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Mai Serhan, "I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir" (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Turun Mende, the host. Today we'll be talking to Mai Sarahan about her new book, I Can Imagine it for Us, A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir, published by AUC Press last year. Thank you for joining us to the podcast, Mai.
- [00:55]
C
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
- [00:58]
B
Mai Sarahan is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Egypt and she holds a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford and has studied at NYU and auc. And currently you are living in Cairo, as far as I know.
- [01:17]
C
Correct. Yeah.
- [01:18]
B
Thank you so much. We would start the podcast by reading some passage of the new book so you can and start our head and yes, thank you so much, Mai.
- [01:30]
C
Okay, so as you probably know, the book is a very fragmented narrative and it moves between different countries. So what I've done is I've selected a reading that's kind of a mashup, not. I don't follow chronological order here. So I'll start with Cairo. Cairo, 1984. Football is a sport embraced by all Egyptians. Boys make balls from scraps of old socks and pieces of sponge to play in all the alleyways. Men don't touch food or their wives for days if, God forbid, their team loses. Egyptian state media floods radio stations and television channels with patriotic songs before a match to deflect political unrest. When the game is on, Egyptians retreat to their living rooms stood before their television sets, and the streets turn into a ghost town. The only sound one hears from outside is the occasional uproar of those sitting upright before their screens. It is one of those nights when the two major Egyptian teams, Ahli and Zamalek, are competing for the Egyptian Premier League. My mother, Nermeen, and I are Ahli supporters. We've always been. It runs in Mama's family. Baba, though, he's at it again, being a renegade, rooting for Zamelek just because we huddle before Our tv like millions around the country, and the air is charged. Ahli scores a goal, Zamelek follows with another. Ahli scores a second goal and Zamelek follows with yet another. Ahli scores a third and final goal and Nermeen and I begin to bounce off the walls. We hug, we wave the Ahli flag from our window. We pierce the night with our uproar. Then Nermin gets up. She goes up to our father and sticks her tongue out. But our father can't handle losses. Big or small, he cannot distinguish between big and small. Nermeen is small and he is big. When his hand lands on her face, she falls to the floor. Outside our window, cars begin to flood the streets. Millions of Egyptians are celebrating tonight and the other half won't touch food, won't touch their wives. As for us, the party disbands suddenly and lights go off. I try to sleep, but Nermine's curled up back is keeping me awake. She's not moving, but I know her eyes are wide open in the dark. I mutter her name but she doesn't answer. I hear our parents argue and I get up, tiptoe towards the strife. The door to their room is open. Their silhouettes are two meters apart. I hold my breath. Lima Sol 1990 I forget the happy places, my cousins and me descending from all corners of the earth on a pretty, pretty beach town. My Tato's apartment on John Kennedy street with broad balconies and sea views for every room. Three months of sun, sea and summer. My uncle's wives telling their daughters to tuck their tummies in their bikinis as the whole tribe flocks along the coast. The the pedestrian walkway at sunset, its candied apples, corn cobs and arcades. My cousin Fredi carving the watermelon heart, the sweetest part just for himself. Us girls slipping into miniskirts, waiting for Teta to finish her game of cards and retire to bed so we can all sneak out and hit the pizzerias, the ice cream parlors and discotheques at night, coming back barefoot, singing another day in paradise. Missing lunch the next day at noon because we're all zonked out until one that sunny Palestinian kitchen, always ready, always packed with women, their heaves and shrieks and strong hands and flawless skin. Each table a countertop and countertop a workstation with an aunt or an aunt aunt rubbing lamb chop with spice or rinsing luscious fruit. Licipio cherries, more carmine than any cherry I've ever seen. China 2000 working long hours is an unwritten rule in China. And my father has lived here so long that this work ethic now defines him too. In fact, he has more reason to persist over hardship, to work through exhaustion. If he stops, he will see what his ghost looks like. So he never stops. He's relentless. Every day a different town or province. On flights that whisk us from chilling winter to monsoon summers. New clients, factories, boardrooms, markets, warehouses around the clock meetings and late night negotiations. Sleepless nights in five star hotels, office apartments, endless green mountains on the road. And everywhere, an entourage. Cha Ching chu ching is the only sound he hears. And every move, every mile is calculated to rake in more.
- [06:20]
B
Thank you so much, Girmay. I think now the readers get like a sense of how the memoir is written and what to expect about this kind of book. And maybe we can start with the question, it is a really personal account of what you have written. Like memoir is a personal genre. What sparked you to choose this genre as a memoir? And why did you wanted to write down your personal history of your family, especially with your father's relationship down?
- [06:55]
C
Well, okay, so these events took place 25 years ago. And I've always been told by close friends that one day I have to put this into a story. But I also, as I grew up and started gaining more life experience and getting also into my growing consciousness as a Palestinian, I started to realize that this story, as personal as it is, it also gestures towards a wider Palestinianness. And I felt like it could connect me to other Palestinians in the diaspora who've had similar experiences, not in the specifics of my story, but in the general trajectory of their lives. How, how unstable, how digressive, how the ripples of 1948 are deeply felt across generations. So I felt there was a story to tell that can connect me to a more a bigger public, turning the private into public. But also I realized that this story is one that has a lot of merit in terms of narrative. You know, it's a story with a strong sense of place, with high conflict and high stakes. It has a huge scope, it has a big transformation. It kind of had this epic feel. So I recognized the merit of the story itself. And when the time came, I was enrolled in the Creative writing program and we had to write towards a full manuscript to graduate. And I decided that there's no better time to work on this with all the resources that I had at the university. And I went for it.
- [08:51]
B
Thank you so much. And I mean, the novel takes, the memoir takes place at very different places of course, that you visited with your father and alone. And I mean the title. I can imagine it for us. You said at the beginning of the book that somewhere that you don't know what home means for you somehow. Is the title connected somehow to this notion of home? Or what does the title evoke for you in connection to the memoir?
- [09:25]
C
Yes, of course. It definitely alludes to the home that I've never been to, which is Palestine. I'm not allowed to go back, so not to go back. I'm not allowed to go and I've never been. My father's family were expelled in 1948. So the idea of imagining a home is kind of my way of challenging this reality. You know, even if you will not allow me to see it, I can still turn it into this most gorgeous and most anchored and safest and most specific place. At least on the page. At least I can hold it on the page. The memoir has been through a few titles over the years and I'm really happy that we've. We've decided on. I Can imagine it for us because first of all, it carries agency, it challenges our dominant reality, and it invites the collective into this imagination so that we can, you know, imagination, I think, is the first step towards materializing anything. And I thought that was a good title.
- [10:37]
B
Yes, thank you. And I mean the memoir, like, did you have some authors that you looked at or some other memoirs that you read that inspired you to help writing your own personal thoughts? Because while reading the memoir, it was like sometimes that it was like a stream of thoughts written down. Sometimes, of course, they were structured in the narrative and in the non linear way that you decided to present the story. Did you have any authors in mind while working on your own book?
- [11:19]
C
Yes. So my very first influence was Ocean Vong with On Earth we're briefly Gorgeous. He showed me that a novel or a story doesn't have to abide by the conventions or parameters of genre. His book is a letter, it's a historical account, it's essays and reflections, it's poetry. And he talks about the novel as Noah's Ark. And he was very much influenced by Moby Dick. So when I first pitched this memoir, I knew from the very beginning that I wouldn't write a traditional memoir and that I would break with these rules of genre, because I feel like genre, as much as it's a guide to the reader, you're about to get into drama or you're about to get into historical fiction, or it also primes you towards expectation. Like what this book is going to be about. And I didn't want. I wanted to subvert expectations with this book. Creativity, for me is a way of inhabiting spaces of unknowing and originality defies this idea of convention and the boundaries of genre. And plus, genre is a construct, just like gender is a construct, you know, and the idea that we as Palestinians, the Palestinian experience does not fit into these Western molds. So it had to break free. And through that breaking free, gain its own freedom, you know, and own its own voice, you know, it's a very unsettled existence. And I wanted this unsettling to also be mirrored on the page. And I wanted, you know, to use. Because I write across genres, I'm not strictly a poet or a novelist or a memoir writer or an essayist. I've always written across genres and I don't like to be tied to one thing. So I studied screenwriting. I was a copywriter, I was an academic for years. So I use these different writing modes at different points in the memoir, depending on what I want to say and how I want to say it. Yeah. So, for example, the book has this very cinematic, repulsive pace in China. And that was very intentional. And I relied a lot on my screenwriting background on this. With Acre, the scenes in Acre, I wanted to. To evoke a lot of beauty and imagination. So lyricism was essential as an approach because the book moves very fast. I wanted to use the essay to slow you down or to give you a breather at certain points so that I can reflect on that very action packed story, you know, stop and look back. Poetry, for example, is used towards the end when in Act 3, where kind of like, I come into my own and I understand who I am, to signal to you a transition or a major shift in the narrative here that this person is full of command, not just of her identity, but her language and to signal towards authorship and voice, you know, so that's. That's how I saw it. Yeah.
- [15:08]
A
So good.
- [15:09]
C
So good. So good.
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- [15:38]
B
Yes. And I mean, your father is of course, a central character in your memoir, in the book. And Your relationship with your father. Did you have, like, conversation with your family or relatives about this book, or did you engage with them while writing the memoir? Or did you, like, had it on your own mind, what you wanted to write about, your own experience and remembering your thoughts about him? So did you had any conversations with them, or was it like a solitary process, more or less?
- [16:17]
C
No, it was with the writing itself. It was a very solitary process. I don't like involving anyone at this stage of writing and thinking and unpacking because you don't want to be influenced by people's opinions. And it's a space of complete freedom and letting go. And so you don't want anyone in that space. So for eight months, it was just me. And I really didn't censor my. Myself at all. I thought once I. Once the book is complete, or at least a first draft is complete, then I can start looking at what to remove, what to add, and so on. But right when I secured a publisher, that's when I started having to get permissions from certain people. For example, my sister, because there's so much material on her in the book. She was the most important person for me to approve before taking it to print, and I shared it with her. And my sister is also a writer and translator and very much involved actively with the Palestinian struggle. So she understood the importance of this book, although it was very painful for her to read and have to go through all these recollections of this family history. But she gave me the green light. I also spoke to my cousins and they were okay with it, but really that was about it. I didn't seek anyone else's permission.
- [17:56]
B
Yeah, I can understand, and I mean, you said it in some interviews and earlier, that the memoir is kind of for the Palestinian diaspora, that they had a chance to read the story and the book got quite a few attention since it came out, like in reviews. And you had some book talks or book talks are coming up still. And how does it feel when people approach you and say what they thought about your novel since it's. Sorry. And since it came out into the world? So is it still your own, do you think, or is it now part of something bigger? Since it came out?
- [18:46]
C
Yeah. So I. I lived with this story by myself since I started writing in 2021. I finished. I wrote it in a year. So by 2022, it was finished. But it took a while to get it published because I was with a UK agent right before October 7, and by the time we had edited and got the manuscript ready to be pitched in. Book fairs. October 7th happened and the very first immediate response from the Frankfurt Book Fair was we're choosing to highlight Israeli voices. And they canceled four events at the book fair, including Adonai Shibley's Minor Details. So my book wasn't. Yeah, so my book wasn't pitched. And they said, okay, wait till the London Book Fair. And the London Book Fair came and went. And they said, no, the market is not ready for this Palestinian story. It was very fresh. It was like five, six months after the genocide began. And they were looking for influencers work, self help cookbooks, commercial stuff. Um, and by that point I was getting really impatient because I was witnessing this genocide throughout my days every day. And I just, the sense of urgency felt like I, I couldn't keep it with, with, with the European agent anymore. I wanted to, to pivot to my region where I felt like this book carried more weight and more urgency. So I pitched it to AAC Press and once it came out, I remember the, the day it came out, I, I, I panicked. I, I, I felt very scared. Like, like my, my sense of ownership over my story. I had no control over it anymore. And I started getting messages from friends giving me their opinions. And even if their opinions were amazing, I, I completely recoiled from, from any feedback. I'm like, why are they talking about my story? This is my story. I felt like I wanted to pull it out, I didn't want it to be in the world, especially that there was a review that came out and I'm pretty sure it was AI generated because I can figure out these things easily now. And I think it completely misconstrued the story. It talked about me carrying shame towards my father, which is completely untrue. Like if anything, this book is a celebration of the family legacy and it's an attempt to forgive and reconcile and to understand. So that really upset me, that first review. But then, you know, recently I had a book launch in London and someone in the audience was crying as I was talking and saying how composed I was and how emotionally restrained I am. And she wonders like, what is this? Like, is there pain there? And I told her, like, this is not my first conversation in public. You know, it's, it's was probably my eighth or ninth at that point. So I was, I was very much used to it. So with time, with time it becomes easier and I can intellectualize the book, I can talk about its craft aspects, storytelling, its more public dimensions. So with time I'm losing this protective grip over it. And I'm totally okay with discussing it, especially that it's been very welcomed. I feel like when I enter a room and I'm in discussion with people in the audience, it feels like everyone comes in ready to be very real. They're ready to completely offer themselves, just like I've offered myself in this book, and have a conversation that's not pretentious or it's not guarded. The guards go down with this book, which is something I really appreciate. And people come to me and confide in me and, you know, their most personal stories now, which is a huge shift, you know, so it has that effect. It has that effect on people. So, no, I'm very grateful for the response.
- [23:26]
B
Thank you so much. Coming to the last two questions I thought about while reading the memoir. Is memoir writing a bit? Maybe like writing a diary from the past, like, thinking about back. About the days back. And if you would write a diary then, would it be similar to the memorial, writing what you did now?
- [23:53]
C
Or.
- [23:54]
B
Do you know what I mean? Or would there be, like, huge changes between. If you had written a diary then, between a memoir that you have written now?
- [24:06]
C
I mean, first of all, I don't keep a diary. I don't keep a journal when I write. I write creatively. I don't. I don't just shut my thoughts down. And I think it's very far from being a diary entry, this book, because I'm a writer. I'm a creative writer. And this is a literary memoir, which means there are a lot of considerations. You know, you have a real story, but you have to dress it in dramatic effect, which. Which means a lot of things. It means that you have a narrative arc. You need to consider your starting point. You need to consider the exciting incident, which in my case is the phone call that comes from China saying, come. That's where. That's the point in the narrative that moves it in a different direction. Okay? That really jumpstarts the events. You have to determine the crisis and the escalating tension, and what's the point of climax, and where's your resolution? You have three acts. You also have to work with linguistic invention. You have to determine the temperament of the book, its musicality, what sound does it leave in your ears when it's done, the atmospherics, how are you gonna edit it? How are you gonna sequence it? These are all creative tools that I use as a writer. So I feel like it's a piece of literature. The story itself might be real, but it's formally ground very Much formally grounded in literary and dramatic effects. So, no, I don't see it as a diary at all. It's very intentional, and I've considered every turn of phrase in this book.
- [26:04]
B
Thank you. You published previously a book of poetry, the Cairo, the Undelivered Letters and now the memoir. For young writers who want to start, like writing genre binding works. Do you have some kind of advice how to approach maybe publishers? I mean, AUC presses like a big publisher. Do you have an advice like maybe like going to small independent publishers first? Or would you given advice for young, approaching literary writers?
- [26:46]
C
I mean. Well, first of all, before approaching any publisher, I think the best advice is to. And I always give this advice is to expose yourself to readings in every genre possible. Like, as I told you, I started as an academic, you know, so that taught me how to structure my thoughts very well. It taught me methodology. It taught me, like, when you're writing a thesis, for example, you're using flashcards, and so you're very organized. And then how are you gonna sequence these flashcards so that when you sit and write, you the whole thing is fleshed out in front of you. And from there I was a copywriter. And copywriting taught me word economy. It taught me how to pack a punch. It taught me how to get someone's attention very quickly. And that really helped me when I pivoted into short story writing, advertising, copywriting really helped me with short story writing and flash fiction. And from there I started getting into poetry. And poetry taught me how not to be lazy with a line, how every line has to work really hard to basically take your breath away, to really. To have you extremely. To have you completely hooked into the story and immersed, you know. And from there I got into nonfiction and I got into cinema, and I went and I studied screenwriting for a year. So all these different writing modes have taught me different things. Like cinema, for example, taught me visual language and pacing and so on. So I think once you are in command of your craft and you know what to use when and to what end, and to read as much as you can across genres, that's all extremely helpful. Even if you're working, even if you decide to work within the limits of one's job, even if you're working on a novel or a screenplay, it all helps you. So I have been working for years on my craft. So when I approached auc, I feel like they actually. It received a unanimous yes instantly from the first meeting. And the book was. They decided to take it to publication within the next nine months, which was unprecedented. So I think. I think it's just a result of hard work, exposure, dedication, being at it every day. I love what I do so much that I enjoy it more than anything else. I would rather be reading or writing than doing anything else. So that's what it takes, actually. It's as simple as saying you have to be passionate about it, you have to be disciplined, you have to love it, and that pays off. Whether it's AUC Press or a UK agent abroad, the work was gonna speak for itself if you put in the love and the effort. And really, that's what it takes.
- [30:04]
B
Thank you so much, Mai, for taking the time today to talk with us about your memoir and your work. Thank you for joining us to the podcast.
- [30:14]
C
Thank you so much for having me. Sam.