Youssef Rakha’s novel, The Dissenters, out now from Graywolf Press is a stunning, bewildering, and hypnotic exploration of one woman’s life lived against a tumultuous era in Egyptian history, one that artfully reckons with ideas of freedom, faith, family, gender, and trauma. In this interview, Justine Payton converses with Youssef Rakha about the inspiration behind The Dissenters; how the protagonist, Mouna, came to be; the importance of place and time in the novel; and what relevance the story holds for our current moment.
Justine Payton: This novel is mesmerizing, intimate, raw in its portrayal of humanity—what was the inspiration behind it? And while you write in both Arabic and English, why did you choose English for The Dissenters?
Youssef Rakha: There were two points of departure for this book. First, I wanted to write a novel about the 2011 revolution, the disappointments of its aftermath. It was already settled in my mind that I would do that in English. I’d always wanted to write a novel in English. At that point I felt I’d paid my dues to the Arabic language, and for all kinds of reasons both in my own life and the world outside me, this seemed like a good moment to make English happen. So, I started playing with a speculative fiction-type book about protest and regime change—some of the outtakes of that would become short stories—and I wrote two chapters. One was about the hero’s mother as a young woman. My agent at the time pointed to that chapter and suggested I consider making the whole book about that woman—the mother. Then something clicked. If I told the life story of a woman like my mother, I’d be able to review some sixty years of history before the revolution. I’d already been thinking about those sixty years because it was dawning on me that if I wanted to write about 2011 in a way that wasn’t just cheerleading the revolution, if I wanted to do more than activism through literature, I had to tell the whole story, starting with the British withdrawal from the nascent republic in 1956. And so, I set that chapter in 1956. I made one of the main traumas in the woman’s life happen the day the Suez Canal was nationalized, leading to war. And that was how aspects of my mother’s life and character became the book’s second point of departure.
The majority of your writing seems to be rooted in Cairo. What is the importance of place, and of Cairo specifically, in your writing? In The Dissenters?
When I started writing creatively again after a long hiatus in 2006, it was with hybrid essays about Arab cities: Beirut, Tunis, etc. This was nonfiction, but it incorporated narrative—autofiction—and poetry as well as journalism, and it involved lots of research into the history and geography of those places. It was a way to deliberately avoid the hegemony of the novel that was overtaking the Arabic literary scene at the time, which I resented. After a while, though, I realized that in writing about all those cities I was really dealing with Cairo—another thing I’d been avoiding, Cairo as a topic, though not consciously—because it was almost like describing something by pointing out what it isn’t: “The coffee tastes good in Beirut” really meant “The coffee tastes terrible in Cairo” etc. As soon as I realized this was what was happening, I resolved to write what would become The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, my first large-scale project, an imaginative Cairo book that I modelled on the Arabic canon and for a while at first refused to describe as a novel… Anyway, for that reason, and because Cairo looms so large in all my work, I used to think I was a place writer. Now I tend to believe time is more important than place in my work—historical as well as experiential time—but that doesn’t mean that Cairo isn’t an absolutely overarching part of everything I do, whether as the inspirational setting of a fascinating moment in Arab Muslim history—the 1990s to the 2020s—or as a particular configuration of emotions. The Dissenters is as much about Cairo as anything.
You’ve written in the “Acknowledgements” that, “Before I started working on [The Dissenters], I had never imagined I could work that way with a female character.” What was this process like? How did writing so intimately about a female character transform you as a writer?
It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It was more than just liberating. On the one hand I felt tremendous relief that I managed to embody something I’d always felt beholden to but hadn’t known how to be. On the other hand, it made everything real: all that I’d thought or said about the patriarchy and the psyche and the fluidity of gender even in the most gender role-abiding contexts became real in a way it hadn’t been before. It was a confirmation of my long-held conviction that we’re humans first, all of us: that there is no reason we can’t in our minds teleport not just into a different gender but into the opposite biological sex. I remain humble, of course. If a woman were to read the book and say you got it all wrong, there would be nothing for me to do but look down. But I would still cling to the idea that, well, it felt right, it felt as right as it could feel, and maybe individual women are as different from each other as they are from a man like me.
Time also feels like a character in this novel, with the narrative moving through past, present and future in a somewhat hypnotic, fluid way. How did you approach writing this? Did the story’s conception come to you in a nonlinear way, or did that approach develop later on in the writing process?
Both! It was always nonlinear, teetering on the edge of temporal chaos, but in the first version of the book the two timelines were kept in relatively discrete, separate chunks, not really intersecting the way they do now. Turning them into alternate passages that later merge and fuse was the idea of my ingenious editor, Anni Liu. I didn’t believe it would work at first but I promised to try it out and once I did, I was astonished by how well it did. I think that change may have simplified or clarified the temporal structure a little actually. But here’s the thing. A relatively recent epiphany in my literary life was when I realized that in all of my writing one of the things I’m always trying to do—even unconsciously—is to give a sense of what it’s like to be in time, to subjectively inhabit time, and in reality, of course that’s never a linear or straightforward experience. In my work the timelines are there underneath the surface, because I don’t want to let go of the power and beauty of storytelling, but the writing, the way the text is propelled forward, will follow its own atemporal trajectory.
Of course, this novel is beautifully written in the epistolary form as well, through long letters that Nour is writing to his sister, Shimo. Why did you choose this form to tell this story? Did it ever cross your mind what Shimo would think, or how she would respond, to reading them? (I admit, it was something I thought about!)
The novel wasn’t always so explicitly epistolary, even though Nour’s words were always addressed to Shimo, a Shimo. And Shimo is the only American thing in the novel! But I think in this respect I more or less totally identify with Nour. I don’t actually have any brothers or sisters, it’s something I look to with envy and awe, and so it was just an incredible and delightful challenge to imagine the dynamic that governs the way they talk to each other. Of course, even if you’re only hearing one side of a conversation, you still get a sense of the other side. Shimo’s actual comeback is a book I can imagine, I can’t imagine writing it—at least not yet—but I can imagine it, but you see the letter is a metaphor for the rite Nour is performing in the whole book: to tell Shimo Mouna’s story in order to reconcile them, and himself to his own life and country. Another thing to add is that the original sense of the Arabic word for “book”, kitab, means “letter”: All canonical books in Arabic are actually addressed to a friend or a patron, just like letters. That’s a very moving metaphor for me because when I write, it’s always to someone anyway. In this case, as Nour, I’m writing to my sister, who’s an integral part of the whole project.
There are many dark moments in The Dissenters—the genital cutting that Mouna endures, the suicides of the “Jumpers,” Amin’s experience in jail, etc. Was this a conscious decision—to not shy away from these difficult, often horrific, yet all-too-real occurrences?
Absolutely. The darkness is essential. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have the rawness you so kindly speak of, the visceral sense of what it’s like to live through history. I mean what would the Iliad be without the Trojan War, you know. I think the trick is for the horror to remain bearable, just bearable, so that the beauty and more importantly the very special kind of knowledge that literature imparts aren’t overshadowed by feelings the pain. It’s a delicate balance, but I wouldn’t dream of keeping something out because it is dark.
You live in Cairo with your family. What vision or dreams do you have for Cairo, for Egypt? How has the country’s past as revealed in The Dissenters shaped its present, its future?
I could say all the usual things—more political freedom and rule of law, a stronger economy, a more inclusive society—but that would be pretending I didn’t live through all that I wrote about in The Dissenters! I mean I now know how difficult, how very dangerous bringing about that kind of change in a country like Egypt really is and, what’s worse, I know those aims are simply impossible under the current global system. It’s not simply a matter of decisions or reforms to be made within the country itself, although of course there is room for that… Actually my biggest hope is that Cairo, the Cairo I grew up in—even with all its problems—will survive in a recognizable form. Right now, the whole orientation is toward new developments and what you might call gentrification. There have been encroachments on historic parts of the city that are very disturbing. The middle class especially is struggling with incredible inflation now that the local currency has been floated. My dream is that we’ll get past this economic bottleneck in my lifetime, that there will be enough prosperity, goodwill, and calm for political and social freedoms to take root. But my vision—the only possible vision—is a renewed sense of cultural identity, and that’s not restricted to Cairo or Egypt but extends to the whole Arab Muslim world. We need a new, more efficient and more confident way of being in the modern world. All these questions are dealt with in my upcoming book of essays, Postmuslim.
Lastly, I finished reading The Dissenters amidst the chaos of the 2024 US presidential election, and it was easy to draw parallels—fanaticism, corruption, greed, ego, power, patriarchy. As we live through times that are tumultuous, that test the bounds of justice and equality, what role does art have? What responsibility, if any, do writers have to speak to the times in which they are living?
Many seem to believe the responsibility of the writer is to speak directly to political issues, making the right ethical statements at the right time and so on. Of course, writers can and do do that outside of their work, but I don’t believe it’s what they’re there for. Writers are there to reconstitute reality in a way that generates questions, not to moralize or lay down the law. Real, deep, serious questions into and across reality are the writer’s responsibility, and that necessarily goes beyond expressing moral outrage at individuals or actions that always turn out to be the usual order of things. I feel a writer is accountable to their own experience, including the contradictions and discontents of the value system to which they subscribe—how dreams of liberation turn into nightmares, for example, and how “democracy” reduces to money and populism. You step back from a scene that you’ve been part of and look as hard and as dispassionately as you can at what’s there, refusing to acknowledge anything that doesn’t hold together however attached to that thing you may be. Then you mix it all up in a way that shows what holds, what doesn’t hold, and especially the space between them. Art is ambiguity. That’s how it can be generative and nurturing.
Justine Payton is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington where she is a recipient of the Philip Gerard Graduate Fellowship and the Bernice Kert Fellowship in Creative Writing. She has been published or has work forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Terrain.org, CALYX Journal, Isele Magazine, The Masters Review, and others. She is currently the managing editor of ONLY POEMS, an editor for Ecotone, and a guest editor for The Masters Review and CRAFT.
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of the novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles, which are available in English, and Paulo, which was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award. The Dissenters is his first novel to be written in English. He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 event in 2010, and his work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Bomb, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Quarterly, GQ Middle East, Guernica, Internazionale, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times.