaps autobiography. So I think the novel was taken up as a modern, much-coveted weapon in intellectual and political battles, until those battles overwhelmed it, and stylistically it remained dependent on schools coming from abroad. There are exceptions, novels written with authenticity and a desire to write the novel for its own sake. And I think more recent generations of writers are closer to this idea, and more eager to write the novel as an independent art grounded in our own experience, even when it touches on ideas and politics.
You return often to Majmaah, the town where you grew up, and manage to present it as though it were being described for the first time. How does the place change in your writing as you move further from your childhood there? Have some of your memories of it been shaped by what you’ve written, so that the place you lived and the place you made are hard to tell apart?
AA: A wonderful question. Writing is rediscovering the tangible. The street you’ve walked down hundreds of times has become something you register without thinking, but you rediscover it when you set out to write about it. The people you cross paths with every day become so familiar that you think there is nothing more to see. But when you try to write about them, hidden depths begin to emerge; their movements, their tone of voice, their glances take on deeper and clearer meanings. I think rediscovering the tangible is one of my most important reasons for writing: I want to capture the most habitual and repetitive situations in order to discover them anew.
Honestly, I don’t know where the place lies: in reality, or in my writing about it. I want it to be in reality. I want anyone who reads about Majmaah or Riyadh in my writing to see them as they truly are. But writing inevitably involves some romanticization, and perhaps someone will visit Majmaah and not see it as I wrote it.
Some call you a realist, yet the dead walk in “The Dead of Riyadh,” a long-dead father brews coffee in “Najr,” and jinn toy with people’s minds on the Mountain of Death in “Dreams: The Descent to Paradise.” Where is the line between the real and the uncanny in your work? And what role do Najdi folktales and oral stories play?
AA: I believe that reality in the Arabian Peninsula, and among Arabs in general, is closely bound up with the uncanny. Go back to the tales told by fathers and mothers, in gatherings and in the street, and you’ll hear about jinn and legends and “telepathy” and wild fantasies. The desert environment we live in, whether as townspeople or Bedouin, is a sensory one. Read how the Arabs likened the sound of the sands to ‘azif al-jinn, the humming of the jinn; how they tell of humans marrying jinn; how they describe the hama, the bird that emerges from the head of a murdered man whose blood has gone unavenged and cries, “Give me to drink! Give me to drink!” until vengeance is sought for him. But we are certainly influenced by other cultures’ literature in the way we treat the uncanny, and modernism and postmodernism opened up ways of handling time, the metaphysical, and the imaginary that have since become part of our culture.
You recorded The Edge Overlooking the World in your own voice for Thmanyah Radio. Did reading the text aloud change your relationship with it?
AA: I’ve always written while imagining a voice reading what I write. That was the old trick that let me simplify my language and make it more realistic, especially since we have relatively few models for this in our fiction; most of our writing aims for elevated, poetic phrasing, even when it is about reality and ordinary characters. So it wasn’t hard to turn the book into an audio recording, except for the dialogues, which needed small changes so the listener could tell where each exchange began and ended.
Your writing mixes standard Arabic with Najdi dialect, and ordinary life is rendered in precise local detail. You’ve even written that “the language of someone from Qassim differs from that of someone from Majmaah, even in their use of standard Arabic.” What do you fear your texts will lose in translation? Is the ordinary the most universal thing in literature, or is it the most resistant to translation?
AA: This is a global problem, not ours alone. How do you translate Ulysses into any language? How do you translate The Catcher in the Rye? In one Arabic translation of Ulysses, the translator chose to render the speech of a Black character in Sudanese dialect. Do you translate The Catcher in the Rye into a colloquial dialect? And which one: Najdi, Hijazi, Cairene, or Nubian? I think it’s a linguistic and philosophical problem more than a geographical one, and I don’t think it has a definitive solution. It will be a personal decision each translator makes, arising from their own environment and their intended readers.
Some Saudi readers, let alone other Arab readers, have wished for footnotes explaining your local expressions. Where do you draw the line between helping the reader and preserving the rhythm of the story?
AA: I think this is the magic of colloquial language, and of language in general. When I was learning English, I struggled to understand Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Jack Kerouac, even though I knew American films and spoken English well, because so many of their words belong so specifically to their environments. But they were magical because you catch the meaning from the context. It’s this resistance that makes you feel the authenticity of what you’re reading, as if you were a tourist walking through strange, unknown markets, gathering obscure but striking words. Some novels are later published with extensive notes explaining meanings and allusions, but I don’t think that applies to what I write.
In your essay “The Predicament of Authenticity,” you described globally dominant culture as melting down smaller cultures “in something like a soft cultural colonialism” and saw its clearest symptom as the pursuit of a “global reader” and the ready-made forms that come with it. Now your work is reaching that very reader through translation. How do you see this? And what would you like to say to that reader?
AA: Frankly, I don’t think about it much. We ourselves are global readers, influenced as readers and writers by novels and films that come from everywhere, some of which represent global patterns, so we will inevitably write in a style that might seem global. But I’m not obsessed with it, and I don’t think about it. If the global reader wants me as I am, good. If not, they can do without me; they have what suits them better. I don’t want to read Jon Fosse because he writes for a global reader; I want to read Jon Fosse because he writes in his own way, in his own style, out of his own context. Creativity is global by nature, because people, however different their contexts, remain bound up with one another in universal situations and feelings. And readers are curious by nature, wanting to discover worlds that lead them toward what is different from themselves. I don’t think García Márquez was thinking of a global reader when he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet here we are, sharing it in Saudi Arabia with readers in Siberia, Congo, and France, and finding no difficulty connecting with it.
Many of your stories open like scenes in a screenplay. At eighteen you asked yourself, “Should I become a filmmaker?” You’ve said you want dialogue that “sounds like the movies,” and that you have a screenplay you will direct “someday.” How has your fascination with cinema shaped your technique? Is writing, for you, cinema deferred?
AA: I came to literature through cinema, which was my first obsession as a boy. Literature, cinema, and football are what I consume most every day. But to trace this back to its roots, I think Najdis of earlier generations were visual in their sensibility and practices, whether they lived as Bedouin in the desert or as settled inhabitants of villages. Because their culture was more oral than written, language and image came together in their spontaneous expression, and we inherited that style. When you look back at Najdi cultural heritage and folk traditions, you notice how visual it is: full of similes and images, of scenes painted in words and connections to the tangible world. You find this from the pre-Islamic poets all the way to our own recent times. So it’s no surprise that we formed a bond with cinema, an art that reached us only recently. Many of the tales we heard and read begin as visual scenes.
You take your blog seriously and keep posting new stories there, whereas many writers treat blogging as a stage to leave behind once their books reach print. What is your philosophy here?
AA: Arabic publishing is a crumbling sector; most of the people in it are amateurs working in an industry that barely exists. I once advised a friend to read Ibrahim Aslan, and he surprised me by saying he couldn’t find his books! I’ve loved blogging because it is a direct line to readers who may not be able to find my printed books. As long as we’re amateurs in a broken industry, why put up barriers? If it were up to me, I would publish my books on my blog. But many readers, myself among them, love printed books.
Ahmed Alhokail is a Saudi writer and novelist. His books include the story collections ‘Ala Hafat al-Wa‘i (On the Edge of Consciousness, 2013) and Bayt (House, 2020); the novels Khutut (Lines, 2013), Dawa’ir (Circles, 2015), Turuq wa Mudun (Roads and Cities, 2019), and Ayyam wa Kutub: ‘Am Awwal (Days and Books: Year One, 2021); the novella al-Khalq al-Jadid (The New Creation, 2020); and al-Hafa al-Mutilla ‘ala al-‘Alam (The Edge Overlooking the World, 2025). He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Algaid (2025).
Ibrahim Alfraih is a translator and Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at King Saud University, where he leads the Saudi Literature Chair. Follow his Arabic Literary & Cultural Studies Network (ALCSN) newsletter on Substack.