Yasmin Zaher and Saleem Haddad in conversation

SALEEM: I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I read The Coin this year and I think it was one of the best books that I've read, definitely this year, if not for the last few years.

YASMIN: And I read Guapa when it came out in 2016, which was the year when I started writing The Coin. And I read it as an inspiration really for what you can do as an Arab writer, writing in English, kind of being a little bit transgressive as well.

SALEEM: That means a lot. I wonder if a good place to start our conversation is to pick up on something you wrote in an essay that was published in January 2024, I think, in The Drift. The essay was called “Abolish the Categories.”

A few writer friends sent me this essay wanting to get my thoughts and it really prompted a lot of conversations. And rather than me trying to summarize what the essay said, I wonder if you can just tell me a little bit about what you were preoccupied with in the essay.

YASMIN: Oh, interesting. So, yeah, I think, well, the categories kind of refer to literary categories, right? And the idea, I think, came to me from trying to organize my bookshelf, like trying to organize the fiction in my bookshelf.

And the way I do it naturally, for some reason, is based on geography. So I will do like Middle Eastern literature, African literature, literature from East Asia. And then I thought about myself and like where I would fit.

And I didn't quite, you know, I am a Palestinian writer, but I write in English. So I was like putting myself at the edge of the category. And yeah, just thinking about these terms of, you know, who we are as writers and how that defines us and feeling very strongly that I don't necessarily fit in any of those categories, which I think you probably have a very similar experience, just by virtue probably of being from different countries.

SALEEM: Definitely. My background is very mixed and I grew up in a lot of different countries. So I always find myself not entirely fitting into a certain category, especially when, as is often the case with literature, it's by nationality.

Technically, I could fit into three of those, Lebanon, Jordan, and British. But I wouldn't categorise my writing as any of those things. And whereas Guapa was not really set in a particular country my next novel is very much rooted in Iraq - but I still feel quite strange about it being considered an Iraqi novel.

YASMIN: Right, and I feel strange about The Coin being considered a Palestinian novel because it takes place in New York, first of all, and also because its main character is so unrepresentative of Palestinians in a way. Like, she's rich, she's promiscuous, she's not under any control of the patriarchy. And, yeah, it's hard to belong, but it's almost like you love your culture, but you feel like it doesn't love you back, like you don't belong in that box, you know? That's something that I struggled with a lot while publishing.

SALEEM: While publishing or while writing?

YASMIN: While writing I was in my secret chamber where I wasn't thinking about anyone, I wasn't thinking about audience, I was in my madness. But then when it came time to go out there, to be vulnerable, to be judged, really, like so much of publishing is about being judged, then I started to have a lot of anxieties around that.

SALEEM: Where did you find The Coin fitting in? Not by you, but by readers and publishers. Was it sold as a Palestinian novel?

YASMIN: Absolutely, it was sold as a Palestinian novel. It came out nine months into the genocide, so there was a lot of desire for Palestinian narratives — coming out of a good place where people wanted to understand what's going on and to support, but also coming out of a place that I liked a lot less, which is like, you know, people want to virtue signal and people want to be in. It was a mixed bag of emotions to get so much attention because of timing that was very negative.

SALEEM: It's funny because when Guapa came out, it came out in 2016 at a very particular point, but when I was writing it I didn't think that I was writing a gay novel. I thought that I was writing an Arab Spring novel and that's how, when I was pitching it to publishers and to agents, that's how I was pitching it. The gay stuff kind of seemed not only relevant insofar as I was trying to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and the political. Then when the novel was marketed, and then received, the gay aspect of the novel came into focus and I was very ambivalent about that.

YASMIN: So you were put in the gay queer category?

SALEEM: For sure.

YASMIN: And how do you feel about this category? Do you think that's a legitimate category?

SALEEM: Well, there's two things at play. The first is that I was surprised by how important the gay element was for gay Arab readers and that it was something that they felt very strongly, in a positive way, about the book. It was important for them, the gay angle, and I think hearing that from those readers made me more open to the idea of seeing Guapa as a gay novel, whatever that means.

Fundamentally, I think with literature and what I really loved about the essay that you wrote is that the best kind of literature is one that transcends these categories and that doesn't try and fit into these categories. I think I approach my own writing that way in a sense that I think these categories are fundamentally, maybe not necessarily capitalist, but certainly consumerist because they're about how to pitch things and how to fit things into easily digestible labels. And that doesn't concern me as a writer. When I'm sitting in my room writing, I'm not thinking about where this would necessarily fit in and I don't care ultimately where it would fit in. Although in the context of Guapa I did care because I was very concerned about the pinkwashing element. And that's why I felt like I needed to have a lot of control over...

YASMIN: Can you say more about the pinkwashing element? What do you mean exactly?

SALEEM: For sure. So the novel came out in 2016 and this was also the time when liberal identity politics was at its peak. And I was really nervous about the idea that the novel would be used as a way to kind of bludgeon our culture and society because the novel... When I was writing the novel, I was critical of everything. But I was scared that readers would pick up only on the parts of the novel that criticized Arab society and forget about all the other things, or not see it in a broader context. And so when I was talking about the novel I was so careful about how I should frame what I'm saying.

YASMIN: Yeah, to not come off as self-hating.

SALEEM: Exactly. Or at least be an equal opportunity hater, which is what the novel is, right? It's just hating everyone.

YASMIN: As all great novels.

SALEEM: So I just needed to make sure that that was included in all of my interviews and all of the events that I was part of.

YASMIN: Okay, so you say that when you write, you don't think about the marketing categories of your book or how it's going to be presented in the press. But do you think about your readers, especially now that you've written two novels? Do you think about your readers more now with the second novel?

SALEEM: So actually, it was the opposite. I think when I was writing Guapa I was writing from this very anxious position where, well, the first draft is different because the first draft is really just kind of me putting everything on the page without really thinking too much about anyone. But in edits, and Guapa was edited, as you know, any novel goes through years of edits, and Guapa was edited maybe 10 or 15 times before it was finally published. And through these various revisions, I had this very anxious way of editing according to different audiences. So every paragraph, I would read from the perspective of, let's say, a middle-class gay Arab man or a conservative right-wing Dutch person. And I would just try and wear these different hats and read the novel through those lenses and try and, as much as possible, subvert expectations of all of these different readers.

With the second novel, I thought much less about audience. I thought about readers, but more, I think it was partly because I'm now more aware of my readership. I'm now more aware of the people who enjoy my writing and read my work.

And I think that eased a lot of my own anxieties. And I think I approached the editing process with more confidence, not just in myself, but also with confidence in the reader, giving them a lot more credit, making them do a little bit more work, not necessarily feeling like I have to explain things.

How have you found it? Have you found a shift from your first year to second?

YASMIN: Yes, definitely. The Coin also went through many, many reiterations, of course, but I only really started wearing the critic's hat at the very end. Maybe in the last few months of revision, I would be like, OK, how would an American Jew perceive this sentence? How would my mother perceive this sentence? But I was very aware of not wanting to self-censor and wanting to keep the work kind of raw and wild, because that's just something that is very dear to my heart and literature and a quality that I didn't want to lose.

My second novel that I'm writing now, it all takes place in Palestine. And we didn't mention this, but both of us are Arab writers who grew up in the Middle East, but write in English. So our audience is predominantly English-speaking.

And I'm a lot more aware of what you're saying about needing to explain things, needing to clarify things, you're almost holding the reader's hand more than I was when I was writing about New York. Because in New York my character walks down Fifth Avenue and I don't need to say anything about that. Everybody knows what Fifth Avenue is, but does everybody know Salah al-Din [street], what it's like? I don't think so. So that's an interesting experience of almost being alienated from my own work, because I'm writing things, not necessarily how I would consume them naturally. There are more crutches in the text.

SALEEM: That's interesting, because I feel like with my second novel, actually, I took a slightly different approach, where I felt like I don't necessarily need to explain East London to a reader in the same way that I don't need to explain the neighborhood of Shmeisani in Amman to the reader. I will just put those in, and if the reader wants to know more about either of these places, they can then do the work and research.

YASMIN: I think that's probably a better literary choice. It's to be natural, to not explain, because otherwise you get something that all of us probably really don't like when we're reading, which is that we're being told what to think. We're being told who's moral, who's not moral, is this character rich, is this character poor.

SALEEM: That's something that I'm really trying to fight against, these expectations around what a certain novel should be, whether it's, a “gay novel” or an “Iraqi novel.”

YASMIN: Well, I think as long as you the author are aware of the fact that this is an upper middle class setting for a novel, then why not? The problems come more when you have these characters who are spending money and you don't know where the money's coming from. Like you just, you need to kind of create a class infrastructure in the novel to support whatever is going to happen in it.

SALEEM: Very true. I wanted to talk about language because like you mentioned, we both write in English and I'm wondering whether you feel any anxiety about the fact that you, that you write fiction in English.

YASMIN: No, anxiety, no. I'm at peace with who I am at this point, but I would say there's a little bit of grief, or a feeling that maybe I'm losing something, or I'm neglecting a part of myself. On the other hand, I have a tough time with Arabic language and literature because I find it very, like, I find it too rich, you know? I find it a little bit too sugary for my own style. I think in my style sensibility, I'm more of an American writer. Does that make sense?

SALEEM: I think it does make sense. I wonder if you can maybe explain it a bit more.

YASMIN: I like short, direct, to the point, maybe borderline vulgar.

SALEEM: Functional.

YASMIN: Yeah. Writing and Arabic just by nature of the language is really like ornate and swirly and like stretchy, you know.

SALEEM: And quite metaphorical also.

YASMIN: And that's not my style sensibility.

SALEEM: And The Coin has not been translated into Arabic, has it?

YASMIN: No, it hasn't. Has Guapa?

SALEEM: No, we've had a lot of trouble trying to get it translated into Arabic, partly due to the subject matter and partly due to challenges with Arabic.

YASMIN: In the industry?

SALEEM: In the industry in general, exactly.

YASMIN: And what if there was like a bootleg copy of Guapa in Arabic? Would you be happy with that?

SALEEM: I would be happy with it.

YASMIN: Like a free PDF?

SALEEM: I would be happy with it. I would be totally fine with it. So if there are any translators who are interested, please do get in touch.

I had a lot of anxiety around the fact that I was writing Guapa in English rather than Arabic. And I think the character also grapples with this anxiety himself. Anxiety of articulating himself in English versus Arabic is something that emerges as a concern for him in the novel.

YASMIN: Are you one of those people who have different personalities and different languages?

SALEEM: Yes, definitely. And it's funny because I've been learning Portuguese because I live in Lisbon, so I find this new personality emerging in Portuguese.

YASMIN: What's your Portuguese personality like?

SALEEM: Self-deprecating, I would say. I'm not sure whether that's partly because the self-deprecation emerges because I'm not confident in the language. And so I then try and kind of poke fun at myself and make myself a clown.

YASMIN: Interesting. I started learning French three years ago. And my French personality, surprisingly, my Parisian personality is a lot friendlier than my other personalities.

I think it's also something to do with being insecure, knowing that you're not, you know, you're not all that. So you have to compensate with other things. So I'm a lot more forthcoming and funny and nice.

SALEEM: And how are you in Arabic?

YASMIN: Kind of, maybe a little bit more dry and misanthropic.

SALEEM: Okay.

YASMIN: And English is definitely my, you know, it's my smart language.

SALEEM: Yeah, it's definitely my heady language.

YASMIN: It's the language that we were educated in.

SALEEM: Definitely. And also it's the language where I think, at least for my case, I can only speak for myself. When I was trying to discover, I grew up, my formative years were in Jordan. And when I was trying to understand the world and understand myself and understand my sexuality, I had to turn to English in order to do that. Because the stuff that was written about all of these things was in English. In Arabic, a lot of the stuff that I was exposed to felt very didactic and propagandist.

And so I think English was the source for me to explore the world. And that's why I ended up gravitating towards English as a language that I think in, that I write in.

YASMIN: For me, in a way, it's the language that liberated me. It was also because it was the language that I read in.

SALEEM: And have you found a way to kind of go back to Arabic and kind of re-evaluate your relationship with Arabic?

YASMIN: A little bit. I think I have a chapter of my life ahead of me that will be dedicated to that.

SALEEM: I feel the same. I think it's, even though I've made peace with writing in English, there's a part of me that also is aware of, well . . . let me I've made peace with writing in English because English is the language to communicate to the world. I see my audience as being a global audience, and I think that the concerns that I write about are relevant across the world. But I think there is something that sits uneasy with me about using the language of empire to do this. I would like to not abandon it, but build an alternative ecosystem in which I am thinking and writing, and Arabic would be the natural ecosystem to do that in for a multitude of reasons.

YASMIN: I agree with you about English being the language of empire, but what that means also is that you can communicate with different parts of the empire. So, for example, I have a lot of, a lot of my readers are like diasporic Indians, for example.

SALEEM: Yeah.

YASMIN: Or, you know, like British Muslim girls from, I don't know, Somalia. And I feel like English allows me to communicate in a way that Arabic would not. And going back to how we started all of this is that we are not trying to . . . literature is not about speaking to your own people, it's about speaking to humanity, or to people who have something in common with you.

And me as a reader, I was 14 years old, reading Catcher in the Rye — what did I care about what I had in common in terms of identity with the character in that novel? I didn't. It was something a lot deeper than that.

SALEEM: Absolutely.

YASMIN: And I think with, with the politics of the Middle East, of Palestine, we're kind of losing a little bit of the universal. As a novelist I feel it's important to not fall into a place that divides.

SALEEM: What you're saying is that you would like your writing to speak to something more universal than just —

YASMIN: Yeah, absolutely. Like for me, The Coin is about a lonely woman. It's not about a Palestinian woman.

And if I can communicate that, then that's when I succeed as someone who loves literature, not if I transmitted the ideological message of my people.

SALEEM: I totally see what you're saying and this is not to discount the universal message within The Coin, but I also, when I read The Coin I read it very much as a Palestinian novel. I don't know whether this was intentionally done or not by you, but for example, the obsession with cleanliness that the character has, I kept thinking about ethnic cleansing as, and I don't know whether that was something that you intentionally did or whether this is just something that I read, but that was, that felt very clear to me, the parallels.

And I think there's this beautiful prickly tension in the novel between meaning and meaninglessness that the reader is continuously confronted with. And I think because of that, and also because of the novel's surrealism, it was, I think the only piece of fiction around Palestine that I was able to consume in the last two years because there was a sort of madness to the novel that really mirrored the madness of the times that we're living in now. I wonder how that sits with you?

YASMIN: You know, when it was published — so I wrote it before everything started, of course, and then it was published after — I had to have this moment where I was like, I had to reread the book and be like: is it still relevant? Has our reality changed so much that this book is now, does it stand on its own anymore? And because it's playing between meaning and meaninglessness, and because it's so much in the surreal, and because it's not taking place in Palestine, it was able to kind of float above the current affairs and not, you know, not sink in places where reality had changed so much that the book kind of loses its force.

SALEEM: Or sink into overexplaining, which I think The Coin does really well. It doesn't explain itself. It just is.

YASMIN: And my method of writing is like, I'm really in the subconscious. I'm not, I wasn't thinking about ethnic cleansing when I was thinking about cleaning, when I was writing about cleaning. I was thinking about my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, who are all clean freaks, you know. And maybe that has something to do with cleansing, or maybe, you know, what I came to understand is that cleaning is a method of exerting control when you have no control in your life and when you've been, when you've been displaced and moved. So, yeah, in terms of that, my, like, I think if you're true to your intuition, to yourself, to what's coming out of you, it will resonate with some big ideas, just because that's the nature of things.

But you don't have to start with a big idea.

SALEEM: I totally agree. And when I teach writing, this is what I always tell people, it's, so much of writing is about tuning into your subconscious and kind of getting out of your own way and then just trusting that your subconscious will guide you to where you need to go, or where the story is telling you and that you will kind of, or at least this is my approach, oftentimes I find that when I start writing on a, especially a novel, I'm, I just, I'm guided by certain questions that I don't know necessarily exactly what they are.

And it's only in the novel's completion that I understand the question that I was trying to answer, right at the very beginning.

YASMIN: I'm the same. I don't know what I'm doing in the beginning. I have no idea.

SALEEM: In retrospect, what are some of the questions that you think you were obsessed with when you were writing The Coin?

YASMIN: I think in retrospect I see that it's a novel of exile. It's about leaving your country and having your country still be a part of you and having to negotiate that impulse. That can be positive but can also be negative, can also hinder you. I think I was also dealing a lot with the body, sexuality also. You, what do you think, what do you think was the undercurrent for Guapa?

SALEEM: For Guapa I think it was the struggle to find your place in society. I think that's the question that I was trying to, to deal with.

YASMIN: The struggle to find your place in society that you're from.

SALEEM: Yes. And I think perhaps also, you know, reaching to the end of the novel, I think I kind of was left feeling the sense of actually the ambivalence about finding your place and being at peace with that ambivalence and maybe even embracing the out-of-placeness in some way. I think that's perhaps the question that I was dealing with with Guapa.

And with the second novel, I think it was about grief a lot of the time and about how to digest and incorporate history in your own psyche. How do you come to terms with all of history in your of present?

YASMIN: Did you do a lot of research for Floodlines, the second novel?

SALEEM: I did. It was very research focused. I think I spent two years doing intensive research. Everything ranging from Iraqi history over the last hundred years to Mesopotamian mythology, climate change, Iraqi art.

YASMIN: And were you moved by the desire for knowledge? Did you want to know all these things or did you want to support your writing with all these things?

SALEEM: I think it was a mixture of both. I started writing this, or researching this, in 2015. I was very anxious for a number of reasons, one of which was Guapa coming out And the anxiety took the form of this terror at the fact that something I had written was coming out and that once it was out there, there would be no way of taking it back in. It would be kind of there in history, forever archived there. And I became obsessed with the idea of archiving and the idea of history. And then I found one way that helped me deal with the anxiety was going back further in history, like to ancient Mesopotamian mythology, looking at archaeology. I found that very soothing because I think maybe it demonstrated how small I was. And also how little is left from then.

YASMIN: The immortality of the author is kind of a myth because so many authors get forgotten.

SALEEM: It's true. Yes. I guess I'd like to know, now that the book has come out for you, The Coin, it's been a year and have you had some time to reflect on the book's reception?

YASMIN: Well, it's had a very good reception. I mean, I won the Dylan Thomas Award, which is an incredible award for young authors. But also, I don't actually read the reviews. I just ask somebody else to read them and to tell me if there's anything bad in them. I try to not be too connected with the reception of my book. I try to stay in my bubble. If I could be an author writing my first book for the rest of my life, that would be a great place. I think it's a very raw and exciting place to be in. There's something innocent about it that I try to keep.

SALEEM: Yes. There's definitely a freshness when you still haven't fully been categorized, so to speak, as a certain kind of writer, writing in a certain kind of style and way, and you're just kind of discovering it for the first time. It's a really beautiful part of the process.

YASMIN: What's your process like? You said that you were researching for two years, but how did you survive for two years without writing?

SALEEM: Well, I was writing. I was writing, but I also had written a few short stories, one of which was the sci-fi story about Palestine for Palestine +100. I made a short film, so I was doing other things as well. And I'm always writing, you know, maybe it's the same for you, but so little of what I write ends up seeing the light of day. There's just so much nonsense that I'm just constantly churning out.

YASMIN: Yeah. The volume of what gets published versus what got typed is indescribable. There's no comparison.

I think probably like two words out of every page end up getting published.

SALEEM: I saw that you had mentioned a few times that The Coin was inspired or influenced by Clarice Lispector, who is one of my favorite writers as well. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

YASMIN: Well, she's a really wild writer. She writes without logic. She's wild. She sometimes doesn't finish her sentences. She's a very free writer. And I think one of the things that I want to do is to be a free writer. I think you too, that's probably one of the things that move you.

SALEEM: For sure. And I wonder whether how much also this has to do with being Palestinian and feeling like you need to be explaining yourself all the time.

YASMIN: Or how much that has to do with being Palestinian and finding a place where you can be free.

SALEEM: Mm-hmm.

YASMIN: You know, like writing can be very liberatory. You're living this fantasy life where you do everything, you think everything, you say everything, you express yourself fully. And for people whose fundamental experience has been of oppression, I think that's just such a gift. It's like a place where you can go and where your playing and you're happy. For me, on an emotional level, it's a very happy place.

SALEEM: That's really important. And I feel like that's something that I always struggle with myself, because I think it is for me. Reaching that place that you describe of this sense of freedom and happiness doesn't come naturally to me, even in fiction.

And it's something that I have to actively remind myself to do. Even when I'm writing fiction, sometimes it's very much rooted in this sense of trying to understand the world as it is now in a very real way. And I think I sometimes have to remind myself to have fun in the process as well and liberate myself.

I don't write much about Palestine in my fiction, perhaps for these reasons and perhaps also because I, as a Palestinian who grew up in the diaspora in Kuwait and then Amman, I feel a sense of disconnect or a sense of illegitimacy to be able to write about Palestine from the perspective of someone who's from el-Dakhel [the Inside]. You know what I mean?

YASMIN: That's funny because I feel illegitimacy because I'm from the Inside but I don't listen to it. Because I'm a citizen of Israel, so our experience is a little bit different. I feel like, oh, you know, I'm not the OG refugee camp girl. But, yeah, there's not one Palestinian. There's no pure Palestinian. Most Palestinians live outside of Palestine.

SALEEM: Yes, true. Very true. But I think when I have been kind of asked to write about Palestine in my fiction, it's often been in genres. So I did the sci-fi story, which I found very fun to do, even though the story is quite dark. But I found it very liberating to kind of be asked to write about a Palestine that's set in the future. And the other story, which will be coming out, I think, next year is a superhero story. And it was the same thing. It gave me permission a bit to be free.

YASMIN: It's like when you, you know, you’re playing Dungeons & Dragons or something. Like you're in fantasy world now.

SALEEM: Exactly. And the current preoccupations remain. So it's just that it's kind of, they get adapted to the new genre or the new structure that you're given.

YASMIN: Also, your writing is very realist. Your fiction writing is very realist. And I can see how that can be, like you're within the constraints of reality in a way.

SALEEM: Is your new novel, does it have surreal elements?

YASMIN: No, it doesn't have surreal elements. It's a realist novel. But you definitely get characters that are you know, very character characters. That would say things that probably you've never really heard people say before. So I think I took some liberty with doing more extreme characters rather than something very naturalist. It's a little bit exaggerated or comical or satirical.

SALEEM: Okay. Do you feel a certain amount of expectation in your writing currently because of The Coin?

YASMIN: Yeah, I do. But I try to not listen. If I listened, then I wouldn't be a novelist probably. So everything in my life set me against doing this. So, you know, if we are where we are, like we probably have some stubbornness and rebellion to us that can make us, you know, cover our ears and eyes and do what we want to do.

Was it hard for you to come out as a writer?

SALEEM: No, actually. So I was, it's only in retrospect that I realized, but I was always interested in stories and interested in writing. And in high school, I was a drama geek.

And so I would, and I was the one in drama class who was writing the plays and directing them. And I would act in them too, because, you know, you have to as part of the course. But I remember just reading Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and just kind of, and I was adapting it for the school play.

And I was just, I entered this magical zone. I remember sitting in the new McDonald's that had just opened up. It was the first McDonald's in Amman, smoking cigarettes and reading Midsummer Night's Dream and feeling like I had been transported into this other universe.

But I also have a very middle-class Palestinian Arab father who's a doctor and who, the idea of writing was never something that was ever considered. And I remember in my last year of high school, he basically pulled me out of drama class so I could focus on economics. And that was the point where I put writing away because I thought there's nothing, there's nothing practical in there.

It wasn't until the Arab Spring that I found myself returning to writing because it created a space for me. I was working in policy at the time and I was very involved in the kind of the protests and traveling and meeting people, etc. And I just found in the discussions that I was having, that there was just something missing. And fiction became the route for me to privately explore what was missing.

That's how I ended up writing Guapa.

YASMIN: Oh, interesting, because I used to work as a journalist and I also felt like something was missing from the narrative, you know? Like you read the newspaper and it's missing… it's like it's an object without shadow.

SALEEM: Exactly.

YASMIN: I was always into literature and fiction but I think that's what made me realize that, no, I need that other realm. In a way, I care more about the shadow than the object itself.

I have a question.

SALEEM: Yes.

YASMIN: Did you first come out as a writer or first come out as gay?

SALEEM: I first came out as gay. Yeah. And then the writing came afterwards.

YASMIN: So it must have been easier after that.

SALEEM: Oh, I didn't think about it in that way. It definitely was harder to come out as gay. But I think it was easier to maybe put aside the writer aspect. Because also, I'm not just a writer. I'm also someone who is very curious about the world. And I think I have a very strong sense of social justice. That was a big preoccupation for me, whether it was Palestine or the war in Iraq, they took up a lot of my thinking in my late teens, early 20s, before literature kind of came back into my life. I think that curiosity about the world was a big part of me. And then once I kind of went out and explored the world, and I worked a lot in war zones in my 20s, so that was my 20s experience, actually, I didn't go clubbing, etc. I felt like after I had experienced all of that, I needed to integrate it. And writing became kind of the way that I did that.

YASMIN: Yes, beautiful. Beautiful path.

SALEEM: But now I find myself in my 30s, in my late 30s. And now early 40s, I find myself kind of going back and re exploring all of the things that I didn't do so much of in my youth, like dancing, for example, that kind of thing is has come back for me.

SALEEM: How much how much does desire factor into your writing? Is that something that you think about? I know that the body is very big in in The Coin.

YASMIN: A lot, I think. It’s there in The Coin. It's there in my current novel. You kind of learn about yourself from when you look at your writing. You're like, Oh, I really care about sex. In a way that I didn't know I did. So yeah, it's important. Also, it's what I like to read. It's often what I liked to read when I was younger, and I still kind of like a little bit of a naughty scene in a novel.

How has that been for you?

SALEEM: It's been a journey for me, because I think when I was writing Guapa, I, in the early drafts, I skirted around the sex, and I would kind of cut a scene before the sex happened. And there was one friend of mine who had read a draft, an older British woman, actually, and she just said, Do you notice that you cut the scene before the sex happens? And that's all she asked. She didn't have an opinion. But that planted a seed inside of me. And I realized that I needed to confront that. And so in Guapa I ended up continuing the scene. And I found it very necessary. I think for me my writing is very — especially these days — is very much preoccupied with desire. I think that's partly because I was estranged from my own desires for such a long time, that I kind of wrote myself back to them, to kind of understand my relationship with them.

And I feel like I'm interested in characters who are estranged in general, whether it's from their desires, from their homelands, from their families. I think I'm very interested in exploring the impact of that distance, that estrangement, and how your character's expectations of the object or the setting that they're estranged from — their own expectations versus the reality is always interesting to me.

I think maybe Palestine also is part of that in a way, you know, having grown up with Palestine being such an important part of our family life, while also being very much an abstract part of our lives, because I only went there once as a child.

YASMIN: Yeah, the things that we, we know, but we don't. It's the mirage, like we know the mirage of something. About sex, I mean, we grew up in cultures where that is so taboo, that the fact that we can even get, you know, write one sentence about it, is quite miraculous, because we've had to completely learn it from A to Z. And sometimes we do it, but we don't know how to talk about it.

So learning how to talk about it is like a whole other thing, after getting over the taboo of doing, like, there's the taboo of doing it, and there's the taboo of talking about it and writing about it.

SALEEM: I would say that straight men in Arabic literature definitely have no problem writing about sex, maybe sometimes too much and without a good editor. But I think that, yes, desire by female characters, female writers, by queer writers and characters, I think that's much less explored. And it's something that, did you, you know, I think you asked me earlier on about what I was preoccupied with when I was writing Guapa and I feel like actually what I was trying to do, maybe not necessarily aware of it, was write myself into the literary canon, and kind of make space for myself in the literary canon, in all my own complexities, as someone who is kind of Arab, but like, maybe not, you know, but living and existing in a Western context, queer, etc. And I feel like by writing Guapa I kind of created that space for myself, which was liberating and allowed me then to focus on my other preoccupations.

YASMIN: You mean, you stamped your existence.

SALEEM: Exactly, yeah.

YASMIN: Yes, that's beautiful.

SALEEM: Do you feel that way at all?

YASMIN: I don't think it was something that I was going for, but it's something that I feel now, yeah, that somehow writing gave that to me. And I think also what's nice about writing the first novel, that is, as you say, like you feel like it somehow stamps your own personal existence. So you don't have to do that with the next novel, like you're already sort of, like you put all your cards on the table, you know.

So I think the next projects, you don't have to be as vulnerable or as declarative about who you are, you know. Like, I'm finding that in my novel now, I don't have to do politics and sex and class and, you know, I can just do something a little bit smaller, more quiet. Because there's something about the first novel that is like, it's a roar, you know, like it's a teenage roar.

SALEEM: And that's the beauty of debut novels. It's your first entryway into the world and kind of announcing yourself. And then once you've done that big announcement, you can then focus on other things.

YASMIN: Yeah, you can focus on your great-great-grandmother or something like this. I saw that one of your grandmothers is from Nazareth.

SALEEM: Yes, originally. Well, she grew up in Haifa, but yeah.

YASMIN: I have three grandparents from Nazareth and one from Haifa. . .

SALEEM: I think this was a great conversation. It was really nice to chat with you. As I said, I really love The Coin and I'm really glad I got the chance to pick your brain about it and to get to know you. And then we're looking forward to your next one.

YASMIN: Thank you, Saleem. This was really special. And we talked about lots of things that were close to my heart and I feel like you really understood me. So, thanks a lot.

I can't wait for Floodlines.

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