LT: They were poor, but you were well educated.
EA: I was educated because I went to a French school. But about my social class: I didn’t identify with the rich or the poor, though my father’s family in Damascus were among the top families. My mother was extremely poor when she grew up. She used to say there were only two jobs in Smyrna for women. To pick up grapes for raisins or be a prostitute.
LT: You often write about prostitutes.
EA: If mother hadn’t married my father, she may have been one. She was 16 when he met her. Then the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps. Not like the German ones, more like the Japanese camps during WWII here.
LT: How did they let you go to Paris?
EA: My father was dead by that time. It broke my mother’s heart. I was 24 when I went. I had a French government scholarship for three years.
LT: How did that happen?
EA: I worked from the age of 16. I was the only child. We needed money. I cut school for a year, and one day I was crying in the office, and my boss, a Frenchman, asked, “Why are you crying?” Because everybody goes to school and I don’t. He said, “Why not? I’ll help you.” But I said, I work all day, there are no night classes. But I could take morning classes. He let me come to the office at 10am instead of 8, I made it up at night. I finished the whole program in two months instead of eight and received a baccalaureate, which allowed me to go into the third year of a French school that specialized in literature. I quit the first job and found one doing almost nothing, for a man who wanted to write a novel. He thought if I just sat there, he would write it. He didn’t, for two years, but I was paid every month. I read books in his library. [laughing] In the French school, Gabriel Bounoure taught us Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. He wanted literature to be free from the Jesuits, and he taught poetry. Thanks to him we got an enlightened education. He’s the one who encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to Paris. I told him my mother didn’t want me to. When I told her, she went crazy. I was her only child, and I’d be in a foreign place. But I went.
LT: You were very brave.
EA: Brave in many ways, but also brave with no sense of the future. It was day to day bravery.
LT: It raises the question of developing character, your character, and how you respond to others, and fashioning characters in fiction.
EA: Some people have hardships which kill them; others are made so bitter they have no hope. But hardships can also, in some cases, become experiences one can grow from.
LT: Often in your writing, there are questions of liberty and madness. In Of Cities and Women, set in Barcelona, in the Ramblas, a woman walks down the street completely naked.
After she passed me I saw her from behind, and was wondering if she was really naked. She was. She continued down the avenue probably heading for the red light district. Was this a scene of absolute liberty or of insanity?
I don’t know sometimes what I’m seeing.
EA: That’s interesting to say you don’t know what’s happening.
LT: I’m wary of making judgments, generational ones, in our day this or that. Nonetheless, what is being free or insane — crazy — what’s possibility or breakdown.
EA: They’re both such flexible notions. We don’t know completely what we mean by freedom, especially when freedom is used as a nuisance to others. We also don’t know really what insanity is.
LT: We don’t know what the benefits or disadvantages of certain behavior are or will be.
EA: Insanity, as a category, has mostly disappeared. But how do you run a society between these two notions, both boundaries, which in effect include disorder. To implement law, what do you do when you have power? How do you use it? Stop? How to integrate contradictory rights?
LT: In your poetics, you are very free. In writing about women and femininity, in Of Cities, you employ the epistolary form.
EA: Because it gives one freedom. I wrote it, because my friend Fawwaz wanted me to write a paper on feminism.
LT: You mention cities, experiences in them, think about politics and philosophy, love, aesthetics, painting, how women are depicted compared with men.
Several questions come forward at the same time, pushing each other. Calling us or escaping us. Should we wish for the acceleration of this process, which is that women become more like men, or should we rather hope for the metaphysical distinctions what man and woman to be maintained without the maintenance of the immemorial inequalities that we know? Always and still present.
You›re so succinct, discussing a complex issue very much with us. I’m not an essentialist, but how do we maintain difference(s) and reduce inequality?
EA: I have no answer, but it is a genuine question.
LT: It’s also similar in regard to varieties of cultures and societies, religions: can we respect differences with, for lack of a better word, globalization?
EA: The trend is toward uniformity. Obviously women have been acculturated to use their femininity, men their masculinity. I don’t think that we want to keep everything we have called “the feminine.” We need societies to maintain what I’d call a metaphysical balance, the different qualities of masculine and feminine. Aggression is part of life, but we also need a counter-aggression. We need men who are against war, as much as women, though there are more and more women for war. We need diversity and balance in the sexes.
LT: It’s in your writing, though I don’t know if I’ve read the word as such: forgiveness.
EA: Goodness of the heart. That is the core of Christ and Christianity. Everything else is an invention of his followers. When Jesus said “I am the son of God,” he didn’t mean it the way it’s interpreted. In Semitic languages, in Arabic, to be a “son” is an everyday expression. For example, a man might say, “Young man,” take him by the hand, then say, “My son, do you know what time it is?” To be the son is to be accepted. It’s a friendly word. When Jesus said “I am the Son, Father,” he meant I am accepted, and what I say is agreeable to the Father, to God. He spoke in Aramaic, older even than Arabic.
LT: In The Arab Apocalypse, an extraordinary epic poem, I noticed the word “sun” throughout it. I’d never read “sun” presented in so many ways.
EA: As a child, I had a strong sense of the presence of the sun. In the summer, the sun is very vivid in Beirut. I was fascinated by the shadow my own body made, when going for an afternoon swim. In my 20s, I heard the French say that Arabs were the children of the sun, les enfants du soleil. It was said with disdain: Arabs were irresponsible, grown-up children. And I remember walking into the mountains of my village, never wearing a hat, being very aware it was hot, feeling surrounded by the sun like a thief by the police. As I said we didn’t have many books, and not having brothers and sisters, I was more involved with noticing what was around me.