Imagination, Hope and Reality

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Excerpts from the conversation:

Q: Let's start at the beginning. How did this book come about?
A: This book has a very interesting story. Four years before writing and thinking about the book censor 's library, I wrote 'Lost in Mecca', and that book was banned in Kuwait. That was in 2015. A year after that, I started my business – a bookshop and a publishing house. And my bookstore is located across the street from the Ministry of Information, where all the inspectors and book censors work. So we are basically neighbours, me and the inspectors and the book censors, and we have this constant interaction on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. And these two incidents make me always wonder whether those people who are censoring books, reading books for the sake of censoring books, are immune from the dangerous butterfly effect that is organically built in any piece of literature? In another way, I was always wondering whether literature is able or powerful enough to change their view about themselves, what they do, how they see the world, how they see books, whether they can fall in love with a book that they are supposed to ban, and how will that go? So I started wondering, I started plotting this idea about a book censor who falls in love with a forbidden novel . And then I took it from there.

Q: You have managed to keep a certain kind of objectivity while writing this novel, because you see the actual anguish that any form of authoritarian rule brings upon the world of books. Could you expand on that?
A: As a writer, I was curious in becoming the book censor. I was really trying to get into the book censor's mind and to see books as dangerous creatures that are more dangerous than drugs. They can corrupt our world. They can corrupt the morality of our young children and wives, and all those claims that governments use to justify banning books. So I didn't want to write from my angle as a bookseller or as a writer or even as a leader, a reader, or a lover of books, because that would make me angry. And it will be like a statement or a manifesto or something that all readers expect from me, especially Arabic readers who know me so well. So, to me, the interesting thing was being the book censor and going through the transformation, changing from being a book censor to an actual reader and highlighting the difference between the two things in an organic way that is embedded in the story without stating things out loud, without being too sentimental about it. And also, I wanted to show that even those people censoring books are just part of this, as you called it, authoritarian rule. They have their own struggle. And there is this conflict of voices and narratives. It's a whole orchestra, orchestra in their head because they keep receiving conflicting signals. What should we do? And what. How and how do we feel about it? And the contrast between the two things, it's very vivid and very strong. So I guess that's why I seem to many people like I'm objective. I'm not advocating freedom of speech or literature in a more direct form because I started by putting myself in the shoes of the book censor.

Q: Which part of it did you begin writing first?
A: The first chapter, Zorba the Greek. It was going smoothly from beginning to end. But I think the first chapter, the very first chapter, first, when he wakes up and he is transformed into a reader. And all this identity crisis. The book censor goes through that part. I think I wrote that part at the very end. After finishing the whole book, I realized that I need to change the tone. But the rest of it, no, it went really smoothly from beginning to end.

Q: Did you plan out the fact that you would use these three or four seminal texts which are loved all over the world?
A: I was working on another book, actually, and then The Book Censor started. You know, it's like pressuring me to write a different story. And, you know, sometimes those stories, like, they battle in your head, like, write me. No, write me instead. No, write me first. So I was, I think, halfway through a novel that was published before the book censor's library when I paused writing that novel. And then I decided to use some index cards where I could outline each chapter and decide which are the texts that I’m gonna use to create a dialogue in the book, like Zorba or Alice in Wonderland or Pinocchio or all these stories. I use them to enhance the idea of the fluidity of stories and literature and to highlight the fact that books do talk to each other every time.

Q: You set off to write this novel, and we all know that we are reading a novel, but in some way there is this disturbing sensation which makes its presence felt, where the lines between the fictional world and reality seem to get blurred.
A: I guess that was the whole idea of writing that book, like the defining line between reality and imagination is also imaginary. Everything is blended together. And I think the more we deny the reality of imagination, I don't know how else to articulate it. The reality of imagination, if we deny, will haunt us in ways that never occurred to us, in ways that are unexpected. And I think people don't realize how vulnerable we are when it comes to denying that part of our identity is our imagination.

Q: When times are challenging, it's always the individual's imagination that gets fired up. And if you can, it provides the person, and thus the community of the people around them with hope. And that hope is what propels you further and further and forward and helps you take steps into the future, doesn't it?
A: Absolutely. I also have been talking to many people who experienced prison, and many of them told me that what saved me most of the nights was the ability to imagine myself talking to someone or doing something. I do think like an individual. Imagination can save your life, or at least save your mental life. What I really crave on days like this, with everything that we are going through, especially with Gaza, and everything is a collective imagination where hope is possible. Because when we collectively start seeing a solution, start seeing a road for change, for justice, for peace, then we start manifesting that in our reality.

Q: When you are working with your translators on the translated text, particularly in a destination language that you’re familiar with, such as English, do you tweak your literary text again, or do you let it run as in the original Arabic, as it was?
A: Well, for this book in particular, the book is in constant dialogue with other books that were translated from their original languages to Arabic – like Zorba, Alice in Wonderland. All the other books that are injected in the story are not written in Arabic originally. And the book, this book in particular, was written in Arabic that seems translated from English. It’s like it doesn’t really fit in the Arabic soil, with all the musicality and specific qualities of the Arabic language that is very poetic and detailed and musical, which I see in all my other stories, all my other books. But for The Book Censor’s Library, it is written as if it was translated to Arabic. So when Sawad Hussein and Rania Abdurrahman told me they are interested in translating the book in English, I was like, that's really interesting, because I've always felt like I had already written. Like, I wrote the book in English, in a way, but it's also in Arabic, and now it's just going back to its original form.