book talk // Isabella Hammad (the parisian)

Isabella Hammad was born in London and lives between London and New York. Her first novel The Parisian was published in 2019, and it follows a young Palestinian man from Nablus who falls in love with France during the end of the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate periods. The novel won a 2019 Palestine Book Award, the 2020 Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. In 2019 She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. She is currently at work on a new novel set in London and Palestine.

TRANSCRIPT

[Captioner standing by]

MARYA HANNUN: Ok, we’re live! Welcome everybody, we're so excited to invite Isabella Hammad to the DCPFAF this year - part of a sort of focus on literature we are doing um and I think we will just dive right in as people sort of filter in to today’s talk I’m going to introduce her. So Isabella Hammad was born in London and lived between London and New York although she is currently in Athens. Her first novel The Parisian won a 2019 Palestine Book Award, the 2020 Sue Kaufmann prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award for the Society of Authors in the UK. She was also awarded the 2018 Clemson Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O’Henry Prize for her short story Mr. Can’aan and in 2019 she was a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honoree. And she is currently at work on a new novel set in London and Palestine. Um and so we are going to start today’s program with just two short readings from the work and I’ll let you take it away. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction and for having me from afar. I will read two sections from The Parisian and I will start at the beginning.

‘There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azmeh, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other. He sat, tugged at the cuffs of his shirt, and started to describe without any introduction how he was returning from Damascus to resume his teaching post in the language department of the Sorbonne.

He had left Paris at the outbreak of war but after the Miracle of the Marne was determined to return. He had grey eyes and a slightly rectangular head. “Paris.” He sighed. “It is where my life is.” To young Midhat Kamal, this statement was highly suggestive. In his mind a gallery of lamps directly illuminated a dance hall full of women.

He looked closely at Faruq’s clothes. He wore a pale blue three-piece suit, and an indigo tie with a silver tie pin in the shape of a bird. A cane of some dark unpainted wood leaned against the table. “I am going to study medicine,” said Midhat. “At the University of Montpellier.” 

“Bravo,” said Faruq.

Midhat smiled as he reached for the coffee pot. Muscles he had not known were tense began to relax.“ This is your first visit to France,” said Faruq. Midhat said nothing, assenting.

Five days had passed since he said goodbye to his grandmother in Nablus and travelled by mule to Tulkarem, where he joined the Haifa line for Kantara East and changed trains for Cairo. After a few days at his father’s house, he boarded the ship in Alexandria. He had become accustomed to the endless skin of the water, broken by white crests, fashing silver at noon. Lunch was at one, tea was at four, dinner was at seven thirty, and at first he sat alone watching the Europeans eat with their knives. He developed a habit of searching a crowded room for the red hair of the captain, a Frenchman named Gorin, and after dinner would watch him enter and exit the bridge where he supervised the helm.

Yesterday, he started feeling lonely. It happened suddenly. Sitting beside the stern, waiting for the captain, he became conscious of his back against the bench, a sensation that was bizarrely painful. He was aware of his legs extending from his pelvis. His nose, usually invisible, doubled and intruded on his vision. The outline of his body weighed on him as a hard, sore shape, and his heart beat very fast. He assumed the feeling would pass. But it did not, and that evening simple interactions with the quartermaster, dining attendants, other passengers, took on a strained and breathless quality. It must be obvious to them, he thought, how raw his skin felt. 

During the night he pressed the stem of his pocket watch compulsively in the dark, lifting the lid on its pale face. The ticking lulled him to sleep. Then he woke a second time and, continuing to check the hour as the night progressed, began to see in those twitching hands the spasms of something monstrous. It was with a strong feeling of relief, therefore, and a sense that his sharp outline had softened slightly, that he smiled back at his new friend.

“What do you imagine it will be like?” said Faruq. “Imagine what, France?” “Before I came, the first time, I had many pictures of it in my mind. Some turned out to be quite accurate, in the end. Some were—” He pinched his lips and smiled. “For some reason I had an idea about wigs. You know, the false hair. I’m not sure where I got it from, possibly I had seen an old drawing.”

Midhat made a sound like he was thinking, and looked through the window at the sea. His high school in Constantinople was modelled on the French lycée. The textbooks were all French imports, as were half the teachers, and even most of the furniture. Midhat and his classmates had sat on ladder-back chairs with woven rush seats reading “la poésie épique en Grèce,” memorizing the names of elements in a mixture of French and Latin, and only when the bell rang did they slip into Turkish and Arabic and Armenian in the corridor. Once formulated in French, certain concepts belonged in French, so that, for instance, Midhat knew the names of his internal organs as “le poumon” and “le coeur” and “le cerveau” and “l’encéphale,” and understood philosophical abstractions by their French names, “l’altruisme,” “la condition humaine.” And yet, despite being steeped for five years in all things French, he struggled to conjure a picture of France that was separate from the furnishings of his classrooms, whose windows had displayed a hot Turkish sky, and admitted shouts of Arabic from the water. Even now, from the vantage of this ship, Provence remained hidden by fog and the earth’s unseeable curves. He looked back at Faruq. “I cannot imagine it.”

He waited for Faruq’s scorn. But Faruq only shrugged, and dropped his eyes to the table. And then Midhat goes to Montpellier. He goes to join the medical faculty. He falls in love with the daughter of his host, a French sociologist. At the end of the first part, he discovers that the family doesn't really see him as an equal. He is very upset about it. He leaves and goes to Paris. When he falls in with a group of Syrian nationalists in exile - Syria at that time including Syria, Lebanon, and trans Jordan. When he goes back to Palestine at the end of the First World War, it is under British control under the British Mandate. Britain and France have started their colonial projects in the Middle East basically. In the passage I’m going to read next, the year is 1920 and Prince Faisal has announced an independent Syrian kingdom of which he is the king in defiance of the French mandate even though they don’t have an army or anything to back it up. And the Palestinians are going to march to Jerusalem to show their support for the Syrian kingdom and they call themselves southern Syrians. So Midhat now is on a train with his cousin Jamil and that is all you need to know.

Over the next three hours, Midhat fell into a daydream. He thought of what Hani had said in his letter about naming themselves Syrians, and wondered what might happen next. Perhaps a war of independence? Which would do what to Nablus? He already knew how wartime could suspend the normal rules. It might free him from his father’s command. Syria would be free—and so would Midhat. Jamil met his eye and winked. The mountains beyond the window interrupted the sunlight, sculpting his cousin’s cheek-

bones with their moving shade. Beyond him, the foreign women hunched on the benches. And where would that freedom lead? Teta was right: he did not know what he wanted. His tableau vivant of King Faisal ruling Palestine lapsed into a vision of himself in Cairo, married with small children. He tried to work out where this image had come from, and was bewildered to realise that he was imagining himself married to Layla.

The echo of a drum fought discordantly with the rhythm of the crank-shaft. In English a woman cried: “There are so many people!” The window was filled with heads and fags. The roar reached them dimly, like a waterfall across a canyon.

Midhat put an arm across Jamil to let the women alight first. Several thanked him, and as he bowed and lifted his tarbush, Jamil hit him on the chest with the back of his hand and laughed. Stepping down was like stepping into a thundercloud. “Michael isn’t that the Hebron procession?” shouted an Englishman in a boater. “I thought they weren’t coming for an hour yet.”

They followed the crowd towards the old city. One smug-looking tarbush was carrying a gramophone above his head, but its music was inaudible. The crowd thickened and slowed, and a horse appeared by the roadside bearing a stout man with a small block of a moustache. 

“Ya comrades!” His chins distended. “Behave peacefully! Ya comrades!” At Jaffa Gate they came to a stop behind a group of young European men refusing to go further. Midhat took Jamil by the arm. “We’re going in?” “Of course,” he shouted, and plunging through the group released Jamil’s arm to clap, borne along under the arch of the gate.

The Europeans had moved to one side, and as the parade bent to fit through the entrance, Midhat saw that its tail was made up of Arab women.

Many carried banners and placards like the men; a few even waved Sharifan fags. They were shouting something. “Falastin aradna” was the first phrase; he could not make out the second. All at once the crush overtook them, and as they were impelled under the vault into the open air on the other side (“Stay with me,” said Midhat, snatching his cousin’s sleeve), they saw more women on the balconies above, throwing coloured handkerchiefs down onto their heads.

By a group of drummers, a Sufi dervish in a long gown and jacket of balding velveteen began to dance. His body torqued, first one way and then the other, so his garment spun out and the seams twisted. He rocked his head back and forth, patting the ground with his feet. Dust rose in a mist. The crush became an audience, dilating the space around him. A clap started, then one song caught over the discordance of the many and spread around their area, and as someone pushed him closer to the dervish, Midhat lost his hold on Jamil. The dancer’s feet patted faster, faster, and Midhat stepped close enough to hear the man’s own voice: “La ilaha illa allah la ilaha illa allah.”

Then something unexpected happened. Half propped up by people on either side, Midhat experienced a strange, dull explosion in his chest.

Something close to joy but deeper, more serene. He moved his head to the pulse, his tongue ticked against his hard palate. Unable to see the dervish’s feet, Midhat watched him revolving with mechanical smoothness, motored by the turbines of his tensed, upstretched wrists. A hand clasped his neck.

“Is everything all right?” Jamil’s hair was matted, his forehead shining, a scum filmed his upper lip. “Look, look, dabke!” The dervish gave way to a line of village men, grasping elbows and hopping up and down. One at a time they shuffled to the centre of the vacated ring, and jumped and kicked. From somewhere, pipes. Midhat looked down at his own legs. His shoes were pale with dust. He felt a shove from behind. “You know dabke!” “No I don’t!” He gasped a laugh and pushed back.

The group of women at the rear had moved under the arch, and as the crowd compacted they settled by the wall and clapped along. One woman near the front, who was not clapping, caught Midhat’s attention. She was looking directly at him. Staring, in fact, and standing very still. He tried to keep her level in his sight while everyone else jostled, then knew she had detected him because she quickly turned away. She remained in absolute profile, motionless. Without even thinking of Jamil, Midhat pushed towards her. Although she did not move her head, he could see the white corner of her eye go black with her turning iris. Without the other eye, the single organ was like an object, and he did not have the feeling of meeting someone’s gaze. Instead, he was watching her looking at him. A body blocked his view: he pressed against the next person along to take the woman into his sight again, provoking a knock on his shoulder as the dancing circle closed in on itself. The crowd began to shift. The horde of waiting pilgrims by the gate plunged towards him, and then she turned. He caught her: Fatima Hammad; both eyes, the downward slope at the corners, and though he could not see the rest of her face, the eyes were enough to summon the whole.

MARYA HANNUN: Thank you much. There was so much just in those two small passages of quite a long and detailed book.Um so we will just start with our questions for you. I also want to encourage the audience to ask questions. You can click on the play bar and go to YouTube and leave a comment or a question. Isabella Hammad, we will just start with a very simple question. I would love to hear more about Midhat. Like where did his story come from?  Why choose this person’s perspective?  I notice that Basma, you know, she shares a last name with you. I would love to just hear more about those two. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: He is based on my great grandfather. Who partly raised my dad. That is him there. I actually grew up with a picture of him, not this one, there’s another picture of him standing in front of- well it looks like he’s on a stroll. He’s wearing his tarbouch and he’s got a waxed mustache and he’s wearing a pair of leather gloves. This picture Every family member has a copy of this photograph. So, I always thought of him as the Parisian in Nablus. He studied in France. He was obsessed with silk scarves or whatever. I always imagined him out on a walk in Paris. And then, Only years later did I look at this photograph and it was actually a painted screen in Jerusalem. It was in a studio in Jerusalem. I know, it’s funny. It’s funny I was familiar with this photograph and then kind of looked at properly, you know. I grew up with this idea of this man, basically, this very eccentric man who was very lovable and slightly ridiculous. Obviously, growing up in the diaspora the main other stories you hear about Palestine are traveling stories. I wanted to match up the story of the ridiculous Midhat with the stories of life in Palestine in the beginning of the national struggle before the Nakba. 

The stories I have been told about him were mostly funny anecdotes. The more I uncovered the more I understood he was actually incredibly sensitive and his life was quite complicated. Particularly his relationship with women and his mother. And so, Fatima is the woman he marries in the end. The giveaway is that she has my second name. That is her there. Those are her downward sloping eyes. I set out to write a book based on their lives. 

MARYA HANNUN: You mentioned that you uncovered so much more about this person. I would love to hear you talk about that process. Because obviously, the book is a combination of family history in so much detail and then, also really detailed secondary research on what Nablus was like, what France was like, the politics of the time. In addition to that, as you say, he was a more sensitive character. How did you come to understand that?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I began with oral histories. I just spent a lot of time with elderly relatives. I interviewed my grandmother a lot. My grandmother is a very, very good storyteller. She was probably the principal source for material that actually went into the book. I would often note anecdotes and stories of hers I kind of lifted wholesale. Most of the other people I more felt like I was gathering ambient information. I spent a lot of time with elderly people in Nablus. Maybe they didn't even know Midhat. And all over the place with refugees and historians and scholars of different kinds. I just felt like I was trying to create a space in which I could imagine that period with maximum material and Psychological realism. I also feel like that experience was its own thing. Sort of, related to writing the book but it also was it’s own kind of growth period for me as well. Spending a lot of time with the elderly people. Just talking about the history of Palestine and their experiences and their childhood memories. And from it, you know, obviously, I then write the book. But it wasn’t- the process was quite unconscious. It wasn’t like an academic process. And then, honestly, I did a lot of obsessive historical research kind of harassing historians and such.

MARYA HANNUN: I am sure they loved it. So, to that point of the sort of unconscious psychological dimension, I was wondering if you understand or can talk about how much of yourself was in the character of Midhat or any of the other characters in the book. Because he is this person really trapped between two spaces in the world, two geographies, two cultures and languages. I know a lot of Palestinians, including myself, in the diaspora can relate to that experience of being both part of two places and being on the outside always. How much of that came from your own experience?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I think it was more observations of my male family members. I don’t know if they experience it differently. Inevitably all of your characters have pieces of you in them. That’s just the case. Because in order to access this other realm of experience, this consciousness that you’ve created that you’re trying to access, you have to use some of your own emotional experience or material to make that empathetic jump. But I think the themes are very, very dear to me. Like the themes are obviously very important. Growing up in two cultures, growing up in diaspora. What that means in about your relation to Palestine, to being Palestinian. But, I think that particularly for my parents' generation, I think the question of assimilating or not was maybe more critical? I think that that period it was more difficult to be Palestinian in the diaspora, in some respects. I think that is something I grew up very conscious of and confused by and was probably investigating. 

MARYA HANNUN: So back to something you were saying before, the main person you were relying on for this story was Teta Ghada. I noticed that there is a lot of Arabic in the book but the only actual Arabic script is in your dedication. It says, ‘For Teta Ghada, li kul il tafaseel.’ I have to ask, obviously she gave you so much rich detail. Can you share with us maybe an example of that? One of your favorite tafaseel. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: She was- At the launch in London she was signing the- [LAUGHS]. One that went wholesale in there was the story of Ghada and the funerals. She would follow the funerals. When she was telling me that story I was like oh that’s going in straight away. There were lots of stories. She loved her father so much and she loved his sense of style. He was so sweet and this kind of light-hearted man. A lot of her love for him I felt and put in. 

MARYA HANNUN: Another thing that’s probably interesting for our audiences is you said you interviewed people in Nablus. Was that the only time you visited Nablus? Or, not the only time rather, the first time you visited Nablus was for this research?

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Yeah. So, I went the first time after university and then I go every year. 

MARYA HANNUN: So, I guess, from that I was curious, did you go to Nablus for the first time and start doing these oral histories with the novel in mind already? And, if so,  How did this trip influence or change the trajectory of your novel? Or, did it?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I think on the one hand I definitely went because I wanted to write. And I wanted to find out about Midhat specifically and Nablus in general. Nablus is kind of a character, in a way. But, you know? I was, like, really young. In retrospect you can always come through a straight line of, like, motivation to action. And, I think that it was much murkier than that. I think it was a very emotional experience. It was kind of confusing and life changing in some ways to kind of go through that very sped up learning period. I did, from the moment I got there I was interviewing people. I mean, I wasn't sure what I was looking for, specifically. My grandmother was just kind of lining up members of the Kamal families. “She’s writing a history of Nablus” which was not really what I was doing [LAUGHS]. It was kind of exploratory and slightly ad hoc and improvisatory I would say. But I did go for that express purpose, yes.

MARYA HANNUN: You interviewed members of your family and others. I want to ask you a bit more about that. There is a huge theme in your book. It comes up in a number of different places about politics of narrating Palestinian stories, whether it is the sociologist and his experience with Medhat, or Abouna Anton. I am curious, where did it come from?  Did it come from your experience of going there and thinking about the politics of talking to people and representing their stories or reading these historical, Orientalizing sources by European men - these documentary stories? Where was the inspiration for that thread?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: It is all of those things. The politics of narration but also the politics of observation, of looking. What does it mean to look, to observe?  In what context can that be problematic? How does that intersect with structures of power? The book is full of people generalizing about other people, that very human tendency to put other people in boxes and to label and categorize. It was very in vogue in that period. That’s like the beginning of racial theory, the beginning of eugenicist ideas which kind of directly correlate to the age of empire and basically legitimizing colonial domination of other peoples because they are inferior. That theme directly features in the book. I wanted to explore both the violence, but problems of putting people in boxes, and labeling and what it means when we want to label yourself. What does it mean to be Syrians, to be Palestinians. And at the same time, what the literal fallout is of those categories are. That does relate to narration. The French priest was the kind of Orientalist figure that needed to be there, it felt. We had a kind of Orientalist figure in the first part in France and needed one in Nablus.  We had a Palestinian in France and we have a Frenchman in Nablus. 

I channelled those ideas through him. I give him a moment of recognition where he understands what he has done wrong, basically. 

MARYA HANNUN: That was a compelling arc in the story. Related to that, and this is me projecting again as a Palestinian-American who writes, at times, about Palestine - It can be a fraught process, the weight of the politics and the history, and representation. Can you talk about any anxieties writing the novel, and what you found the most challenging to narrate?

ISABELLA HAMMAD: It was very fortunate that I wrote it in a state of innocence. I wrote it without really knowing how difficult it would be. I didn't know how long it would take me. I was almost fresh from undergrad, and I think that being young meant I didn't know that it would get read. I didn't have that pressure of, ‘what does it mean to do these things?’ It was almost just for me, just exploring these ideas. 

At the same time, having said that, I also, and I think that is where the theme of looking comes from, and that theme of narration, the theme of power and knowledge comes from, is basically consciousness that any time you write about Palestine, it is immediately politicized. It is very easy to be misconstrued. We are all competing with propaganda because of the kind of systematic silencing of the Palestinian narrative, or narratives, and Palestinian voices. You feel very conscious of this when you’re writing about Palestine. You don't want to be writing in slogans, you don’t want to be constantly tearing down propaganda. But if you’re writing in English, you do have that in your mind. It probably fed into certain choices episodes I chose. 

That may have been one of the reasons I didn't just focus on Midhat, but it became a story of the struggle more broadly. Given that he is not a very political actor. I took more of a direct role in resisting British rule at times in the narration.

MARYA HANNUN: I appreciated, as a reader, confronting directly his ambivalent relationship with politics. That also felt very real as a characteristic. And to your point, something we try to do as a festival is to challenge the idea that there is one Palestinian narrative that involves being a certain type of political activist and move beyond that, or just expand upon it. 

Related to something you were just talking about, which was writing about Palestine in English, I was reading a few reviews online. The Guardian called it ‘Middlemarch with minarets’ in their title, which made me laugh and roll my eyes. Can you talk about the publishing industry, the packaging, and sort of the Orientalizing that was naturally going to happen. How did you navigate that?  Were there any interesting experiences there or fights you had to fight?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: That’s a good question and I don't want to get in trouble. There is a marked difference between the British and the U.S. covers. I prefer the one without an Orientatalist flavor. But I also understand that there are people who do want that. There are different ways of going about these things. 

‘Middlemarch with minarets,’ - I think in many ways, it is structured like a classic, more like a Russian novel. Lots of characters and big families and the ways that politics and the private spheres intersect. So I understand that reference. Although, and I had studied English literature in university so  I can't deny that I read a lot of classics and stuff. At the same time, I think the style of realism came out of something else because I was so obsessively trying to imagine Palestine before the Nakba. There was this kind of obsession with details and hence the dedication to my grandmother for the details. I wanted to visualize it so there is a lot of emphasis on interiors, on furniture, the plumbing, the little extraneous details that aren't related to the plot, which relate to scene setting and speak to an old-fashioned realism and which someone might claim is like Middlemarch. But I feel like that had more to do with Palestine, in a way, than it had to do with George Elliot. 

MARYA HANNUN: It is clear that there is some real world building going on. As a reader, I appreciated these details that I could zoom in on to get a sense of what this place may have looked like before the Nakba. I’m going to read you a short quote from Sherene Seikaly, a historian of Palestine, of Nablus, in the American Historical Review in which she discussed your book. She says, 

“The Parisian is rich in archival details and brave in its narration of the most intimate of family histories. Hammad is loyal to the Kamal and Hammad families’ angle of vision. The majority of Palestinians - peasants, porters, and servants - remained nameless, but they begin to appear as glimmers of full personalities at the end of this story. Indeed, it was not until the mid-1930s that Palestinian notables, like the Hammads, and the nascent middle classes like the Kamals, would begin to understand peasants, workers, and servants as more than objects.” 

I really liked that because I felt like it was a fair description, more of an observation than a critique, right. You have access to this segment of Palestinian society in your family. I wonder how much class was on your mind in the story and how you navigated that given your interlocutors and the people you were interviewing and the sources you had.

ISABELLA HAMMAD: It was on my mind. I felt that because I was relying on family narrative I didn’t have access to the narrative of those classes. The uprising in the 1930s was led by the working classes and the fellaheen. If there is a critique in the novel, it is the critique of the elites and their stagnating national movement - which was fraught with infighting and self-interest, which leads to corruption. It is channeled through the character of the priest, who sees what he calls ‘Muslim civilization’ as monolithic and unchanging. And then suddenly, there is this mobilization of the peasantry and they are taking charge of the uprising. That is what kicks things off. 

So then there is a betrayal at the end of the novel when the leadership, who classically co-opted the grassroots struggle, call it off and say there is a victory - although we know there wasn’t. It was very much on my mind. They kind of peek at the edges. There’s also a maid in the family who gets fired by his grandmother. Reminders of the class problems within Nablus society. 

MARYA HANNUN: I think both in Nablus and in the [INAUDIBLE] household, this is present, these class structures and lack of mobility. It was interesting to read and see some of the parallels in these elite households. I actually want to go back to the Middlemarch point. You read a lot of English literature in college and I’m sure growing up. I wonder if you could talk more about your literary influences, both in English and Arabic, if you have them, or Arabic in translation. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I read widely. I don't think there are books I necessarily copied. I did refer frequently to Marcos, when I was writing this book for technique. I reread Arabesques by Anton Shammas as well, just before writing. I used a lot of memoirs, I read a lot of memoirs from people from Nablus, like Fadwa Touqan and others. I don't know if there is necessarily one. I think that a lot of the time the first book is quite unconscious. You are piecing it together. 

MARYA HANNUN: Did the book start with Midhat as the character or Nablus or family history more broadly?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: It started with Midhat, the story of him going to France. The letter that got sent. That was him.

MARYA HANNUN: The motivation. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Yes. 

MARYA HANNUN: I’m going to start reading some of our audience questions. We have one. ‘Did you see The Parisian in a particular place in the Palestinian literary tradition?  Or do you see the book existing on its own?’  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: That’s interesting. It is in English. A lot of Arabic language, Palestinian canon, often focuses on fragmentation. Edward Said talks about the scene, the brokenness outside of the scene. To write something that has a cohesive backbone of a narrative is not totally in keeping with tradition. 

At the same time, there was a point to that as well. I wanted it to be pre-Nakba, pre-dislocations, that there was a political meaning in that sense. I think we can talk about it being in Palestinian literature in diaspora, broadening the linguistic multiplicity of what it means to make art in the name of Palestine. 

MARYA HANNUN: I was thinking of Edward Said as I read your book and something he said about narrating Palestinian experience as really being this process of fragmentation. You have all these holes in your family history that you are trying to fill. The process of putting it all together can be impossible in some cases. Part of your process is putting together this history that we have access to but it’s not presented to us in a cohesive manner. Because there is so much dislocation, our parents don’t live in the houses that their parents lived in, that their parents lived in, we don't have these straightforward narratives and so excavating that and putting that together in the process of writing. I see that in your book, for sure.

Here is a question that references Edward Said: ‘Ms. Hammad

is clearly influenced with Edward Said's Orientalism, and Hagel’s theory of philology. She’s curious about how these characters were applied through the character, the professor. The way I understand this question is, how do you refer to these people as primitive through the character, through the Europeans who are talking about them, without reinforcing these stereotypes or dehumanizing them - I think. ‘How do you extricate your views from those you invoke?’  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I gave Midhat the opportunity to fight back. He sees the notes and is very offended, and says ‘How dare you try to humanize me? I am a person.’ I did that because I was taking umbrage at the idea of humanizing a narrative or humanizing Palestinians as just incredibly patronizing. Why should Palestinians constantly prove that they are humans? I put it in the novel so we could have Midhat experience that and argue back and then leave in outrage. He’s betrayed by the woman he loves who doesn’t stand up for him in the face of her father. Because it’s a novel with a lot of characters and third-person narration, I’m not expressing my point of view, but through the structure of the drama, you can see my point. 

MARYA HANNUN: We have another question. Do you use any archives besides your family's, for instance state archives or Palestinian archives in Beirut?  What was that experience like?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I didn't use any. My archival research was quite limited. There were a few major history books that I read, like a history book by Ihsan Nimer about Nablus, which I had a long drama trying to find the third book in the series, which I finally found in Birzeit. In terms of the archives, I just did that to get the voice of the British officers who very briefly appear in the second part. I went to the war archives in London and tried to get a feel for their voices and the way they talked. Broadly, it was history books and oral histories. 

MARYA HANNUN: You reference them in your acknowledgments, some really detailed historical accounts of Palestine in this period. They have done a lot of that work. Anny Gaul is asking ‘The conversation has touched on class. I also want to hear about gender and female characters. From the details of how to roll grape leaves to girls’ schools and women’s political organizing.’ 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: That was a big interest of mine, especially having a grandmother who is a very forceful figure in Palestinian struggle. Eileen [NAME, INAUDIBLE] was a great source for that. And I used the character of Sahar, who is a mix of a few important Palestinian feminists, including [NAME, INAUDIBLE] Abdulhadi. Quite a few of them came from Nablus, which is interesting because it is quite a traditional town, pretty conservative. They produce these quite strong female figures. Thinking about how that also intersected with class dynamics and the development of the uprising of the 1930s was something I wanted to explore and dramatize. 

MARYA HANNUN: We have a lot of good questions. One question before I go on, as a historian, I am wondering, was there something specific you learned that surprised you, an account or detail or reference, or event that you felt you had to include in the novel?  Or just something you learned that you want to share with us.

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Let me think. I was quite obsessed with the architecture. I can talk about architects. 

MARYA HANNUN: I was rereading the novel to prepare for this talk. One of the moments that I really loved, which I glossed over the first time I read it, was when Sahar goes to her husband's house for the first time and there’s this whole interlude with the tiles and she’s trying to find the architect and where the tiles came from. And then she goes back to the house and then you sort of get into the women's movement through these tiles, and the women all gather on the tiles. Where did that detail came from? 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I can't remember. You put things in and can't remember if you made them up or they’re real.  The tiles are fantastic. I did research about the earthquakes and I was interested in how the earthquakes figure in people’s memories. There was this story my grandmother told me that her mother, Fatima, had seen the sky when the earthquake hit Nablus. The building opened to see the sky and closed again. That is probably where the tile thing came from. I can't remember if it was true. I think I made that up. 

MARYA HANNUN: That is an interesting answer in and of itself. There was such detail there. We have another question. Something you have been talking about, but to expand on the process of writing your first novel and translating intimate oral histories into a novel of such breadth and depth. How long did the process take?  How involved was your family in giving feedback?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: The entire thing took me five years in total. That was kind of chaotic. It wasn’t like I did the research and then I wrote. I was constantly doing research and trying to answer questions and the structure of the novel kept changing as I went along. I am afraid I won't give an adequate answer because it’s a quite unconscious process and I’m quite a chaotic researcher. Like I told you, I couldn’t always remember what I made up and what was real. I would think to myself ‘Oh that’s great, how creative of you’ and it would all be true. My parents read it and my father, we speak every Sunday, he would give me ideas and they weren’t always that helpful. But he became quite obsessed with one, with me putting in the Zeppelin. The Germans flew the Zeppelin over Jerusalem, they flew it twice. Once in 1927 and once in 1931. He really wanted me to put in something about the Zeppelin but it didn't fit in with my timeline and I said ‘Baba, I’m sorry I can’t put it in.’ He kept sending me emails to links of images and told me I should put it in as a flashback, like the character has a flashback. 

MARYA HANNUN: This question prompted me to think of another question. Have you heard from your family since reading the novel or since publishing it or any of the people you interviewed back in Nablus?  Have they read it? What’s their reception been?

ISABELLA HAMMAD: It has been great. It has been a special thing. I got in trouble for changing the family tree but you know, there are so many family members that I did, you know, have to take some creative license. People were like, ‘no, but you changed them! This is my cousin.’ But broadly, it’s been lovely. In March, before the lockdown, I was in Amman and I did an event at the Columbia Global Center there. There were lots of relatives who came who had other stories about him [Midhat] as well. 

MARYA HANNUN: Then to zoom out of the novel, because we are the DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival, we are interested in Palestinian subjectivities, can you talk more about being Palestinian growing up and your experiences with Palestine, especially before you visited?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: You grow up and you don't go. You have this conception of Palestine that is kind of abstract, in a way. I was politicized young, as a result. I set out to write this book with a quite strong political intention. Without the material experience of going and being there, I think that was quite interesting in a way. It is almost that Palestine is more than a place. It has to do with family and all sorts of very private things and a certain model or vision of political liberation. I think that it is hard for me to remember what it was like before I went, in a sense, to have to get back to that abstraction. 

I spend time in Lebanon and Jordan. But it is very different. I think in a way, although this is a zoom out question, to go back to the book - the book was also growing up or growing into, for a sense, for me. A big learning experience in doing that research. 

MARYA HANNUN: Back to the book - food is such a part of it too. One of our commenters mentioned the rolling of the grape leaves. In my own experience, long before I went to Palestine, a place where it existed was my cuisine. I have to ask you this because we’ve been asking our audience this on social media - are you a partisan? Do you prefer the na’meh or the khishneh?  The soft or crunchy? 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I love the na’meh.

MARYA HANNUN: We agree to disagree. We have another question: The themes of madness and mental health occur throughout the book, notably in the first section, when Midhat attempts to diagnose what caused her mother to kill herself and in the last section when he himself ends up in a ward after discovering Jeanette's letter that his father hid from him.. Was there a metaphorical significance to these episodes or the general indication of madness throughout the book, beyond these significant plot points?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I wouldn't say metaphorical significance but it feeds into that thing about categorizations and the politics of looking and observing.  These episodes of mental illness or troubled mental states are also quite reasonable. They are not actually outsized responses to the reality in which the person is living, but they are classed as abnormalities or irregularities. I think I was just interested in that idea in general, but I was conscious that Midhat was a very sensitive person and had suffered. I was interested in why. What was it about the situation that was provoking such a troubled psychological response in him? Because the novel is also a psychological portrait of him, he can’t integrate, and they’re in different languages, he can’t find a way to give the narrative to the two parts of himself. In relation to Jeanette’s mother in the first part, there was a lot of overlapping subject and object relations there. Midhat was observing the mother as a doctor looking at a patient and how it interplayed with categorizations in a medical realm. 

MARYA HANNUN: That makes sense. There’s something in the literature of this period, in the academic work being done now, there is a new attention to medicine as a form of classification as in the same way as all these other racial categories that urge to diagnose and classify and typify people and how that may not translate to experience. I hadn’t thought about it until you started talking about it, but there is a relationship between the medical literature and the medicalization of all these experiences and also, what Anton is doing and what the sociologist is doing. This broader way of thinking about people.  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: And the hospital as a space What can happen in the hospital space. You have people of different classes mixing. This is where the priest, who I based the character of Anton on, got his material. He would come to the hospital because that was a space where they were free to talk. 

MARYA HANNUN: We have another question: ​’There have been criticisms of the book in that Madhat Kamal's mind was colonized in parallel ways of how Palestine was colonized at the time by the British - and Zionists.’ So I’ll ask if you agree with that reading and was this done on purpose?   

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I think that he does decolonize himself at the end, so that does occur. It is not as straightforward as saying his experience in France was entirely bad. He does fall in love there and is loved back, but it’s deeply complicated by the fact that France is a colonizing power and is colonizing part of the Middle East. There is a kind of way where he’s colonized in a way by Orientalist images of Arabs. Having shrugged off this deeply insulting attempt by his host to humanize him, he then - he is a young man trying to find himself. He is highly performative and uncomfortable in his skin. He’s trying to find himself. When he goes to Paris he just adopts this performative, Orientalized Arab mode. There is a kind of way that that continues and is almost a psychological or neurotic manifestation of this performance in France.

MARYA HANNUN: That part made me wonder if you had read before, or if that was at all influenced, or if it was just a coincidental parallel by Seasons of Migration to the North, the Sudanese novel.

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Yes. Very much. 

MARYA HANNUN: There is something there that is complicating the idea of whether he is performing or wearing this to his advantage. Then it is not such a passive act of being colonized. There is more agency there. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I tried to draw that a little bit with the Samaritans. He accidentally encounters a Samaritan priest dyeing some parchment to sell Orientalists. They are pandering to the market, and he proceeds but they are very ashamed, like ‘you shouldn’t have seen this!’ Midhat recognizes something. He’s like ‘Oh there is some agency in taking control and using it to your own ends.’ 

MARYA HANNUN: Right, I remember that scene. We have two minutes. Can you tell us about what your newer project is?  

ISABELLA HAMMAD: I am in the middle of it. It is about women, mainly. It’s about three women and their relationships to each other. It goes on in the West Bank. 

MARYA HANNUN: We will have to have you back to talk about that when you are finished. Thank you. We are out of time and there are no more questions. I want to thank you again for joining us and for sharing these details, thoughts, and your process of writing and your experience of the novel. I want to make a plug to those of you tuning in to show up to our documentary this evening, Ibrahim, as well as our DJ set afterwards. We have a packed day of programming and you can find it all on our website: dcpfaf.org.

Once again, shoutout to Isabella for joining us from Atehns and giving us your time. We really appreciate it. 

ISABELLA HAMMAD: Thanks so much for having me and thank you for tuning in.