Selma Dabbagh: “I am worried about how we are becoming desensitised to horror”
The British-Palestinian author on the role of literature in the face of an ongoing genocide and fiction as the first peg leading to greater awareness
Your novel Out of It has been named as one of the books to be read in the face of the ongoing conflict. What role do you see for literary fiction in making sense of the world after Gaza?
The world will be irrevocably changed after Gaza. I do not think we have ever experienced in real time a genocide in this way. I think that the type of killing and the level of killing and the starvation, also the use of AI automated quadcopters and drones and the killing of children and women has been on a level that we have never had to witness in real time. There’s a bizarre situation at the moment where books are being written about the genocide and were being published during the genocide while the genocide was continuing. One of them being Atif Abu Saif’s Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide. I also personally had a strange experience of contributing to an anthology called Daybreak in Gaza and my friend Marwa, who I write about in my LRB blogs, was in the south of Gaza and sent me a picture of the table of contents saying that she had received this book. So she was living in a genocide, reading about me, writing about what it felt like to witness a genocide from afar. There’s all kinds of perversions in terms of how we’re experiencing such horror which for me as a writer is having a profound impact.
I am worried about the way that we are becoming desensitised to horror. I think the idea of dispensing with many human lives, for example saying the ceasefire is holding when at least 100 people have been killed since the ceasefire, it’s kind of like saying our expectation as to what a breach of the ceasefire seems to be saying we need thousands to be killed for that to even register as a blip. So, the value of Palestinian humanity has gone down.
How can we write fiction in a way that gets people not only to understand and then put the book down but to think about the actual actions that they can take to live more consciously and more viscerally and more humanely in connection with people who are undergoing horror?
Do you feel that short fiction is placed at an advantage when it comes to dismantling problematic media representations of the Israeli occupation?
Very interesting. There are lots of things which I love about short fiction. One is that you can be far more experimental. I think you can carry off things in short fiction you can’t really do in a novel. Like, you could write it from the perspective of, I don’t know, a dog or a bug or a cup or you could write it in the second person which can work very well for short fiction. So, there’s a lot of playfulness that is allowed for that, which I think can become a little contorted in longer fiction. There aren’t enough outlets for short fiction, in my opinion. I think there should be more opportunity for writing like that. And I think it’s a form that is really suited to Palestinian writers living under occupation, because your life is so continuously disrupted. When I go there, I feel I’d never have been able to write a novel if I lived here. Your life is not within your control. The occupation controls everything. If you want to go and visit somebody in Jerusalem from Ramallah for a cup of coffee, it might not happen because the checkpoints might be closed or everything might be changed. Everything is subject to constant change. So, a short-form piece can be more suited to the kind of conditions that Palestinians live under, which is generally one of constant disruption and repeated trauma and being re-traumatized in a way by recent events.
Your short story Take Me There written in English almost takes the form of a Qissa. Is your work, fiction and otherwise, an attempt to introduce Arabic sensibilities within the Anglophone literary landscape?
English is my first language and really, it’s my only fluent language. So, I don’t know that I’m familiar with the Qissa form enough to be able to claim that. It takes a long time to be able to strip down and deconstruct oneself and to see where certain styles of communication come from because they’re so natural to you. I mean, it’s only very recently that I realised that my idea of socialising is telling stories, whereas actually a lot of my English friends telling stories is one thing, but it’s not the main component of discussion. Whereas I think it’s more common among my Palestinian friends. I mean, it’s a bit of a generalisation. So the same is like, how do I express myself in a story? How do I hear it coming through me? And I think Ahdaf Soueif says this... She used to think in Arabic and then write in English. So sometimes the rhythm, even though my Arabic is not fluent, I’m hearing the way that people I know who are similar to my characters would express themselves. And that probably does influence the form, the style, the language and perhaps a certain gentleness in that story.
In your short story Last Assignment to Jenin (2017), you uncover the ways in which official documentation always falls short when it comes to recounting war crimes. Was that something that you had wanted to highlight? And also, how do you feel that writers and artists can address this lack, this falling short?
Yeah, so in Last Assignment to Jenin, there’s this situation where a woman who’s crazily in love with a man who’s dumped her goes into Jenin before the 2002 assault. And it’s, you know, very prescient at the moment because we feel that Jenin is, again, about to be obliterated. Like, it is under attack at the moment. And the thing that drove her there was the idea that that extremity, a political situation, was as extreme as the passion she was feeling for a man who had dumped her. In it, she is recording the testimony (of a Palestinian family). And she’s not getting very far with this Palestinian family until she says, OK, ‘war crimes’. And they have this idea in their head that there may be punishment for the people and their accurate documentation of it, and giving these stories will allow for that.
There was such a belief in the word, in the power of the word and the power of evidence and of being precise and giving testimony. I think the desire for people to have justice systems is so hardwired in them, you know, to see retribution. So, what is wrong with the international criminal law or human rights system is really the lack of political will to enforce. I believe it could work, and it could work for the Palestinians, and a lot of just judgments have come out which are positive, but there’s a lack of political will, so it’s failing.
So, we’ve got a failure going on that could be readdressed. In terms of literature, I think that here you’re going beyond one set of rules and you’re communicating … I think you can get a character to live in a reader for far longer than you can get statistics to be retained by them. You can get that idea of a scene and a moment of tension or being let down, being elated, particularly when it comes to romance and sexual tension. I think these things can really drive stories forward. Another reason why I did We Wrote In Symbols was because I felt that a lot of women of Arab heritage were... I could feel I was doing it myself… I wasn’t really writing about these things as freely as I wanted to. I feel if we don’t have the ability to do this, we cannot tell our political stories as well either.
As a British-Palestinian author you have access to a certain readership in the West, yet you’re at a remove from the conflict on the ground. How do you navigate this?
I think in the beginning when I started writing, there were very few novels. I’m talking about 2003. There were very few novels by Palestinian writers in English. And my initial idea was to write, like, the sort of magnus opus. Said had always said, why is there no grand Palestinian narrative? Why hasn’t that been written? And I thought I would do that; starting before 1948. But then I thought, actually, this doesn’t really interest me enough. I want to be where we’re at now. So, I’ve definitely always felt a huge responsibility of representation. I think being a Palestinian writer is totally different to being, for example, an Indian or a Chinese writer, because there are far more writers from those places. I also think that we don’t have as big an internal readership that we can depend on, and we are so misrepresented.
It’s getting a little bit better, but when I started writing, the trope of the terrorist or the victim were very hefty things that you had to navigate around. And then there’s also this expectation with Palestine, because we don’t have political power and we don’t have military power, it’s, like, the legal and the moral and the written, the story… These are our powers; these are our narratives. People are very possessive about you not getting it wrong, so you really have to research.
But you also don’t want to info-dump all this stuff into your novels. I mean, it can work. Like, A Suitable Boy, for example, there’s a lot of information about land reform in India. I quite like reading that. Now, like, two decades on, there are far more Palestinian writers, and they are far more creative. A lot of them are coming from the diaspora. Some of them are authentic voices from the occupation, from the West Bank and Gaza, or within Israel, who are writing about their experiences.
I feel I’m much more freed up to write something more from a diasporic perspective. I’ve started playing around with writing some short stories which are basically about relationships, and I find that very freeing. I think I’m more sensitive to Palestinian critique. I don’t care, you know, what the Israelis think of me. I really don’t care. I know what I believe, and I don’t believe that it’s anti-Semitic or in any way offensive to them. I’m totally opposed to the current Israeli government and the Zionist project generally, and that’s my politics. I’m not going to hide that. I also try very much to review the work of younger Palestinians. I’m aware of my possible access to audiences, other people. So, I frequently review Palestinian literature.
On a panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival, you mentioned that there are many emerging voices from Palestine in film and literature. Can you share some names that have come to your attention recently?
Yes, if you want something quite funny, I think Mazen Maarouf, who’s a Palestinian who lives in Iceland. He wrote a collection of short stories Jokes for the Gunmen set in Lebanon. He grew up in a refugee camp there. I think Atef Abu Saif’s Don’t Look Left, A Diary of Genocide. It’s quite hard reading and it’s not a war diary in a way that somebody like Etel Adnan or Mahmoud Darwish wrote about the Lebanese civil war. Maybe the prose isn’t that high but in terms of the experience that he went through between October and December 2023, that would be a good one to read. Poet Mosab Abu Toha is fantastic, Isabella Hamad, who’s also British-Palestinian; The Parisian and Enter Ghost are great.
I loved Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I think her prose is so sharp and poignant and there’s a slightly nervous sensibility that comes through her writing that is really directly a result of the situation that we live in and she communicates that very well. There’s a neglected Palestinian-British writer called Mischa Hiller who wrote thrillers -- there’s one called Sabra Zoo and the second one called Shake Off. I think, just in terms of writing about the vulnerability of men in warfare, of these almost virginal mummy’s boys who are just being expected to resist – I think he does that really beautifully and he can handle a really sharp spy plot.
Can you share a bit about your upcoming projects?
I’ve got several really exciting writing projects. I’m finishing my novel which is set in 1938 Jerusalem. It’s around a party. So, it’s a little bit Mrs Dalloway in that way. It’s a rich household of the man, the father figure, is a Palestinian Nationalist and he’s trying to engage the British in political discussions. He also is reaching out to some of the Jewish thinkers and political figures in Palestine at the time who were thinking of a binational state. It’s told through the eyes of his daughter who’s around 15, so it’s a little bit coming-of-age novel against the background of the Palestinian resistance to the British, which was going on at the time. So, at the party, you’ve got Jewish guests, British guests and Palestinian guests and it’s how the women in the background are trying to engineer this party in a way to shift out certain British personalities and get other ones into a position which would allow for something more along the lines of a binational state. Could the whole history have gone differently if certain Individuals had acted better at that point in time? That, for me, is why I think literature can be important. You feel that you don’t know which reader might get put in a position whereby them speaking out and being informed things can shift and if you as a writer might be affecting that reader. You’ll never know but the hope is that you might be and that will shift the direction.
Simar Bhasin is a literary critic and research scholar who lives in Delhi. Her essay ‘A Qissa of Resistance: Desire and Dissent in Selma Dabbagh’s Short Fiction’ was awarded ‘Highly Commended’ by the Wasafiri Essay Prize 2024.
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