Author Hoda Barakat’s unflinching examination of people on the margins of society
BY CATHERINE BOLGAR
Photograph by Kheridine Mabrouk
Art by Hassan Meer
For someone whose latest book is a dark, unflinching examination of people on the margins—even the underbelly—of society, author Hoda Barakat is warm and friendly. It is her deep empathy that led her to explore the stories of migrants, exiles and wanderers looking for their place in the world.
Hoda Barakat’s novel, Barid al-Layl, won the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, part of the prize is translation into English. The novel will be published in early 2021 as The Night Mail in the US and as Voices of the Lost in the UK, translated by Marilyn Booth.
Barakat details lives adrift through letters that are adrift, too, like messages in so many bottles tossed out to sea. The novel is composed of a series of letters, each by a different character, that aren’t finished or that don’t arrive at their destination. Even though there is no central character and the setting is vague, the individuals’ stories are coherent and vivid.
The absence of a single narrator is because “life is like that,” Barakat says. “This latest book has characters whose voices aren’t heard. They are anonymous—the people who leave their countries en masse and are treated like herds. They are excluded from the societies where they arrive. In this novel, there is a concentration of these people, who aren’t loved in their countries. They have no nostalgia for it. They just want to leave. They aren’t all victims or angels. They are sick of their era, of their country. There are characters that I don’t defend. I just listen and talk with them. In this herd, there are individuals.”
Barakat herself fled her native Beirut. She went to Paris for her master’s degree, which she received in 1976 from the Sorbonne. The Lebanese civil war had recently erupted, and “I couldn’t stand to stay in France,” she says. “I wanted to see what was going on in my country.” She thought her fact-finding mission in Lebanon would be short, but 15 years passed, during which she taught in public school. “Eventually, I understood that my presence made no difference to the conflict,” she says. “I had two children and I feared the militants. I was always afraid that it would never end.” She and her children moved in with her sister, who was living in Paris, in 1989. The civil war ended in 1990.
“It takes me five or six years to write a book. It’s a luxury to dedicate oneself to writing. I had to work, and journalism was what I found. When I left journalism, I wasn’t sad. It gave me time to do what I really wanted to do.”
Barakat doesn’t see herself as an exile or an expatriate. “Exiles are those who cannot stay in their country,” she says. “I was able to stay in Lebanon. I could come and go as I liked. Expats leave their country for a project. I didn’t have a project. I just wanted to flee. I can’t categorise myself.”
Barakat remembers writing all her life, since a young age, encouraged by teachers. Her first book, Za’irat (Women Visitors), published in 1985, collects some of these short stories. In Paris, she kept writing but also worked as a journalist, for Al Hayat among other publications and for Radio Orient. “Even a big success in the Arab world isn’t enough to let the writer live on it,” she says. “It takes me five or six years to write a book. It’s a luxury to dedicate oneself to writing. I had to work, and journalism was what I found. When I left journalism, I wasn’t sad. It gave me time to do what I really wanted to do. I considered myself a writer.”
Asked whether she could better tell truths in fiction than in the news, she answers, “It’s difficult. You don’t reveal the same things and you don’t have the same attitude. I think my characters are more true than reality. That’s the connection between reality and truth. The truth is in the lives of people and seen through the lives of people.”
Her 1993 novel Ahl al-Hawa (Disciples of Passion) takes place in an insane asylum. “People asked if I had been in one, because if not how did I write about it in such detail—the nurses, the care?” she says. She sighs at the very notion of being in an institution when there is so much work to do. “I imagined it all. It’s like a writer who imagines how it is to be blind. Is it true? We don’t care. To each writer, his own truth.”
That novel holds another paradox: “There’s a woman who never speaks,” Barakat says. “At the end, you wonder who is the main character—the one who tells the story or the one who never speaks but who leads the story.”
Characters don’t have to resemble Barakat for her to get inside their heads. Her second book and first novel, Hajar al-Dahik (The Stone of Laughter), published in 1990, centres on Khalil, a gay man whose sexuality already makes him an outsider, as he tries to avoid being roped in by any faction in war-torn Beirut. The Stone of Laughter won the Al Naqid Prize and was translated into numerous languages.
Harith al-Miyah (The Tiller of Waters) in 1998 brought even more acclaim: the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for the best Arabic novel of 2000, selection for Best of FNAC and the bookshops l’Arbre à Lettres, translation into 17 languages and distribution of three million copies of the book with a newspaper as part of a UNESCO project.
“I want to ask why they sell everything up to the last penny to pay intermediaries to ferry them away, knowing that the West isn’t ready to welcome these people. Who are these smugglers who take even small children?”
Barakat received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and the Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite in 2008 from the French Ministry of Culture. In 2015, she was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
The acclaim is satisfying but isn’t Barakat’s goal. Prizes and accolades boost visibility and mean “one is more widely read in the Arab world, when people thought I was too difficult, too elitist,” she says.
Difficult would be one description of The Night Mail. The characters at best are ambivalent—the woman showing up to meet an old flame, or the lover who makes the trip but not the connection. Others are conniving, unreliable narrators whose motivations are contorted. At worst, they are criminals, some petty offenders but others torturers or murderers.
Without describing these lost souls much physically, nor naming them or the cities they are in or the countries they’ve fled, Barakat manages to create a world in high definition, similar to a photo in which the subject is in sharp detail and the background is blurred but discernible. Barakat paints a bleak world of violence on every level, from parent to state. Mothers and fathers turn their backs on their children but not before beating them. Lovers berate, betray and even kill their devoted. A stench of corruption and state-sponsored insecurity unfurls like a filthy fog.
“Each character is a world, a child made up of many things,” Barakat says. “Destiny also plays a big role. We don’t have a single parent tree. It isn’t positive or agreeable to make a list or formula that will sum up a character. That isn’t the literature that I like. The dimensions that fiction treats people with are without limit.
“Maybe it’s at the age of adulthood that I’ve discovered a world so different from my education. I discovered another dimension of nature that up to now torments me, like a void that pulls in people who look into it. I didn’t find anything to give me confidence in the human race.
“I want to ask why they sell everything up to the last penny to pay intermediaries to ferry them away, knowing that the West isn’t ready to welcome these people,” Barakat says. “Who are these smugglers who take even small children? Who are these people who walk, by the millions, to leave? These people who wander without knowing where they are going? The refugee camps are terrible, but these people don’t want to return home, whatever the price.”
“As a writer, I am ‘composed’ of many cultural homes. It is a choice to write in Arabic. But we can’t have our roots in only one culture. Even when people don’t leave their country, they can read about others.”
In the countries people flee to, she says, “There are two attitudes. Either they are victims, unlucky, and we have to welcome them. Or never open up, let them die in the water. I don’t take a position. I don’t explain and I don’t give an answer. I just listen.”
Asked whether it’s ironic to write beautifully about such ugliness, Barakat emits a sparkling laugh, itself tinged with irony. “To write about violence or all of these things that destroy lives, it’s research that seeks to understand. When we want to understand, we want to set aside this ugliness.”
While the characters in The Night Mail allude to their Arab culture, they don’t dwell on it.
“It’s not essential to place the action in a well-determined place,” she says. “This last novel is my first not to take place in Lebanon. All my other novels are in Lebanon, even though I don’t live in Lebanon. As a writer, I am ‘composed’ of many cultural homes. It is a choice to write in Arabic. But we can’t have our roots in only one culture. Even when people don’t leave their country, they can read about others.”
Barakat gets a sense that Arab and Western readers approach her novels differently. “Arab readers take a closer look. I don’t have to explain a lot to them. For Westerners, what I like is the distance they have with the text—they take a meaning that’s more universal.
“It’s true that in my own case, I don’t feel I belong to a confined world, a geographically defined, sealed world. I have Arab culture. I also have European culture. My culture is also for Africans, for Americans.”
Arab literature has evolved over the past decade or two, from a focus on independence to now also include a focus on individuals, Barakat says. “Arab fiction has become richer, more complex. It’s not so much about revealing the truth, preaching, calling for freedom. Some still continue to explore societal or political problems in a classic way, but a large group of writers is finding an exploration of the individual can be done differently. This kind of fiction connects much better with fiction in other languages and other geographic or cultural worlds.”
Since her youth, devouring books in Arabic and in French and writing her own stories, Barakat has used fiction to open up the world. “You can learn about other cultures through literature. You don’t have to travel,” she says. “If you know another language—you don’t always have a translation—it’s another way to open a window to the wisdom of others. When you know several languages, it’s great fortune to feel yourself in the presence of what is happening around the world, even if you aren’t able to go to those places.”
Born in 1972 in Muscat, Omani artist Hassan Meer is known for his abstract artwork and photography. His works feature in the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation. Shown here, The House Series: Reflection from Memories (2010), courtesy of the artist.
