Huda Fakhreddine’s work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free-verse poem and the prose poem.
She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (forthcoming from Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Asymptote among others. Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019.
She is the co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Tahani Almujahid is a rising junior from Dearborn, MI, studying English and International Studies. On-campus, Tahani has written for the Michigan Journal of International Affairs, Michigan Daily, and Writer to Writer. She has also served on the e-board for Xylem, which gave her insight into the world of literary publishing.
Tahani Almujahid (TA): It’s so wonderful to have you here today, Huda. Tell me a little bit about yourself. I’d love to know more about you.
Huda Fakhreddine (HF): Well, I am a student and a student of poetry, that is what I like to present myself as. Poetry has been my passion and my interest since childhood. I grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War and my parents’ house was always the launching point into my reading journey, so that’s where I was first introduced to pre-Islamic poetry and the Qu’ran, and then later, to the poetry of the Abbasids, which I worked on and wrote my first book about.
I studied English literature at the American University of Beirut and got an MA in 2002, and then tried very hard to stay in Lebanon; I did everything I could to stay. I taught at Lebanese American University (LAU) and at the public university—the Lebanese University—and I was intent on getting myself into a Ph.D. program in Lebanon, so I wouldn’t leave, like everybody else, but I couldn’t. There was no program that was functional at that time. Things have changed since then. So I found myself eventually applying for graduate programs abroad and in 2005, I came to Indiana University in Bloomington to work with Suzanne Stetkevych and that’s where I did my graduate work focused on the Abbasid poets and wrote my dissertation on the metapoesis in the Arabic tradition.
So I’ve been living in this country since 2005. My main interest is Arabic literature and especially poetry. I do my best to keep up with new publications and releases and I think my work in translation is something I need to just keep myself in touch with and keep myself in this exercise of intimately reading all the new texts.
I think my experience living in this country has colored everything I do because suddenly, in 2005, I found myself out of context, away from the places of the language, where you live in the language and think in it, and you are with it all day. Suddenly there’s this distance and you’re living in translation and you’re so acutely aware of the politics of representation and translation.
TA: Thank you for sharing your context and the background that you’re coming into this with. This issue, for me, is very personal too, as you’ve echoed yourself. Let’s talk a bit about the concept and framing. Why is the issue focused on the last 30 years which you call the “decades of fire?” Why not anything before that? Why use the term “Middle East North Africa” (MENA)?
HF: I think the title is, in some ways, problematic. We always seem to approach that region and its cultures and literature from the angle of current affairs or political problems or volatile, turbulent history, so from that narrow perspective, we somehow reduce a rich, long culture to the problems that it has. It’s always framed that way, but I understand the thinking. I understand the thinking behind the title of the issue and the description because these past 30 years are pressing on everybody’s minds: those who know about the region and those who don’t really know. So when you tell somebody—an uninformed American reader, let’s say about Yemen, they’re not going to be aware of its long ancient history, its rich folkloric, linguistic, and literary traditions. They’re going to think of something they read in the newspaper or heard on TV, so I think it’s the framing of the issue and the thinking behind it is to say to those who know and those who don’t know that this is something important and it’s worth your attention, so pay attention. But then, our hope is that the issue will offer this diverse nuanced perspective on the region that is often not allowed that perspective. It’s often flattened into one issue or two issues or a headline.
My hope for the issue is that it offers this perspective that is different from the one we normally see, although special issues are in and of themselves problematic. One of the fallacies or the problems of representation in this country is when we look at cultures and languages that are assigned to the margin is this: they’re usually assigned the special corner, the one issue to represent all of that world in a nutshell. So representation is always violent when it happens under these circumstances, but my hope is that this issue will challenge that, even though it has to work within the system, and that it will offer something different. We’re still receiving submissions so my hope for the issue is that it will represent a generational diversity, so not only the names you expect from the different countries but younger poets and writers of fiction and prose. I imagine the issue as a look back to see how we can then better understand the moment we are in now in the Middle East and North Africa—in that region, regardless of what we decide to call it. Again, I have major issues with representation. I teach at the University of Pennsylvania now in a department that’s called “Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations,” a very problematic label that we, in our work, if we do our work well, should challenge in everything we do, in every class we teach. We should point to how constructed that label is and how unreal it is on the ground, in the geography, and in the history of the place. I hope that even if we have to work within these labels and within these frameworks that we will find ourselves stuck in, that we challenge them from within. That’s my hope.
TA: Every framing is going to be limited in some aspect and you’re right; it’s, unfortunately, the system we are working under and within. In this framing, are there any particular voices that you think are crucial to the issue, and what do you think could be missing from this 30 year time period?
HF: I’m hoping to have voices that are usually marginalized or underrepresented or silenced. As our call for papers said, we’re looking for LGBTQ voices from that region, often silenced over there, or pushed to the side, women’s voices, minority languages from that region that are often disregarded. There’s always this focus on Arabic or Persian, but then you have all these other languages that make up the rich text style or the rich culture of the region. But again I’m also very aware of the problematics of this—when you say, I want to represent underrepresented people, there is some forceness to that. How do you select? Above all, I think the artistic, literary merit of the text has to be foregrounded regardless of who wrote it. We’re going to have to rely on the submissions we receive and I invite people who are going to be reading this to submit.
TA: What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge with this issue in particular?
HF: This is not going to be the decisive word on MENA. This is not going to be the final issue. My hope for this issue is that it paves the way for more similar initiatives, whether special issues or other ways of engaging with the cultures and literature of that region so even if we can’t really represent everything that needs to be represented and includes all the voices that need to be included, we can hint at them, signal towards them, and that leads to other work. I think that’s the most realistic approach when we take upon ourselves a mission so big as representing all of that region in one single issue. My hope is that this issue takes upon itself the mission of challenging the rigid, stereotypical image we have about the region and its many cultures and languages, and literary traditions.
TA: Thanks for sharing all of that. It’s always difficult to push further against the perspectives we are already used to, so I’m excited to see what is to come with this issue. I also have a few questions regarding your own background and that of what you studied, because the poetry of the Abbasids was so long ago and we are focusing on the last 30 years.
What are you most excited about like reading? What are you looking forward to seeing?
HF: I’m always most excited about the poetry, but, as I mentioned I’m also excited about the essays. I have a sense that some of them will be personal pieces where artists, poets, novelists, critics, translators reflect upon their careers and their craft and their own development in light of these major developments that happened in the region in the past decades.
As you said, personal engagement often leads to very illuminating observations that everybody can learn from, so I appreciate the personal connection and there will be a few pieces like that —names we know or voices we don’t know yet looking back and reflecting upon the relationship between this turbulent, volatile history and their own personal craft, their relationship to their writing, the themes they work on.
And on the issue of the Abbasid, the tradition is never absent. It’s always present in new art and new work, so I’m also looking forward to the way writers will engage, or will at least acknowledge, their references and backgrounds and how their own personal histories or the shared history of the region factors into their work. History and memory, both personal and collective, wars and refugeedom, exile and immigration, these are all extreme experiences that invite memory into the present moment, so there’s no escaping the past—not just the past three decades, but our long, long past. The memory of the languages we write in, the memory of the traditions we engage with so yes, the past is never absent.
TA: In thinking about history and memory, there is a large diaspora who’ve never been to their homeland because of all these things that have happened in the last three decades. Do you feel that they have a place in this issue, in the translation or the reading of it? On a personal note, I’m always looking and trying to read the literature of the region and of my people in Yemen, to try and understand the perspectives that I personally have never experienced as someone who hasn’t lived in my homeland.
HF: Of course, and that’s the first group of people that comes to my mind when I think of contributors to this issue. People from the region who have lived, whether willingly or by force, outside of its cultural and linguistic context and writers who write and other languages. I mean, for example, Arab American poets and writers, many of whom haven’t necessarily mastered Arabic but Arabic exists in their English writing, shadows of Arabic, flavors of Arabic, concerns of the context that they either know or have lived with the shadows of, all their lives. This is again, where memory and history factor in. Definitely, and one of the languages of MENA, if we’re going to use the problematic label, is English. The experience of living in these countries has long been represented and expressed in other languages, in French and English, so for the purposes of this issue, there will be many pieces written originally in English and we’re claiming English as a language of the region. Think of how many people like you and me live our daily lives thinking of our extended families in Yemen and Lebanon, but we live that experience in English, so we’re going to claim part of English for ourselves.
There are very important literary works being written in English, in America, and in other places, and in French, so I hope that the issue will represent that. The Arab American, the Persian American experience, the Kurdish American experience. The flavors of all these languages when they are forced to be filtered through the lens of English and how English itself changes with our experiences and has to accommodate us. It really is a relationship of conflict with English on some level.
TA: I completely agree about this conflict with the language that you’re pointing to and that this is a very open space and whatever experience people are coming in with, they’re invited to submit, whether that be their own stories or in translation works. What would you like to say to people who are interested in submitting? Are there any words of advice and encouragement you’d like to share?
HF: I did receive a few inquiries by email, and my response to all of them so far has been, yes please submit. So, don’t overthink it. Some people thought it was only translations and some people thought it was only really work written in English originally.
If you have a strong feeling about a piece, and you think that it has something to say about this region, whatever you call it, or whatever issues you have with labels that exist for calling it that, I think it’s a relevant piece, so please submit.
And I also encourage different forms of writing. Don’t hesitate, especially if you feel that this piece is saying something or shedding light on something that needs more attention, that you feel hasn’t been touched upon before. And if you’re moved by it then I’m sure others will be moved by it, too, and we look forward to reading it.
TA: Of course, that’s wonderful and we encourage everyone to submit. I’m excited to see what is to come with the issue and the types of submissions that we receive and to enjoy the different voices that come out of the region and different experiences. Thank you for speaking with and meeting with me today and I look forward to the issue and your contributions to it.
HF: Thank you, Tahani. It was lovely meeting you.
