In Conversation: Songs as Memory, as Solidarity, as Resistance

In Conversation: Songs for Darkness

Between Iman Humaydan, Michelle Hartman, and Emma Hardy

Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese novelist, researcher, and academic whose latest novel Songs for Darkness — published today in Michelle Hartman’s English translation– depicts the lives of four generations of women and their experiences of love, sacrifice, revolution, and grief in the fictional village of Ksoura in Mount Lebanon. Set against the backdrop of the massive changes of the 20th century, the novel takes the reader from the first World War to the Israeli Invasion of 1982, intertwining the story of these women with the story of the formation of modern Lebanon. Throughout the novel, Iman draws her reader in an intimate relationship with her characters, letting you share in their most raw and vulnerable moments.

Michelle Hartman’s translation was clearly born of a deep love and respect for Iman’s work, and the two have worked together on several books and have grown to understand one another in a way that can only be described as an ideal writer-translator collaboration.

Iman will be traveling to meet with readers in the United States in April and plans to make stops in San Francisco, Massachusetts, and New York, and we also have a short excerpt today from the novel. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you start out by telling us about your inspiration and or motivation for writing this book?

Iman Humaydan: This book, for me, is a continuation of what I have started since B as in Beirut. I work always with more or less marginalized women. With the first book, they [the characters] were in a closed area, which is the building. The second book was in a village; I just took the personalities out of four walls, until I arrived at 50 Grams of Paradise and then Songs for Darkness. If I want to imagine the movement of these characters, it was just to go outside and find their place outside the private. And in Songs for Darkness, I tried to give, totally, the talking over to them, for them to tell the story, not me to tell their story. I was very concerned about connecting these characters and their lives within a social and political context, and a historical one. That is why I wrote this book. My characters are there; they are related to what’s going on out in the country and they are a part of this history. That was my main concern in this book, to create this relationship between their lives and the life of Lebanon.

You develop these beautiful characters that as a reader I easily fell in love with and felt a strong emotional connection with which really emphasized the heartbreak of their suffering and challenges. Could you talk about your writing process, and how you developed these characters?

IH: Always, in my mind, there was this very important idea that these characters should be linked to what’s going on outside. All their lives, from Shahira til Asmahan, their reactions, their movement in the universe of the novel, their ideas were very intimately connected to the social, political and to the historical context. So they were not people that do not have a relationship with what is going on outside, and this was my main important point.

When I talk about Shahira, who was born at the end of the 19th century, like 1890, I should put Shahira’s life within this context, and the same as her daughter Yasmine and her grandchild Layla and then the great-grandchild Asmahan. It was important for me to give the voice for each character in a very logical and believed context. I mean Shahira cannot say words that Asmahan said, and cannot have the same approach as Asmahan had.

The thing that differs between the characters — I think Shahira was a remarkable person because she was the column of the female experience, she was the cornerstone of these [characters’]experiences, they went different directions, but she was the source. And this is something very dear to my heart, always in my mind I have a female character which is the source. Although in my life I never had a female character who was a source for me. Neither my grandmother nor my mother because they were very silent people, and maybe this silence provoked, or evoked a lot of curiosity and need for me to let women speak.

In the book we see these major political moments and movements of Lebanese history act as a catalyst for a lot of what these characters go through and how their stories are shaped. Why did you choose to set the story during this particular era of history?

IH: Because the 20th century witnessed, first of all, two world wars, both affected Lebanon. And there were also the independence movements in the Arab world, the pan-Arab movement, the declarations of nation states, the internal problems in each country because the states were in a state of being formed. So this was a very rich century, and it was a century with the failing experiences of building a nation state. Also, I shouldn’t forget it was the century where Israel was declared as a state, with all the consequences of declaring Israel as a state. If you look at our history since the 1940s, we didn’t have a decade without big problems in the Arab world. I wanted to look back at this history and see the place of women, where it was. And the place of women means, between brackets, the place of all people who didn’t have a voice. Not only women, but other communities.

Also, it was a near history for me. I heard a lot from my father, I heard a lot from other people, so it is a place where I can, in my imagination, grab and do something about it. It would be much more difficult for me to work on the 19th century, let’s say, on the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century before the first World War and how our communities in Mount Lebanon dealt. So I chose something that affects me, affects my mother and my grandmother, and I worked on it.

In the translator’s note, Michelle, you wrote that Iman described the book as being “by, of, and for women.” What does it mean that you’re both female artists writing or translating these really powerful female stories?

Michelle Hartman: I think Iman answered this in a way, talking about her interest in connecting the lives of women throughout a historical period to their contexts and to the specific things that were happening and the ways in which people, in this case women, are impacting the world around them and the way that the world around them is impacting them. I think one of the things that I really love about Songs for Darkness — and this is sort of a characteristic of Iman’s work in general, but you really see it come out in Songs for Darkness because it’s a big story and it moves over a big period of time — is that there are lots of characters, and there are lots of main characters. Shahira in a way carries through because she is this grandmother figure, but the other female characters that come out and narrate stories are also really important characters, not side characters. And I think that one of the things that is so important here is the way in which the stories are very detailed, and the stories are very real. The stories connect very deeply to the histories and politics, as Iman just said, but they aren’t, if I can say this, obvious, they are not cliché. We don’t actually know what’s going to happen exactly, and the characters are all acting internally from their perspective as people.

So this is something that’s really remarkable about this particular novel, and I think as a translator and as a woman translator I really love this characteristic of the novel. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier to do it, but it makes it very interesting and it makes it very compelling to try to figure out how to convey that across the languages. That’s the job of the translator, to read it, understand it, and get really immersed in it. Then you have to figure out how to make that, which in its own context is very rich and deep and nuanced, move and actually work in a whole other language context. So that’s actually something I think that we can say, specifically about Songs for Darkness, which was really interesting to work on.

IH: I want to add that I am so grateful to have Michelle as a translator of my novels into English because it is a really wonderful experience. There is a lot of understanding between us, and I think this is due to the love that Michelle has for the Arabic language and for the Arabic culture, and this helps a lot. I mean the worst thing might happen if a translator is translating because he or she “works as a translator” full stop. With Michelle, translation becomes a life between us, and I am happy to be working with her, really.

MH: Well we have worked together for a while, and so I think that we also have developed that relationship over a time. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and hung out together, and talked; it does help to be able to feel what’s going on when you really know a lot about how somebody thinks and how they talk and how they do things, and where they are coming from. The more understanding you have the more you can bring that into the text.

IH: And it helps you knowing the Lebanese society.

MH: Yes, yes right.

IH: I don’t know, really; I wonder if you translate let’s say an Algerian novel, would it be the same for you? This is a question outside the question.

MH: I haven’t really embarked on that kind of a project and I think, for me, I feel like — not that it’s impossible someday — but that I work on things that I have some connection to or some feeling for. I don’t just translate whatever comes across. I work on things that I feel like I can do a good job on and that I can understand in some way, [that] there is some kind of important connection or something that I really want to do. Obviously Iman‘s work I really love and I really connected to from the first work that we did together. And so now, even more, I feel like I’m a part of the world of these books. I know this world really well. The real world, of course, because of going to Lebanon a lot and spending a lot of time in that context, but also the fictional world. I feel I know that fictional world really well and it’s connected to the real world. I feel really grateful that I get to do them because the new work comes out and I’m so excited to kind of get all into it. And I think that it’s that kind of spark and that kind of interest and connection that makes it work.

IH: Also I want to add one point, that Michelle respects the choice of the writer when we come to the last draft. Every time we read it together and always Michelle puts a circle around certain words that she’s hesitant about, either this word or that word. And I really admire that she respects what the writer feels about which word might fit. Of course I always leave it to her, because she is the one who knows English, who can really choose the right word that resonates with the original language. And this is something that you don’t find a lot with other translators. My books have been translated into many languages and I have a very special experience in the translation into English with Michelle.

Michelle, could you talk a little more about your translation process? 

MH: I think one thing that I love about working on Iman’s fiction is that, as you can tell from talking to her, there is a whole world that exists and the book is part of it. There’s a much bigger world that she’s created that is not necessarily in the pages, and the pages are what she’s chosen to create for us to see, and in a very conscious way. I mean that might sound obvious, right, that’s partly the process of fiction, but in Iman’s case it’s a very big and very well developed universe that she has created. In working in her text, you are really immersing yourself in a world. So that was a really interesting part of the book, because also it’s so big. It’s much bigger in scope than the other novels by Iman because it’s over such a long period of time. It ends in 1982 with the Israeli invasion and you know that there’s more (what’s happening now, where is Lama, where is Asmahan), and there is that kind of suspended ending. So because of all of this, and because the novel is pretty long, I also had to think about and imagine translating something to make that apparent inside of the text. And these are intangibles, these are not the word to word to word parts of translation; this is the bigger picture of translation. There was this element of working on the book, which I think was really interesting and challenging.

And then also another part of it that I really liked and was interesting for me, as someone who’s worked on and studied Lebanon a lot, is the history of this region and the events that are so much a part of the text. It’s much more obvious, if I can put it like that, in the text that it’s taking place over this historical period and also trying to engage some of those really key events and moments in the history of the region and the modern state. And I do that work as a professor, I do it with my students, I do it in my other research. I had recently finished working on oral histories of the Lebanese Civil War and women’s lives in the civil war with a colleague of mine. I was doing all of this just as I started delving into the text, and all of that came into play. So I think that’s another really interesting part of translating it and I think that that will be interesting for the reader.

This text is just so character-based, I mean I think the reason you turn the pages is because of the characters; you turn the pages because you want to really know what’s going to happen in the story. At the same time, there is this big history that’s being told and you really learn a lot from that. And I know Iman did a lot of research on it to make that come to life. So I, as a translator, went back and read histories and read other texts that also talked about these times because I wanted to try to do that same thing–of capturing the right way of talking and the words and the tone in English to make those different parts come to life in the right way. So that’s part of the process of it.

IH: You’ve reminded me of the research I did before writing this novel. I will give two very tiny examples: The example of taking the train to Palestine from Lebanon that Ghassan, the husband of Yasmine, did because he worked in Haifa in Palestine at that time. And the second example was the film that Layla saw the night of her disappearance. And these two very mild, very secondary incidents events that happened in the novel took me I don’t know how many weeks to find; because to find out on the 30th of April 1963 what film was playing in Beirut, in downtown Beirut, I contacted maybe 10 people who are related to cinema and most of them didn’t know. And the second one, the train, you know that the civil war in Lebanon really caused a very dangerous cut of our memory. We don’t have archives of how the trains changed directions after the declaration of Israel because the trains couldn’t go anymore to Palestine. For example, we have a directory of trains in Lebanon, but we don’t have trains. So, when you ask how the train used to move, it’s difficult to find people to answer you. The same as the women’s protest in downtown Beirut, because there is no documentation of this unless we go to people like Michelle, and other researchers who worked really deeply on Lebanese history and the modern history of Lebanon. So, it was so interesting this trip that I took to find out all this tiny information and put them together while building the novel.

MH: So it’s fictional of course, but the documentation of the history that’s inside of this fictional text offers us a lot, and it offers it to the younger generations, and for all of us, to learn or to remember these things. The sections in Palestine, reading them today with everything that’s happening in Palestine now with the genocide and the occupation, and then reading these historical moments and remembering in the textual form, remembering how people were able to move back and forth, remembering this is part of one culture or community, you would have a job here you would have a job there, people intermarried, people moved back and forth over the borders. And we know this, but here we see this documented in a particular way. So there are so many moments in the text that are tiny, but they give this importance to contemporary history as well as older history. And these are just one or two examples, but there’s so many of these throughout the novel that are really crucial.

IH: These historical details helped in constructing the historical background — but it’s a novel, it’s always a novel. It’s always a fiction. Although I borrowed history, it’s not a historical novel.

We see the songs and the poetry play different roles throughout the novel. As a way for the characters to express themselves, a way for them to escape their reality. I also found that, when I saw singing or poetry come up, it was a moment where a character needed to go into her inner self and reconnect with herself. If you could talk a bit about the songs, from your point of view, and the role that they play in the book.

IH: The songs came into the book in a very spontaneous way. I cannot tell you that I was thinking of them at the beginning of my writing, but when creating the character of Shahira — and not forgetting the social context of where she was and the history, the beginning of the 20th century — the songs came in a very harmonious way, when I was reading about the economic life in the Beqaa part of Lebanon, because Shahira came from the South Western part of Lebanon. And there, people used to live on planting wheat and other cereals, and I did some research there with old people, and they told me that women used to go down to the field and they used to sing. And there were special songs for the harvest and for the planting of the wheat, and this stuck in my mind, and I started searching for these kinds of songs. I found out also a very interesting thing: that the songs of the western Beqaa Valley are almost the same as in Soueida. Soueida is the Druze area in Syria, and in the western Beqaa there are three or four Druze villages. So I said okay, why not, the songs also travel as people travel.

I used these songs in the novel to show them as a part of their daily life and a part of resistance for them. They resisted through songs. It was their way of expression at that time, maybe it was difficult to express definitely, and it gave them a lot of self peace and internal peace. And there is a sentence that Shahira always used in her life, she says she cheats, I don’t know if I can use the word cheats, maybe you tell me how you translated it Michelle, تحتال على قدر, she cheats on fate, or on destiny. I used the word تحتال على قدر, always she deals with her destiny, with her faith, with intelligence and will and a strong personality, that she does not want to be defeated by fate and songs were a part of this tactic. She sings, whenever she is feeling down she sings, and if we look at it, really, songs make you feel better, even now. I mean when we sing it is better. And the songs were also a tool of solidarity among women which is very important.

MH: I translate fiction, mainly, and so whenever you are translating something that has poetry or songs in it, I know it’s sort of like “oh no” here comes something outside of my zone. For me, that’s really the hardest part, just in terms of difficulty because all translation is difficult and you never can find the equivalent that you exactly love or you find something like yes, this works really well, since you know that there are so many other ways you could do it. So translation is bargaining and compromising and making choices and you’re fixing something in place that isn’t fixed. Songs and poetry are like that just exponentially more, less satisfying and more difficult, so this was really the hardest part. It’s probably the part we talked about the most and you know it’s funny that you say that one [تحتال على قدر] because I remember from the first draft I did highlighting that expression. And I don’t honestly remember what we decided. That’s one we discussed over and over, and I don’t remember, because we have the idiomatic expression in English to do with fate about tempting fate, not so much cheating fate, so I can’t remember. I remember that we had a list of words and that we debated and talked about them. I remember that clearly, and I honestly don’t remember what we decided, so I’ll have to go back and look. That’s a teaser for the interview, the reader can go and figure out what did we actually land on for that because it’s quite important in the text so it was one that we spent some time on.

We did spend time on the songs, remember? And Iman sent me to some of these modern interpretations of the old songs that you can find, to listen to them and to see how people have been talking about them. Again, when we look at history and try to remember and recapture and preserve and document elements of history, things like harvest songs, and songs that women specifically sang at certain times of the year, these are such valuable things. Even if some of them are fictionalized or even when some of them might not match exactly what we expect, it’s so important for us to have these in a way that we can carry them over and preserve them. And that’s something that I loved about this text. I don’t feel that confident still about the translations of the songs per se, but I like that they are there, that we tried to do a good job. I tried to do a good job of putting something that is at least poetic, even if it’s not exactly poetry in English.

IH: But I think Michelle that you did great work in translating these songs, and I remember one of them, I told you, it is better than the original.

MH: Let’s not exaggerate [laughing], but you know we spent time on them, we really did try, but in this case too it’s so important because the songs are in the title. And so the songs needed a lot of time, and they needed a lot of going back and debating and thinking. When it’s poetry, it also needs a little bit of something extra, it needs a little moment and so we tried, we worked hard on them.

IH: Truly, through the progress of the novel, songs became something that connect the women of different generations to each other. In the airplane, one of the last scenes of the novel, when Asmahan took her daughter who is seven years old and traveled to New York, to make her daughter sleep, she sang her the songs of her great grandmother. So songs became really a tool of transmission of memory from one generation to another, and a tool of solidarity, a way of solidarity, and a way always of resistance. So songs here — they are a way of saying I am still here and tomorrow is going to be better.

And now this is something I’d like to mention: I am trying to write a second part of this novel. It might be far from the context of the first novel, because the place is different, and it is going to be abroad most of the time, it’s not in Lebanon. But it is some kind of continuity of this transmission of memory with Lama, with the little girl in the novel.

MH: Send it!

IH: I hope so, I am working a lot to earn my living, and I have very little time to write. I feel bad about it; I am searching for a residency for a couple of months to finish my novel.

To finish, I wanted to return to female relationships in the book. I think, in my own experiences and in reading the book, I can see the importance of female relationships in one’s life and how they can impact you and impact how you see the world. 

IH: Well, I cannot see the world outside the solidarity between women, I cannot. For me it is something very vital. It is the spine of my writing, because solidarity is a political discourse, it’s a political point of view, how you see the world between women, it is a tool to give voice to us, to women, and I consider myself a part of this. It is not that I am doing a charitable relationship with women in that I am writing about them; it’s me, it’s my experience, it’s my mother, it’s my past, it’s the suffering that we had in our collective memory, and we had also in the attempts that women around me. Attempts is not the right word, it is the activism, what the women before me did for me to be here. It’s a kind of unbreakable chain of solidarity that doesn’t have limits within history. That’s how I see it. I see it in my life, and I do it in my life, and I do it in my writing.

MH: I think that you come back to the question because it’s so crucial, and I think again this is a really good example of how, in the novel, this thread of women’s solidarity is not necessarily even said directly. I think sometimes people think a message of political solidarity means everybody says ‘Political solidarity! Women!’ Right? It does not read like that. It reads through the specificities of the characters, of the stories, and the way that they work. And I think, in my experience at least, part of what draws us in is that you are reading the stories and you are so deeply into them, and these ideas about the relationships between women are so central and they’re so complicated, it’s those nuances and that very specific kind of storytelling technique that gets you so involved in the story. And every single thing that happens between every single woman is not amazing — people have conflicts, people have fights, people betray each other, people get mad at each other. You are expecting your cousin to stand up for you to your mom then she does not, and then why not? It’s a really complex message, but underlying all of that is this idea of the women’s relationships and the women’s solidarity that I think is really the key of this novel, and I think it’s why people will be so invested in reading it, because you want to know what’s going to happen and you really care about the relationships between the characters.

IH: Solidarity within the paradoxes of relationships.

Also read: From Iman Humaydan’s ‘Songs for Darkness’

Emma Hardy is a recent graduate of Boston University where she earned her B.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, with a focus on Arabic. She is an editor for ArabLit and a continuous student of the Arabic language.