Always More Than a Place: A Conversation about Palestine with Isabella Hammad

Abstract

a Q&A Keija Parssinen: I read The Parisian at the start of Ohio’s statewide shutdown, when our understanding of Covid-19 was limited, and panic was in the air. It was a comfort to me to turn to your book at the end of those exhausting, anxious days. The pace of the novel is languorous, which feels like a rare luxury in contemporary fiction. The book meanders in a way I could envision Midhat doing, a kind of flâneur making his leisurely way across the page. How did you approach pacing and time in this book? How hard did you have to fight to preserve that lovely strolling quality? Isabella Hammad: That’s lovely to hear that it was a comfort. I don’t think I necessarily made a choice to write something languorous per se, but I definitely wanted the readerly experience of time to be long. I wanted to re-create the feeling I’d had as a child where you’re absorbed in a story for a long stretch, and when you reach the end you have feelings of nostalgia for the beginning. I didn’t really have to fight for it. My editors liked the book for what it was and kept it that way. They helped me rearrange a few things and trim some fat, of course. Parssinen: In the first portion of the novel, when Midhat is in medical school in France and falling in love with a Frenchwoman , he is a kind of familiar romantic hero: purposeful, full of desire, and desired in turn. His character begins to change after he is driven from medical school by an act of anthropological racism. He moves to Paris, embraces a kind of louche bohemianism, and, from that point forward, seems increasingly lost in an ever-complexifying political landscape. Writers tend to talk about a character’s emotional arc, but with Midhat, there’s something more diffuse at work. What did you hope to convey through his journey? Hammad: It’s true, Midhat does start out like the protagonist of a European bildungsroman, leaving home to define himself as an individual in the world. A bildungsroman usually involves some kind of reconciliation with society and society ’s values, though, and in this case that classical narrative is disrupted by Midhat’s awakening to the fact that he is not considered an equal in his environment, in French society; he is not considered an “individual” but rather a type of a person —racially, culturally, religiously. You could say that Midhat initially embraces a model of Western individualism, which he then realizes doesn’t apply to him, because the model of the Western individual is only available to the white European or American. Then the novel takes on a different kind of storytelling populated by a wider array of perspectives and voices, underpinned by a certain orality or emphasis on the told-ness of the narration, a sense of collectivity behind the story, and a collective audience. Yet Midhat doesn’t quite fit in this new narrative zone either. I’d argue that there is still an emotional arc, though: he struggles to reconcile his French experiences with his life at home in Palestine, and this leads to certain kinds of repressions and performances. But he ultimately achieves an equilibrium by becoming the narrator of his own life and, at the same time, understanding his position in a community, in a collective, in a family and society that accept him for who he is. Always More Than a Place A Conversation about Palestine with Isabella Hammad by Keija Parssinen I’ve been thinking about literary imprints lately, and how difficult it is to discern the books of one house from another in commercial publishing. Yet I realized that many of my favorite recent books—Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love and The Hired Man, Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley and Bird Summons, and Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, to name a few—have come from one press: Grove Atlantic. It’s true that Grove is a smaller independent outfit. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to feel an aesthetic taking shape in their books, one that...