Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian fiction writer based in London. Her first novel, “Out of It,” which is set in Palestine, was published in 2011. A lawyer and mother of two, she is also working on her second novel, about expatriates, which is coming out next year. She spoke to India Ink at the Jaipur Literature Festival, which she was attending for the first time.
What are the occupational hazards of being a writer?
Compared to a lot of Palestinian writers, I have a big advantage of living in Europe and having a European passport, so I don’t face threats on a daily basis. I think I am more likely to get criticized because of my subject matter, or have people take objection to my politics, rather than my writing.
What is your everyday writing ritual?
I like to work in the morning. I try to have big chunks of time where I’m doing nothing else, and I try to keep administrative work to the evening. I still work part-time as a lawyer and I have two children so my time is very splintered.
Also, writers now have to do quite a lot of work for the publicity of a book that is out, so the administrative side and the publicity side impinge on your time. When I’m actually writing, I have a sofa that I go to in a room that has no Wi-Fi. I close the door, I have my notes on the side on a small easel, and that’s where I write and that’s when I’m happiest.
How do you deal with your critics?
I had one review which was quite strange. He made it sound like I was trivializing the Holocaust by something one character had said in the novel. He misinterpreted it and said it was offensive rubbish. I was so upset and angry with my first review because I felt that he got it wrong. Your sense is to respond to correct the record. To trivialize the Holocaust is actually a statutory offense in some countries. I did try and draft a response against the advice of everybody.
It [the review] came out in The Independent, and it was also odd because they put a strapline which said, “Aren’t you a bit too young for this conflict?” I was eight years older than the reviewer. And then I realized there is actually no dignified way of responding to a review. You have to just leave it.
You do get these knee-jerk reactions from people who are very supportive of Israel. Just the minute you say you are from Palestine, that in itself is offensive enough. So it doesn’t really matter how you are dressing it up.
That means you get quite cautious in the way you speak. You qualify everything, you talk with your footnotes, you have to make sure that you are really not going to say something in a panel or a session which is going to be filmed or played on YouTube and then get distorted.
Do you self-censor?
I don’t think it is self-censorship. It is extreme caution in how you say things and making sure that you know absolutely where something is coming from.
One of the tests as a writer is that you should follow what interests you. Often that is the behavior of your own people. Rather than thinking “this is what I should write about; this is the way we should be positively portrayed,” find your interest, find your passion as honestly and truthfully as possible.
What advice would you give to people who are interested in conflict writing?
History is very important. So is putting things into perspective so you are not just dealing with the immediate conflict. The back story is always relevant; it always needs to be clear. Even if it is not going to fit into your word count, it has to be very clear in your head why something has happened, whether it was a fictional event or a real event.
If you are portraying negative aspects within your own movement or your own people, one thing I often find is useful is to make sure that I have a good understanding as to why that person is behaving in a way they are, what is their history.
People are inherently the same. They are responding to circumstances. They have the same capacity of good or evil in them; it is just how they get driven into that position. It’s critical to have some sort of sympathy being built up, even if the end result is not one that you would condone.
Could you tell us a little bit about your book “Out of It?”
It’s a very specifically a Palestinian book in some ways. It is about a very specific set of circumstances, but the issues in it are very universal. The particular thing that was interesting to me was the idea of political consciousness, and how people in conflict situations deal with what space they should allow their personal lives when the political may be dominating.
The characters in my book are very middle class. They are exiled and are returnees to Palestine. They are very educated, and they want to change their country, and they want to somehow engage. But they find it very difficult to find a place between the sort of extremist opposition and the defunct leadership that is in place.
I wrote the book before the Arab Spring, but I was writing it to show a class of Arabs who are multilingual, urban, politicized urbane that were not being depicted in the media. I felt like this is a whole view of the Arab world which was just not coming across. And then when the Arab Spring started, and suddenly, there were my characters.
How is your upcoming book different from your previous one?
It’s different because it’s not about Palestine. It is a novel about living in a compound in a situation where there is a political conflict outside. It’s about how we can turn a blind eye on a crisis that is surrounding us. It’s different in terms of setting, but I think in terms of theme it is similar. It should be hopefully coming out next year, and the title is “Here We Are Now.”
Why does the Jaipur Literature Festival matter to you?
I think among writers there’s no festival you’d rather go to than Jaipur because it’s very international. It attracts the top writers of fiction and nonfiction as well as new writers, so it’s a great sort of hub to meet people. It’s a combination of being high-powered and yet very relaxed and friendly at the same time.
You’ve mentioned before the need to talk to the world outside as a sort of impetus that drives your work. How important do you think it is to talk to writers from different parts of the world?
I’m a great admirer of Ariel Dorfman’s work, and I think there are very few writers who have written in this specific zone of having to engage in politics and writing literature because a lot of people see it as a big tension. The presumption of Western literature is that it’s not political; the presumption of Palestinian literature is that it is political so you have this great tension between the two things. So to meet people who have somehow resolved in their minds the little tests they use is critical in terms of being able to write.
In terms of their take on the Palestinian issue and whether they are going to be sympathetic, you always hope that this is going to be a consequence meeting people or them reading your book, but you can never know what other influences they are exposed to and where they ideas come from. It’s a slow process to get somebody engaged with an issue that does not directly affect their lives. Writers are curious about the world, but most people are fairly incurious about things that don’t directly affect them.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes, always wanted to be writer but my dad wouldn’t let me. He said, “You have to have a vocation; you can’t just go and study literature.” I’m one of three girls. My older sister is an architect, my younger sister is a doctor and I’m a lawyer. My dad just sort of decided — “you’re like this kind of character and you’re like this” — and we never really challenged it.
I enjoyed doing law, and I still practice as a lawyer. It gave me a way to work in places to get the material for the book, and that’s what I wanted with it. I felt I didn’t want to just study literature and then come out and work as a writer without ever having done much else. I always wanted to write, but it took me until my 30s to actually start doing it.
(The interview and been lightly edited and condensed.)
India Ink: Five Questions (Plus a Few More) for Selma Dabbagh
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