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- [00:01]
Magalia Miesti Seida
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- [00:31]
Sinan Antun
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- [00:55]
Michael Allen
Refreshers contain caffeine. Copyright 2026, the Coca Cola Company Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca
- [00:59]
Sinan Antun
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- [01:42]
Magalia Miesti Seida
Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, a podcast that brings together critics and novelists to talk about how novels work and about how we work in relation to novels. We're sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies and produced in partnership with Public Books. I am Magalia Miesti Seida, one of your hosts for this season. For today's episode, we're delighted to welcome to Novel Dialogue the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar and literary translator Sinan Antun in conversation with Michael Allen, a pairing that's especially exciting because Sinan and Michael have known each other for quite a long time. So to introduce our guest to the listeners, Sinan is the author of, amongst many other books, the novels the Corpse Washer, the Baghdad Eucharist, the Book of Collateral Damage and the just published in English of Loss and Lavender. This latest novel follows two Iraqi men as they make new lives in the United States, Sami, a retired doctor, and Omar, a soldier and deserter, marked by the excision of an ear as punishment for his crime. Omar arrives in the US in the 1990s, fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime and yearns to shed his previous self. Sami, meanwhile, joins his son in Brooklyn in the wake of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the violence it unleashed, but quickly succumbs to the progression of Dementia. These two storylines unfold alongside each other until the two men's paths cross. Sinan himself translated Of Loss and Lavender into English, having previously translated the Corpse Washer, as well as Mahmoud Dadweeshes in the Presence of Absence, which won a 2012American Literary Translators Association Award, and Ittazam Azem's the Book of Disappearance, which was long listed for the international Booker in 2025. Sinen is also a scholar of Arabic literature and associate professor in the Gallatin School at nyu. Michael, for his part, is an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of Oregon and a scholar whose work cuts across the Arabophone, Francophone and Anglophone spheres. He is the author of in the Shadow of World Sites, of Reading in Colonial Egypt, and most recently of Cinema before the the Global Roots of the Lumiere Brothers, which like of Lassen Lavender was just published in Mark. So congratulations, Sinan and Michael, on these two new books being in the World. And welcome to Novel Dialogue.
- [04:01]
Michael Allen
Thank you for having us.
- [04:02]
Sinan Antun
Magali yes, thank you for hosting us. It's lovely to be here with you.
- [04:07]
Michael Allen
So if it's okay, I can take off with the first question and Sinan one, it's an absolute pleasure to get to chat with you today, and yet there's also something a little bit daunting, which is I've long respected you as a literary critic and I of course admire your work as an author. And so Margaret Atwood is kind of ricocheting in my head for her sort of cantankerous relationship to those who discuss her work and her presence. But I wanted to say sort of in light of that, one of the things that's always impressed me about when we first met was back in like 2005, 2006, and you had finished your work as a filmmaker, co director of About Baghdad. And I of course knew your work as a poet, as a scholar of pre Islamic poetry. And then in the intervening 20 years you've clearly established yourself as a writer in the broadest sense, which is a poet as well as a translator as well as a novelist. And I guess to get us started today, I was curious to hear your thoughts about the move towards writing novels. And that is what affordances does the novel as a form offer you?
- [05:18]
Sinan Antun
Thank you so much. First, it's a real pleasure because I highly respect your work and I admire your work and use your articles in my courses. So it's always a pleasure to be in conversation. I always Think about why sometimes I move to poetry and why sometimes to novels, and I can't always find a satisfying answer. My cop out answer is I think of these as two instruments and I'm always playing the same music. And some genre affords a different type of projection. But I think it seems that primarily, not exclusively, but primarily, I'm haunted by history, the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole. And the novel allows for a more wholesome, in depth confrontation with history in terms of a larger landscape which poetry affords, but in spurts. And all my poems are very short and I think the context of Iraq and the United States and the specific situation in Iraq in terms of 30 years of dictatorship, with all of that entails in terms of controlling the writing of history, then followed by sanctions that really destroyed society, and then followed by this regime that the US created in 2003, there is such a huge gap and a huge chaos in terms of how to think of history, which makes the novel similarly to Lebanon. You're familiar with that case. But other places in this country, in the United States, I mean, I teach Beloved in a way, just the novel allows me to really engage with history, alternative history, and kind of create this alternative archive and gives me a lot of freedom that I cannot find in other genres and seems to not to toot my horn, but seems to speak to readers in the Arab world for whom this is not just entertainment. This is other forms of history at a time when history and entire countries and entire societies are literally being destroyed.
- [07:51]
Michael Allen
No, but one of the things that's so incredibly compelling of loss in Lavender is that it. It braids together two stories, that of Sami and that of Omar, and then each story is itself put into relief, one against the other. So Sammy, obviously suffering from dementia, leads to a certain mode of narration, a certain constellation of figures that Sammy experiences in a particular way. Omar, who has bears the scar of the Iraqi regime with his cut ear, has a very different relationship to the move to the United States and to his past in particular. I was curious. There's so much that's generative about how these two stories work alongside one another well above and beyond their point of intersection at the end. And I was curious what that parallel model that braiding together does in this novel, what that does for you, that say, in Baghdad Eucharist, it's a triptych. There's three different stories. And so I just. On the level of craft, I would love to hear your thoughts about what the parallelism does that the sort of Triptych doesn't. Or were there certain things that braiding two stories together, how that worked for you, versus working with three different plot lines?
- [09:19]
Sinan Antun
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I see this one as very similar structurally to the Baghdad of the Eucharist, because although the omniscient narrator intervenes at the end of the Baghdad you curse, it is about these two characters who live, although they live in the same house and in the same city, because of their bodies, because of their gender, because of their generation, they live two different Baghdads. And that question has always haunted me. And history is always a contested landscape and a battle. And it goes without saying that when one speaks of an epoch or a period in a country, it's a cliche, but it was the greatest time. It was golden for X group, but it was a horrible hell for others, whether in this country we're living in now as wanting to make America great again, or in Iraq again because of the destruction of collective memory, which is something I'm also interested in, not only the institutional, but all the different layers, because of the kind of the sectarian institutionalization that happened after 2003, and also an ongoing debate that started in Iraqi circles, inside Iraq and in the diaspora and on social media, is this form of nostalgia for this past which exists in the Baghdad Eucharist and then with the arrival to this country, it's the same story. And so this parallel allows me to juxtapose and contrast two visions and two memories of what it was like to live in Iraq in the 80s. And of course, as elsewhere, it's always inflected by class and how the trajectories of immigrants or refugees are also largely over, determined by their class background and by fortunes and where they arrive and then the different Iraqs that exist in the memory of people. So the parallel allows me to do that so well. And it's sometimes. I mean, there's a lot of planning, but sometimes, even though I don't believe in the metaphysical or inspiration, but sometimes the form presents itself to you on a platter. So the initial character that I had in mind was Umar. But then, you know, Sami, I think, is similar to Yusuf in the Baghdad Eucharist, and so on and so forth. Unlike Baghdad Eucharist, there is no omniscient narrator intervening, because I also wanted to leave it more open. And it's more haunting to me to have that confrontation and to not provide answers and to provoke very difficult questions for which maybe there are no clear answers.
- [12:19]
Magalia Miesti Seida
I wanted to ask. I Think in relation to this. So you have triptych and Baghdad Eucharist, but the kind of diptych of Omar and Sami and Avlas and lavender. And we don't quite know when we're going to land with a character when we go from Omar to Sami or vice versa. And that there's moments of flashback and an ellipsis, I think more in the second half of the novel. But there's these small gestures of prolepsis that I found immensely affecting. So even something as simple as Sammy loving realizing he loved the goats when he leaves for the lavender farm. But that hasn't happened yet as we're moving in his timeline. And so I think that's a feature even in something like the book of Collateral Damage. So narrating time out of order broadly, but also when it is that we move out of the ostensible temporal progression and the kinds of narrative effects that has. So more so than two stories or three stories really telling stories out of order, I suppose is my question.
- [13:19]
Sinan Antun
To my advantage or disadvantage early on, even from the first novel. But when I even became more serious about reading and writing, somehow linear narratives were not interesting to me at all. And I was always drawn into more complicated or more non linear. And as I read more, I realized that even not just aesthetically, but politically, I'm not satisfied with these typical narrative lines. And when it comes to memory also, we do not perceive or conceive of time and events in a linear manner. There is this human urge that we have to impose a linear manner and some kind of sensible narrative that would make sense of a largely nonsensical world or life. Of course. So with this, with these two characters who are both traumatized for different reasons, it wouldn't make sense to. To me also this rhymes much better with the type of mentality and the type of mental space that I was trying to get across. So yeah, and this always becomes an issue with the editors because they, you know, I appreciate their work and whatnot, but they, you know, so they're like, well, is this supposed to happen? And I'm like, no. I mean, I want as much as possible the reader, just as I did, to inhabit the mind and the body of the character. And so it's always tough because there is a thin line between a certain musical structure or chaos. And so I have to move parts back and forth until somehow it reads and sounds that it is not linear, but it's not too chaotic. But also, you know, I do believe and crave smart readers and most readers are very smart, and they don't need to be handheld. And just as I, you know, just as I am as a reader, you know, want to do the work or do some work with the author. So. And I must say, I mean, I enjoy shifting things back and forth and having them be so fluid. And again, the subject matter itself and the themes call for this type of fluidity and even disorientation.
- [16:02]
Michael Allen
I love Sinan, how in the story of Sami, we really do, in a sense, through the framework of dementia, get very vivid reflections on memory. And so there's moments where there's explicit reflection on how dementia works, but also the sort of sensorium that Sami occupies that's threaded, of course, alongside Omar, for whom the ear is a very physical reminder, a very physical memory that's inscribed on the body. And I was fascinated, largely. I mean, I just think the very resonant way that this. The two stories you're braiding together mean that Iraq is not understood simply as a geographical location somewhere on a map, but Iraq is a site that's lived through the memories and experienced through the traumas of these two characters in particular. And I wondered. I mean, so I've always. I admire and respect your translation of Mahmoud Darwish so, so much. And memory and forgetfulness, like the whole framework of forgetting and remembering in Arabic literature, has quite a tradition. And I was curious, as you know, as a writer yourself who's so cognizant of Arabic literary traditions, the Arabic language, and then also as a translator, as you are, the term memory and forgetfulness travels across those traditions in very different ways. And so part of my interest would be to hear your thoughts on whether Nisian is an untranslatable. That is, is there something about it within the Arabic tradition that gets altered or transmuted when it comes into an Anglophone readership? And then the second, I might push a little bit further. So one could say that Iraq is a place of memory, and there's even echoes, I think, is it. There's an echo to Vietnam at some point, where Iraq is for Sami what Vietnam is for another charact. And it had me wondering whether there's a generalizability, that is to say, do the politics of Iraqi memory graft differently than, say, Palestinian memory or memories of Vietnam? That is to say, are these translations across sites and places and memories generalizable, or is there something radically specific about the type of trauma that this site. It makes thinkable here about Nisiyan.
- [18:40]
Sinan Antun
Yes, and, you know, they all do love and respect to English But I've been increasingly in recent years thinking about it. That's why there is a line in the Book of Karate Damage when Namir is trying to translate an Iraqi blues song into English. And then he tells Mariah, you know what? Some things are untranslatable. And then they are, because certain semantic fields are so rich and have such a long history that one word or even two words or even a footnote is not going to do them justice. And, you know, then there's this dialectic between forgetting and remembering. And then that, you know, it's even proven scientifically that we also keep editing and changing our memories. Memories themselves are not static. But about the generalizability, I mean, that's a very important question, not just intellectually and philosophically, but even for activists on so many continents, this is the big problem that often cuts short the life of coalitions and have, you know, polarizes people. But, yes, I mean, I think for every country, there is something very specific and very peculiar. But this is also the history of empire. An empire, by and large, an empire built on settler colonialism and racial superiority behaves in the same way wherever it goes. And to me, I mean, this is a project that I don't know if I can work on. There are very minor passing evidence of that. So when US soldiers occupying soldiers in Iraq and generals call Iraq Indian country, where does that come from? So, of course, soldiers and officers and pundits come with their sense of white supremacy in Iraq, but of course, there are no races in Iraq that gets translated into sect and all of these. But there are definitely parallels between Vietnam and Iraq and between the experience of war and the devaluing and denigration of black and brown bodies. And that also, in a way, relates to personal experience. When I started teaching here at NYU, where I'm sitting 2005, when Iraq is being destroyed, it's a reality that out of 35 faculty members, most of whom think of themselves as leftists, the only two people who acknowledge that maybe being from Iraq and living in the belly of the beast as this beast destroys my country. So it was a Puerto Rican colleague, an African American colleague, who voiced that to say, hey, it must be really difficult, and so on and so forth. So, yes, there are generalizable patterns of empire and of settler colonialism and occupation. And it's happening now as we speak in Lebanon and in Palestine. There are patterns and models that empire perfects or tries to perfect and then uses on other people. And there is this. It's tough to. To put it out. But there is this sense of unspoken and spoken solidarity between victims of empire from different epochs.
- [22:07]
Magalia Miesti Seida
So there's a conceptual question about the translation literally, but also translatability of certain historical experiences as a kind of principle or politics, but also thinking about them on the level of plot. Right. So that's another transformation that would happen between seeing the resonances, maybe not quite parallels between Puerto Rico and Iraq, for example, but thinking about how they might work their ways into the plot of a novel and be in the flesh of your characters was something I was thinking about, as these questions were also percolating for me while I read Of Loss and Lavender.
- [22:42]
Sinan Antun
A lot of these decisions in the narrative and in the writing come spontaneously. What I assume or I know that they are a product of the way I see the world and the product of my politics as well. And in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in those moments of global solidarity and South. South. I mean, you all work on that. So it just comes naturally, I think. And I mean, there is, on the one hand, I, at least, like some others, have been, you know, trying to ward off this desire to write this kind of globalized novel that is successful commercially. So on the one hand, I'm very allergic, to be honest with you, when I read about these novels that are so, you know, easily translatable. So this, perhaps this is my response. And this is why it took me a long time or I waited a long time before writing a novel that takes place in the United States, you know, in the Arab world. They keep asking us, like, why do you keep writing about Iraq? Why don't you write about the US And I'm like, also, I don't want to write, you know, be part of that trend. But also, I think it takes a long time for me at least, to be able to understand a place with such a rich history and such a complicated history, then to write about it in a way that gives it the depth that it deserves. Some of the best parts of the novel in my mind, were ones that were never really planned, but I think they come from intensely thinking about the characters and the novel. But for the longest time, I used to be bitter about being in academia, to go back to your initial question, Michael, because I thought that delayed my writing and whatnot. But then I realized that that made me a better reader, but also made me be wary and careful about what are the consequences of the way one writes a novel. So perhaps it's a hypersensitivity, but I think it hopefully, at the end of the day. It lends a certain type of depth rather than superficiality to these connections that exist, but that always there is this danger of flattening and being reductive when speaking of overlapping commonalities and similarities and so on and so forth.
- [25:14]
Michael Allen
You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about Run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start. Sell your workout gear on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. They get their race day fit and you get a payout for trying. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop where Taste recognizes taste did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? Turn the temperature down with blinds.com and get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day Mega Sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 50% off site wide and huge savings on doorbusters. Right now during the Memorial Day mega sale@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply. Good. I asked Sinhan so I'm curious. I I love in the novel there are sort of various modes of recognition and misrecognition that are at play. One is the Puerto Rico. Omar essentially starts to proclaim that he's from Puerto Rico as a way of averting Assaddaf for not having to relive time and again questions about Iraq and and but then there's also on the level of language politics, incredible attention you afford to, you know, Syrian dialect, Yemeni dialect and these kinds of networks that Omar enters into ways of distinguishing regionalisms within the Arabic language and yet a certain camaraderie among an Arab community living in the US and as a self translator, I guess this is a question about craft, but I was curious how when you're thinking about the translation of Arabic dialect into the English version of this novel, what sorts of decisions did you make? There's many moments in the novel where you leave it untranslated and the mark of the dialect is present in the transliterated form form as it's printed. And then all and then there's other moments where that seemed less important and there's allusion to the fact that it's a Syrian or Yemeni dialect that is emerging. And so given that within Arabic, the language politics and the pragmatics of Language use would register for a reader. I loved when I was reading the English that still registers. And so as a translator of your own work, how did you decide how to navigate that path?
- [28:00]
Sinan Antun
Yeah, that's, that's an excellent question. Because in, in, in, in all my novels, the, the dialogue is always in the various dialects, whether inside Iraq or outside. And that's, I'm sure, you know, a huge debate in the Arab world because there are a lot of novelists who write their dialogues in standard Arabic. And to quote our late friend Elias Khoury, he's like, you know, the doorman and the philosopher and the academic. They all speak the same language, which is ridiculous. But there is something that's really untranslatable because I cannot render the differences of the Arabic or Iraqi dialects in English. I mean, what can I do? Put a Southern dialect or a New England dialect that would completely change the entire novel. So the solution is, which I always insist with editors, is to leave a few words in that dialect just transliterated to give an indication that this is something different. That's the least that I could do. And that's the choice to mark if it's not even said in the narrative itself, or sometimes it is where he says he heard the Yemeni dialect. So that already indicates to you. But something that I was able to do in the English, which I couldn't do in the Arabic, is that, you know, Omar's English is of course not, not that good when he arrives. And it takes him a long time for it to become really good. And that was not reflected in Arabic. So when I translated his speech or the speech of some of the other characters who are not native speakers of English, I made sure that what they would say would sound exactly like how they would say and the typical flaws that Arabs or Mexicans would have in English. And I. So that is something that is not in the Arabic that I added because I'm self translating to give it, to just make it sound. It's a cliche, but I, you know, these characters are real for me and they have to sound really real. And I don't. Whenever my students use the word authentic, I raise the red flag and what to, you know, they would sound real and believable. So that's what I did. It's when I'm asked about loss. Yes, that's the only loss, because I do. Since I was a kid, I really enjoyed listening to the different and identifying the different dialects in Iraq and here in the US as well. I actually play this trick Where I asked a person, from their dialect, from the first sentence, where they're from, because I really love and cherish this variety that we have in all of these different iterations in the music. And so I enjoy writing it in Arabic. In English, it doesn't come out except for using these expressions, which might turn off some readers, because there is too many songs, there is too many italics, there are too many barbarous words. But, hey, that's how it is.
- [31:04]
Michael Allen
Do you think, Sinan, there's a difference between, say, the racial politics of Puerto Rico in Iraq being blurred around the sort of idiom of brown bodies in the US and the language politics of dialect that play out. And I wonder, I mean, if you were to think between a US readership and readership of the novel in the Arab world, whether race and language would translate in similar ways, or do you have any thoughts about how you see those categories playing out differently in different parts of the world, on the part
- [31:43]
Sinan Antun
of readers or in general?
- [31:45]
Michael Allen
I guess, you know, it's like one of the. Where the question's coming from a little bit is, you know, obviously I'm thinking within, say, Quebec French, and there's ways that the Quebec novel mediates questions of class and political situations on the basis of the register of French that's spoken. And there's just an attention to the immediacy of language politics in a place like Quebec. And that's true in many places in the Arab world as well, where the politics of language are immediate and resonant. And moving to the U.S. i found that there's an attention to racial politics in a certain way. Talk about the sort of epidermal schema of race in the US but that the language politics question here translates or doesn't translate in the same way at all. And so as. As I. As I read and engage with your novel, I notice, I'm like, wow, it's so alive on the linguistic dimension. And it's also alive in staging questions of racial politics in an idiom that was more recognizable to me as a kind of US way of understanding how racial solidarity can work.
- [33:02]
Sinan Antun
No, I mean, I'm happy to hear that. I think, you know, it goes both ways. But I think nowadays, readers, from my experience in the Arab world, the young readers, who are all young because we're not so young anymore, are because of all the. Because of the technology and because of social media, they are more aware of all of these issues and through the media than I would have expected them to be. So they can read those differences Very well. And they can understand the racial politics, especially that to use the word that the liberals like to use, the US is involved in our countries so viscerally. And US culture invades the world on a daily basis. So their frame of reference, I was, you know, their frame of reference is Breaking Bad and all of these. And that goes to speak to the, you know, global capital culture and Netflix and all of that. So they. And in a way, because it's the periphery, and this is something else, the periphery has always more pressure and demand to understand the center. I mean, my first surprise when I came to the US in 91 is that I knew about Whitman and I knew about Ginsburg and I knew about Italo Calvino and everyone. But the people in the MFA program somewhere in Virginia, like, you know, they didn't know anything about our parts of the world, or even about the global south, or even about South America. Writing about race and class in the United States, you know, it's so important and so present. Yet a lot of times, which irritates me, you'll find that a lot of these novels, it's completely absent and shouldn't be. I mean, so there is a. I tried hard to write it in such a way where that it's spontaneous and not, you know, I guess this brings me to another very important issue is for someone with very obvious politics that falls on one side of the spectrum, how to make sure that that is braided, to use your word, into the work in a very seamless way that does not at all turn any part of it into a platform. Right. Which happens a lot. And, you know, in one of my previous novels, in the Corpse Washer, a very dear friend who loves my work told me, you know, this section here is obviously where your rage comes out and takes over the character's voice and gives a speech. So. But, I mean, we don't have time to talk about it. And I only have one lifetime. But it's amazing, the connections, the south south connections, but also all the overlap that crosses oceans and crosses continents. And it was a learning experience for me, actually, about Puerto Rico. But also, there is another. When we go back to the reality that, you know, there's. Because someone asked me in the Arab world why a Puerto Rican nurse, And I'm like, actually, you know, there's a disproportionate number that, you know, people of certain backgrounds are overrepresented in that profession, just like with the care industry in New York and so on and so forth.
- [36:35]
Michael Allen
I was also just to say I mean, one of the things that's incredible in the novel is that the history with the grand H is very present, obviously, but it's also. It comes out differently. So we experience, through Omar, a particular response to Saddam Hussein's capture, which is occurring in the novel through Omar's response to watching it on tv. And it's a section in the novel. It's subtle, it's very late in the novel. But there is a way that the permeation of the grand narrative, so to speak, exists, but it exists framed on a television and mediated for us as readers through Omar's response to it, which is this desire to shut it off, but also the cacophony of responses that really are just fundamentally unsettling. And I find that, you know, in terms of what the novel offers us as readers, as a reflection on the political stake, like, this isn't a. It's not a. You know, it's not a historical account of this moment. In a sense, it really amplifies precisely how that moment ricochets to the present in. In a way that I find exceptional. The other lighter televisual moment. As someone living and working in Oregon, I always look for where Oregon is in the novel. I was very happy to see that the bear attack in Oregon on Oprah Winfrey. I was like, there it is. So, Sinan, thank you for that.
- [38:09]
Sinan Antun
Sure, anytime.
- [38:12]
Michael Allen
So, Sinan, I asked a little bit again, my love of your work as a poet and my love of your work as a novelist, and certainly on the level of style, on the level of figuration, on the level of the immediacy of your writing, you're a poetic novelist in the best way. But there's also a moment, and I hope this isn't super cringe, but there's a. For me to read aloud your own novel to yourself. But there's a moment where you cite a poem in Florida almost in full, and it's. You said Sammy forgot all the poetry he had committed to memory, except for a few verses he would still cling to in those foggy hours. And then you quote the start of the. Or the part of the poem. Whenever epics had tussles over you, they shriveled, but you remained ever green. The world passes by, your sunny morning in darkness. Your night's face is a full moon. Fates were cruel to you, but they were stunned that your grit was greater than theirs. And then the novel continues. He often repeated that last line, but addressed himself rather than the city he no longer lives in. Why did these verses survive and even dementia could not uproot them. Were there roots deep within him? Perhaps grapes were the reason. And then there's a move on to grapes. I would love again just to hear your thoughts about the decision to stage the poem in the novel. There's also verses of um, Kulthum singing that are woven throughout various passages, specifically around Sami, a very immediate way in which questions of memory, be it the lavender and the evocation of sense, that's, you know, the scent of his, his deceased wife. Music and poetry again, sort of thoughts about things that spawn the memory, but thoughts about how, I mean, clearly, I mean, it's not to say why did you either they, it's, you know, they function so beautifully in the novel. But it's also, I know, in terms of studies of memory, you know, song and scent, and you even staged the studies on memory in the novel itself. But this poem in particular, is there a connection you have to it? I mean, certainly an epigraph of the book as a poet and what have you.
- [40:35]
Sinan Antun
But no, no, that's a great question. I mean, I should say that in reading pre modern Arabic prose, you know, whether in Persian or in Arabic, I was pleasantly surprised that we have these books that are already multi genre a thousand years ago that the book would have, you know, you know, that you had to have some history, would have the author's opinion and that would have poems. So to my mind it's like, okay, this whole notion of expansive books that can have all different genres should always be there. So I tried it with the Book of Collateral Damage. But also to me, novel is about or literature, culture is about life. And in life people listen to music and hum them and recite poems everywhere, but especially in that part of the world. And I was recently in India for a poetry festival and it was a great time because in India too, just like in the Arab world, after a good line, people respond, you know, they're like, oh, like Allah. So the issue of this nostalgia for the golden age of Baghdad, that, you know, it's different epochs for different people depending on their ideology and whatnot. But this poem, and I would understand because when I Left Baghdad in 1991, the diaspora folks would say it was so melancholic and terrible to watch Baghdad being destroyed, but also Baghdad, because of what Baghdad was and is, evokes so much. But this poem in particular is very resonant with a lot of Iraqis, especially from an older generation, but recently with social media, with others, but specifically with people who knew Baghdad when It was a vibrant, promising city despite dictators. And for those people to see what has befallen Baghdad now, it is just, you know, it is a ghost of itself, and it's really terrible. So for I thought that for someone like Sami, who was an upper middle class, educated person from that period of Iraq where we had this vibrant, promising, you know, class of people who, you know, wanted to build a new modern country like so many other places in the global south, he would definitely remember this poem. And also, as we all do, in a way, we inhabit the poem and the poem, and it's also the fusion of himself with the city when he's no longer in the city. Which reminds me of something in Derwish which happens to exiles and refugees, is that which Omar says too, is that you realize when you leave a place, your hometown or your home country, that you actually do carry the place within you, and that the place is much more than its physical space. And nowadays, with technology, you can actually live vicariously. I mean, I know people who only watch the satellite channels in the Arab world and for all intents and purposes, are almost living there, except physically. But that poem is also very powerful in Arabic. And poems, as you said, in a way, can really encapsulate such complex emotions that can be retrieved right in one line. And one line can make you cry, can transport you to another place.
- [44:10]
Magalia Miesti Seida
So at the end of another podcast episode, we ask every season a signature question of our novelists. And this season's question for Sinan is, who was your favorite teacher?
- [44:21]
Sinan Antun
My favorite teacher back at the University of Baghdad in the late 80s, when I was studying English literature, we had a professor who, this is. We're living in terms of dictatorship, but a professor who, throughout the lectures, would say certain coded words that were quite radical back then. And then he was also someone who, when I showed him my first writings, encouraged me to write. And later I discovered that he was a communist. But he left the greatest impression on me because of the way he took teaching very seriously and the way that he managed to transmit things to us about politics and about justice and equality in a very dangerous situation. And I've been remembering him in the last two years, of course, because we've seen, unfortunately, so much cowardice from most of our colleagues in a society where there is no dictatorship. So I remember him and I salute him because of what he taught me, how to be and so on.
- [45:26]
Magalia Miesti Seida
Can you share his name?
- [45:27]
Sinan Antun
His name is Amjad Hussain and he still lives in Jordan. Amman, Jordan. He left Iraq.
- [45:34]
Magalia Miesti Seida
Wonderful. Thank you. For that. Well, at the very conclusion of another Novel Dialogue episode, we'd like to thank the Society for Novel Studies for its sponsorship, Public Books for its partnership, and the Rick Edelman College of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University for its support. Deck Daly is our production intern, and Connor Hibbert is our sound engineer. Check out recent episodes of the podcast with Fernanda Trias and Heather Cleary, Omar El Akkad, Orhan Pamuk and Cristina Rivera Garza. If you like what you heard, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from all of us here at Novel Dialogue, thank you for listening.