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- [00:00]
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Tirul Mende
Experian welcome to the New Books Network hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Tirul Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Salim Haddad about his new novel, Floodlines, published by Europe Editions this month. Welcome to the podcast, Salim.
- [00:50]
Salim Haddad
Thank you for having me.
- [00:52]
Tirul Mende
Salim Haddad was born in Kuwait City to a Palestinian Lebanese father and an Iraqi German mother. And you worked previously with Doctor Without Borders in different countries such as Iraq as well, which is part of the new novel too. And your first novel was published in 2016. And I am looking forward a lot to talk about your new novel, Floodlines, and maybe you can tell us a bit about since the book is published now and you had a few book talks as well and reviews and interviews were published about the new novel, how does it feel now that it is out in the world and how the response was for your second novel?
- [01:37]
Salim Haddad
Well, I mean, I've been working on this novel for quite a long time. I think I started thinking about it in 2014 and I then spent a few years doing quite extensive research on it. And there were a few years where I would put it down and just think that it was not going to be published and then I would find my way back to it. So it feels great that the novel is finally out there and it's getting readers. And I feel like this part of the process is also very interesting because the readers teach you a lot about the novel. And so I'm excited to start that learning process as well, to learn from readers about the novel.
- [02:23]
Tirul Mende
Thank you so much. And concerning, I mean the title, Floodlines, can you maybe elaborate on the title? What does it mean for you in the context of the novel? Why did you decided to call it this way? Because it centers of course, around family with several characters each different on their own, the sisters and the son Nizar as well. So how does the title connect to these characters?
- [02:51]
Salim Haddad
Sure. So the title actually came to me towards the end of the writing period, I had. One thing that was quite clear to me from the beginning was that rivers were a very important theme for this story. And I kind of found myself thinking about water a lot and using a lot of water metaphors. And the character, one of the sisters in the novel, Ishtar, one of her artistic projects, they're all artists in different ways, the entire family. But one of her artistic projects is to build a Mesopotamian ark that was inspired by her vision of what the ark actually looked like, bearing in mind that the myth of the flood, which we often associate with Noah and the Bible, actually has much older roots in Mesopotamian mythology, where there is a myth of the flood. So Ishtar, as a character is very interested in building an ark. And I kind of saw this as an interesting metaphor for the way the characters see their art, as a way to get them through very difficult times. Not just very difficult times in their country, but also very difficult, difficult personal challenges that they. That they went through. So I knew that water and flood was going to be an important theme for me. And as I was writing, it started to occur to me that the memories that the different characters were grappling with, and they're all battling over different and sometimes competing visions of the past. And for some of the characters, the memories would rise up like a flood. For some, even the idea of history and the past would come up like a flood. And so I started to think about using the word flood in the title, and I came across the idea of floodlines, which is sort of the line demarcating where a flood has happened. And I found it very apt because I think all of the characters, in different ways, are battling with what the past has left behind.
- [05:04]
Tirul Mende
Thank you so much. And the novel starts, of course, in the summer of 2014, when ISIS was roaming around in the region and in Iraq, too. Why did you choose the specific starting point for the novel? I mean, Nizar is a war journalist, of course, and reporting about all this violence in the region. But why did you use the specific time period to introduce the family in the novel?
- [05:32]
Salim Haddad
I guess for me, the year 2014 was a time of grief, not just because of the rise of ISIS. And June 2014 was when ISIS sort of declared the establishment of the Islamic State. And they were challenging the very notions of Iraq and Syria as nation states and destroying, obviously, so much cultural heritage. And this brought a lot of grief as well for me. But it was also grief associated with, at that point, the realization that the Arab Spring had failed or at least had. Had run into a very, very existential challenge from which I don't think we've yet to emerge as of 2026. But there was a lot of grief during that period. And I think it was a moment of rupture for me. When I was looking politically at the region, I kind of pinpointed that as the moment of rupture. And it felt appropriate for this family to start off at this point of rupture and to see how all of these sort of big political changes impacted not just them personally, but also the dynamics within the family. So it felt like an appropriate place to start this novel.
- [06:57]
Tirul Mende
And in comparison to Guapa, your first novel, it was set in an imaginative city, and your cover, it was mostly. I mean, there were different characters too, but it was concentrated on one character mostly. And your new novel is centered around these huge and complex, different people and sisters and the son. What did you want to do differently with Floodlines? And what did you learn from writing Guapa that you wanted to incorporate into your new novel?
- [07:30]
Salim Haddad
That's a pretty good question. I.
- [07:33]
Tirul Mende
So with.
- [07:33]
Salim Haddad
With Guapa, actually, even though it was a country that I kind of constructed, and it was sort of an unnamed country that cannot really be placed on a real country, but actually there was a lot of research involved in Guapa in constructing this country. So I was. I was working at the time with an NGO that involved me traveling to a lot of the countries that were undergoing revolutions at the time. So Libya, Yemen, Egypt. And because I grew up in Jordan and spent a lot of time in Lebanon and Syria, I was very familiar with those countries as well. So I really collected different bits of urban geography and political dynamics from all of these different countries to construct the imaginary country where Guapo is placed. But I think after doing that, I really wanted an opportunity to dig into a real country, and not just a real country, but like a real. A real artistic movement. And I'm half Iraqi and half Palestinian, but I grew up very much within the Palestinian side of my family. And so the Iraqi side of my family, who were a family of artists, I really only knew through art. And I really.
- [08:51]
Tirul Mende
My.
- [08:52]
Salim Haddad
My knowledge of Iraq was through Iraqi art. And I really wanted to find out more, not just about Iraq, but about Iraqi history, artistic history in Iraq, but also things like archaeology and Mesopotamian mythology. And I just began to do a lot of research around these things. And I think that's kind of what drove the development of the book, was a curiosity to find out more, not just about my family. And their place in Iraq, but also about Iraq as a country and its history. I think as well, there was a desire to move beyond the headlines of what we know about Iraq, which is this one dimensional or two dimensional idea going back all the way to the early 90s, in the first Gulf War. Iraq was always presented in the Western imagination in this certain light that did not at all correspond to the light that I knew Iraq in. And so there was a desire to really uncover and bring to the surface what I knew and loved about Iraq. Iraqi history, Iraqi culture, Iraqi stories and art that I felt was not really given appropriate time and energy and place in the. At least the Western cultural imagination of the country.
- [10:15]
Tirul Mende
And I think. I mean, of course, in the media, there's always the politics and other problems discussed around Iraq. So there are some scholars, I think, who are now concentrating more on the art and history of Iraq and other issues, trying to understand the country on a social and personal level more. And did you talk with Iraqi artists as well, or how did your research look like about connecting them with the farthest art in the novel?
- [10:50]
Salim Haddad
I talked to. I mean, my research was very varied, and it went on for many years. I spoke to members of my family as the first starting point. The Iraqi members of my family, many of whom are artists. And I kind of wanted to understand their relationship to Iraq, how it translated in their art. I spoke to experts on Iraqi art, specifically, like academics who had studied the Iraqi art movements of the 20th century, because that was the time period that I was interested in. And I was specifically interested in the Baghdad Modern Art group, which my great uncle Jawad Salim founded. And I also spoke to. I spoke to archaeologists, I spoke to experts in Mesopotamian mythology. It was a really long and fascinating process. Um, yeah.
- [11:43]
Tirul Mende
And in the beginning, I mean, before the novel starts, you're quoting James Baldwin. Why did you decide to use this specific quote? And was it kind of. Is he kind of an inspiration for you, or how does it reflect it in the novel?
- [11:58]
Salim Haddad
The quote, James Baldwin is absolutely an inspiration for me. I love his fiction and I love his nonfiction even more. And I came across this, the quote, which is, people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. And I felt that it was very appropriate for the characters in this novel. These characters are all trapped in history. And by that I mean that they are not just bound by the historical events that they found themselves in, but they are also trapped in their memories of the past. And so I felt that that was really. It really captured the central conflict in the novel. And yeah, I just felt really lucky to have come across this because one thing that I was kind of interested as well is to kind of explore the complexities of agency, of personal agency in things like political dictatorships in imperial wars, the limits of what one person can do in that situation, but also ways that they might be complicit in that situation. So I tried to kind of put my characters really at these particularly important turning points in Iraqi history and see what they did and how they navigated out of them if they could.
- [13:23]
Tirul Mende
And one question was that I wanted to ask you is like, when you are looking at the characters and how do you establish them, do you first start with the story, the context of the novel, or do you come up first with the characters? How do you proceed in starting this kind of complex storyline?
- [13:47]
Salim Haddad
Yeah, I mean, I think for every novel it's very different. Every novel has its own challenges that you kind of have to wrestle with and figure out for this. For the first novel, for Guapa, for example, I had clearly, I had a very clear image in my head of these two men who are lovers, who are kind of walking through a burning city hand in hand. And that was kind of the central image that drove a lot of the novel. And I wanted to get my characters, and they were, I discovered, Taimur and Rasa to the end of that image. But sadly I wasn't able to get them through that, through. Through the events of the novel. But I feel like that image was kind of what I was working towards with floodlines. It was. It was slightly different because I. The first thing I kind of, kind of came to me was the idea of a family who were arguing about something and they were estranged from one another. And the arguments were very petty and administrative, but they held deeper roots. I could feel that they held deeper. These administrative arguments held much deeper meaning that connected to the country. And I knew that I, like I mentioned, I knew that I wanted to write about Iraqi art. So I had the idea to actually work with real life artworks that different Iraqi artists had produced and work my way backwards to create the characters from the art pieces. So for example, like one famous piece which is in the novel is Nasb Al Har, or the Monument of Freedom or Monument of Liberty, which is in Tahrir Square in Baghdad. My great uncle Jawad Sadim was the one who had co created that monument. And I started to think, okay, well what kind of person might create this monument? What kind of person might produce the sort of creative legacy that Joanne left us with because I did not want to write a novel that was simply a novel about, like a nonfiction book about my family, wanted to create a book of new characters. So I worked with real life art and then tried to divorce the artist from. From the creative product and figure out how they would fit into this family. And I did that with all of the artists. So the art of Bridget in the novel is inspired by the artist Lorna Salim and especially her work Baghdadi, like painting Baghdadi architecture, like old Baghdadi buildings. The work of Ishtar, one of the daughters, is very much inspired by the work of Rashchar Sadim, who, as I mentioned earlier, is trying to build, or had tried to build sort of a Mesopotamian ark and was very much interested in reviving ancient Mesopotamian water vessels. And it's a project called the Safina projects, that Safina project that actually exists in real life. And it's very fascinating for those who are interested, you can. You can Google it and find out. So I was really interested in working from real art pieces and then developing the characters from there. Even the character of Nizar, who is a war journalist who also sketches and paints, but he does watercolors. His art was very much inspired by the artist, by the journalist and artist Ghayth Abdul Ahad, who's an Iraqi journalist and artist. And I was really captivated by his watercolors. And I thought, I really want to develop a character who is also a journalist who does these beautiful watercolors. Beautiful and haunting watercolors.
- [17:44]
Tirul Mende
And in one of the other podcasts that were recently published online with Yasmin Sari, you talked about the use of English and why you writing in English instead of Arabic. But sometimes do you think in your head how it would sound in Arabic or is it always suddenly in English that you are thinking in your mind too while writing the novel?
- [18:12]
Salim Haddad
I think it depends on the character in this novel, actually, because the characters are British Iraqis. Some of them have moved to the UK at a very young age. And so spe they speak in English to each other, they speak in English to their mother. So I didn't really have to think too much about it. I didn't have to do that internal translation. But whenever I was dealing with dialogue in the novel that I knew was written in Arabic or that I knew was said in Arabic rather, I would have to stop and think about how this would be said in Arabic and make sure that it made sense to me that that would happen. So it really depends on the character and who they're speaking to. The reality is, for this novel, most of the characters speak to each other in English, so that wasn't an issue that I had to think about. For me, I'm bilingual, so I, you know, I move back and forth between these languages on who I speak to. And so that's kind of what I wanted to mirror as well in this novel.
- [19:09]
Tirul Mende
Thank you so much. In the beginning of our conversation, you said that it almost didn't get published or didn't work out. How did you come with Europe editions? Like, was it like a publishing process that you thought that it wouldn't be published? Or why did you set it in the beginning?
- [19:27]
Salim Haddad
I think for a long time I was struggling to figure out what this novel looked like, and that was a big challenge for me. And I think as well, it's a very complicated novel sense that it doesn't really fit into. Like I had mentioned earlier, I think it brings a new angle to Iraq that doesn't necessarily center the US narrative of Iraq. And oftentimes Western narratives about Iraq sort of begin or end at the US invasion in 2003. I really did not want that to happen. I didn't want to center that narrative at all. I wanted to show that Iraq existed long before 2003 and long after 2003. And I think for. For some publishers, the complexity was very difficult for them to grapple with. And it was the same with Guapa, actually. So it wasn't a surprise for me. I think often times I think my. My work, you know, Guapa was published, and really only two publishers were interested in publishing it in the beginning. And then it got a lot of success, and a lot of publishers were very interested in me, and I think they just wanted me to produce Guapa 2.0, which I was never going to do. It's just not the kind of writer that I am. And I think when I came with this novel, that was quite different. A lot of those publishers were scared, and I was like, of course you're scared. You were scared to publish Guapa. You only came on board after Grappa was a success, and thankfully, Europa was my UK publisher for Guapa. And they have always been very supportive, and they kind of have seen my vision, and I think they trust my vision as well. And so I feel very fortunate to have landed back with them for this second novel. They did such a great job with the first novel. They published Guapa in the uk and I developed a very close relationship with them. And so I was very happy that I was able to go back with them again.
- [21:26]
Tirul Mende
And coming to the last two questions. Do you have some advice for young authors since you have published now two successful novels, how would. How to proceed with publishing a novel? Or do you have any advice for them how to get started to become an author?
- [21:47]
Salim Haddad
I mean, to get started, to become an author, I would just say you have to read a lot. I think there's no way around that. If you are not reading, then I think it's not possible to really become a writer. The second thing is you have to learn to read like a writer, which means kind of studying the text, understanding how the writer was able to fill you with a certain emotion, how they were able to give you an idea of the character, how they move the story forward. Like understanding the machinery that works behind a novel is very important. So I think aspiring writers would do well to really study that. I think as well. Writing as much as possible is just doing a little bit every day is very important to get yourself to the end line and giving yourself time and space to do that. Not rushing the process, but trusting that you know it's going to take time. It's a very long marathon, it lasts years. But you just have to really enjoy the process and get lost in the process. I would also say that one thing that has really benefited me is I try as much as possible to listen to the subconscious voice in my mind or in my heart when I'm writing, rather than to logically find answers or try and rationalize why I've made the decisions that I've made in a piece of writing. And I just try and figure out why I've done that later. So much of my writing is just following a certain subconscious drive that's pulling me towards certain characters, towards certain storylines, towards certain scenes that I might not necessarily understand the significance of at first. So I think those are some of the. Some of the pieces of advice that I would give. I also think one final thing is to embrace the complexity of your writing rather than try and dumb it down. And always, you know, don't be. Don't treat the reader like they're dumb. You know, you have to honor the reader and always think they're smarter than you. And I think that that is sort of. Yeah, that would be like the top line advice that I would like this.
- [23:53]
Tirul Mende
Thank you. Thank you so much. And is. Is the form of novel like your favorite genre or style to write stories? You previously published short stories too, and essay. You wrote essays too. But is it like your favorite kind of writing style or why do you stick to novels mostly?
- [24:13]
Salim Haddad
Well, yeah, I actually started in high school writing plays, and then I moved to. Eventually I moved to novels. I've done short stories. I've done essays. I've done screenplays, like film and television. And I love all of them in different ways. Ways. But for me, absolutely, the novel is my favorite form. I think it's, you know, I'm a person of ideas, and I feel like the novel is the form of ideas. It's kind of. I love the scope of it. It's very mammoth. It's very dense. It kind of, you know, is this massive vessel that can be sort of the depository of so many different ideas and themes and characters. And I really love that. What about a novel? But some things don't necessarily. Some ideas don't necessarily translate to a novel. So, you know, when I get an idea, my immediate thought is, okay, is this a novel? But sometimes it isn't a novel. Sometimes it's a short story or it's a film or it's a TV show. And I never really know. It really depends. They kind of come hand in hand. I get an idea and then I think about it for a while in terms of what works. But, yeah, the novel is absolutely my favorite.
- [25:28]
Tirul Mende
Thank you so much, Salim, for joining us to the podcast today. And Floodlines is now available through Europe editions, and it was an honor to speak with you today. Thank you so much.
- [25:39]
Salim Haddad
Thank you so much for having me. Great questions.
- [25:55]
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