LT: Your novel shifts and flows, from politics with its varied discourses, through voices and styles. One of the brilliant inventions is the deaf-mute schoolchildren.
EA: What you call a silent majority.
LT: [laughs] They are taught by Sitt Mary Rose, they don’t speak; she is the only one who is kind to them. The four male characters, who represent various factions of the Christians, speak; they are all anti-Muslim. Sitt Mary Rose is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
EA: Which was why she was killed.
LT: The deaf children are presented “speaking” in the first person. Throughout all the formal changes, I was able to understand where I was, who was speaking; you included politics but didn’t re-create politics per se. You reimagined everything. Desire, impressions, feelings.
EA: And the description of the state of war in a specific place. Politics is such an important part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Why shouldn’t it enter novels? In poetry, people mostly avoid politics. They think it’s not poetic. But the Iliad is a political work. I became an American poet by writing against the Vietnam war, I joined the movement by writing against the war, spontaneously. I feel the first thing is to be true to oneself. Now you will say what if you are a monster and are true to yourself? [laughing] If you’re a monster, you’re going to be true to that self anyway. But a movement of poets against the war didn’t happen about Iraq, which is as monstrous a war and as long. Why? We are in a period when there is, funnily enough, more poetry being written in proportion to the population than during Vietnam. Poets have followed the general apathy of the Bush and Reagan years.
LT: Maybe that speaks about where poetry is in terms of its relationship to society. Some writers may feel themselves at a great distance.
EA: It’s because of the kind of poetry they are writing — a very abstract poetry. They are discovering new forms, by complicating form and by avoiding anything that would smack of a message. And, like all great writing, it can defend itself beautifully.
LT: In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” she observes a day moth, which lives 24 hours, and watches it die. By looking at it, she understands the struggle to live, the finality of death.
EA: You’re right, one can express anything, in the most unexpected way.
LT: What I want to claim is that fiction and poetry need not be specific to a political event to embrace the effects and depredations to life because of war, violence, injustice.
EA: No. I went to Iraq twice, and, in spite of Saddam’s dark side, there was great vitality, artistic vitality — it had the biggest readership of contemporary Arab literature. Iraq had great painters, musicians. It was the most dynamic Arab country for some 30 years, with an excellent medical system, the best in the Arab world. So the destruction of it. Simultaneously, Saddam was an excessive character. You were for him or against him, no in between. In that sense, he was a total dictator. Still, something was happening there. There was the same oppressive rule in Syria, but without the counterpart in culture Iraq had. When America attacked Iraq, each time they moved, they destroyed it. I didn’t feel my best friends, poets or non-intellectuals, really cared. Though when you think about it, there is so much going on in the world, and Americans cannot care for everything. But this is something that America started and did.
LT: There’s a passage from Sitt Mary Rose, which, though it came out here in 1982, could have been written now. \
In this society where the only freedom of choice, when there is any, is between different brands of automobiles, can any notion of justice exist and can genocide not become an instable consequence.
It articulates the horrible sense of possibility of genocide.
EA: Hatred can lead to genocide. You don’t win, so you will tomorrow, or after tomorrow, but you’ll keep going; there is no real rationale to it. The U.S. is not immune, but prosperity made America relax. If this financial crisis goes on, ten people will fight for one job, and race or religion might lead to: “how come the Chinese and the Latinos have a job and I don’t?” To a degree American prosperity created a certain benevolence. America is interesting, everything is true about it, and its opposite is true. There can be an atmosphere of benevolence, but the word “socialism” is taboo. In one way we have a people’s country, there’s no aristocracy. We have a democracy in many ways, really. But people are horrified by universal health care, which Europe and Canada have as a matter of course.
LT: I believe that Existentialism is an important philosophy to you.
EA: Yes, I went to Paris as a student in 1950, Sartre was the great thing, and I had not heard of him in Beirut. It was like a miracle. I had come from a culture where we lived on a more basic level. My father was highly educated for those days, my mother was not. We had no books at home. My mother had the Gospels, she was a Greek from Smyrna — Greek Orthodox. My father was a Muslim from Damascus in the Ottoman empire. He had the Koran, he knew it by heart. Amazingly, the books existed on a shelf next to each other. So I have no problem with coexistence. I grew up with it. People finished their education, if they were lawyers they went to law, but that generation didn’t have books in the home. In Paris, everything was new, astonishing, until I was 30. I was in a stage of discovery for 13 years, until I started teaching, which gave me a distance from reality. I was immersed in reality until I was 30.
LT: How do you mean “reality”?
EA: In the present, that type of reality. When I read Sartre, I was floored because I’d attended French Catholic schools, they were the only ones you could go to, and they hammered us with religion: you’re moral because you follow religion. Sartre said you could be moral without being religious.
LT: Did you hear Sartre speak?
EA: No, but his philosophy changed my life. Its second idea was about responsibility, and that is empowerment. I didn’t have the word or concept then, but it’s what existentialism offered people. Coming from a Catholic school, I know firsthand that you are meant to follow the church, the priest, then you are a good person. You go to confession. By saying you are responsible, you are your decisions. I think that’s liberation. It’s not “Obey and shut up.”
LT: I’m curious how your parents met. A Muslim from Syria, a Greek Catholic from Smyrna.
EA: They met during WWI, in Symrna, in the street. He followed her. They got married. He already had a wife and three children in Damascus, but he didn’t tell her. She was so poor that, for her, it was a fairy tale. He was governor of Smyrna, a top officer; he’d been Ataturk’s classmate, because though my father had been stationed in Damascus, the sole military school was in Istanbul. Then the war was lost, and my parents went to Beirut. From there it was downhill.