Essayists From The United States

"All of my books have focused on characters that are displaced and having to start over in some place new, and how the new landscape shapes the person you are and the person you become. (2019)"

"When you move into a new place, it does involve a refashioning of the self. We derive our sense of identity at least partly in relation to the landscape around us, in which we’ve grown up..…"

"(about The Other Americans) It’s a book that really questions how we remember one another on a personal level, but also on a public level. You can take an event, like the Iraq war – which figures in the book – and people even today are shaping it and remembering it and contextualizing it in very different ways depending on their views. So history itself is an argument, and we are still litigating it many different ways. (2019)"

"There’s a disconnect between how people imagine their families and how families are in real life."

"They’re supposed to be the people who support you, who love you no matter what, and the reality is they’re the first people who teach you to cast doubt on yourself, they’re the first people who sometimes don’t have your back…"

"He needed someone to trustworthy to deal with Faten, and he knew Raouf would not let him down."

"A bit salty dear," she said. Faten smiled, grateful for the truth."

"Better than the Moroccans themselves."

"We're so blinded by our love of the West that we're willing to give them our brightest instead of keeping them here where we need them."

"She did not notice the fading afternoon light that lengthened the shadows behind her, framing her body like the arches of a shrine."

"White Americans take that for granted in that they just have to turn on the TV or open the newspaper to see that. That isn’t something that everyone has, so these kinds of stories can be very affirming. As far as representation, it’s an interesting word. It conjures up some kind of necessity. For me, I write what I know. I’m Moroccan so I write Moroccan characters. I write in the specific, not with the burden of representing an entire Moroccan immigrant experience, but just those of my often very-flawed characters. I write in their specificity, with their unresolved conflicts and flaws, and that is how I expect to have any hope of reaching readers and showing some kind of truth that resonates with them. (2019)"

"He couldn't understand these foreigners. They could go to a nice hotel, have a clean bed, go to the beach or the pool, and here they were in the worst part of town, looking around for something exotic."

"Lucky Aziz. He curses his own luck."

"I had been pushed further and further into a fate from which no escape or reprieve seemed possible. And so there came a moment when I stopped struggling, when I decided that I would cease making any more plans to return to the old days. I made up my mind to look upon the present as exactly what it was: it was all I had. (p232)"

"Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me-that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe. I had to stop playing a part in my own misery. I had to save my own life. (p129)"

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m moved by voices that ring so true that they make me feel kinship with characters who are completely different from me. As I get older, I also find myself moved by depictions of friendship and kindness, which are so much harder to execute convincingly on the page than cruelty or betrayal."

"Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies. (p122)"

"life should not be traded for gold (p87)"

"in those days, I fed my hopes of freedom in whichever way I could, without realizing that I was only hooking myself to different lures. (p88)"

"She had to do something for her future—today."

"But, he tried to tell himself, maybe this was just a fleeting interest, maybe it would all go away."

"Nothing new has ever happened to a son of Adam, she said. Everything has already been lived and everything has already been told. If only we listened to the stories. (p52)"

"He warned me that trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it. (p58)"

"I think of history as a dialogue with the present, so whenever I’m puzzled by the turn of current events — which is all too often these days — I look to the past for context."

"When I started writing, it was a way to understand my own adolescence, and what came out was a revelation about my own teenage years..."

"Nonfiction is supposed to drive home a point. In fiction, you need more nuance, buried in layers. There is character development and plot, and that switch can be tricky. I really like writing short stories, and I wish they were more popular..."

"Nonreaders. Especially Nonreaders of Color. Which I didn’t even realize until so many of them started contacting me. I write for them because I think it’s important to read, and yet I also understand that when you’ve never really seen yourself if the type of stuff you’re assigned, reading seems kinda wack [sic]. So I wanna hook the reluctants and get them started reading for enjoyment.…"

"The dialogue. I love writing dialogue and using that particular element of narrative to draw out the heart of a story because storytelling as a discipline really began with speech—stories orally passed down, generation to generation. Dialogue is just my most favorite thing. In all the stuff I’ve written actually."

"A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too. (p5)"

"I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it. (p8)"

"(What books would you recommend for somebody who wants to know more about Morocco?) The work of Mohamed Choukri, which I discovered when I was 15, was a revelation. His first novel, “Al-Khubz al-Hafi,” loosely based on his childhood and adolescence, was banned by the Moroccan government, but copies were making the rounds in my high school in Rabat. There’s also a fascinating book he wrote about his troubled and troubling friendship with Paul Bowles, which Telegram Books recently issued in English as “In Tangier.” Another writer I came across in my teens, and who was a huge influence on me, was the late, great Fatema Mernissi, the feminist scholar and sociologist. Several of her books appear in English, including “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam” and “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.”"

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...Ottessa Moshfegh’s razor-sharp short stories “Homesick for Another World”"

"What in effect looks like clear and directed writing took much chaos and anxiety. I felt like I was losing my mind toward the end."

"In order to write well, I need to have the ability to be honest with myself without it causing pain. When I’m really sad, honesty hurts, and I find myself not going to interesting places in my work. I guess you can be sad and strong at the same time. Writing requires strength, discipline, and a tolerance for loneliness. The longer I have a partner, the more loneliness I want, because I’ve lost it. But loneliness is also excruciating unless I’m writing. Yet you can only write so many hours in a day, and it takes a lot of effort to fill the void of not writing."

"Thinking abstractly about depression is so easy, but the experience of it is more like being in touch with something very, very deep that is a necessary part of the human experience. It keeps us grounded in our mortality. Depression is an intolerance to life, but it can also be profound. Maybe the trouble is that we don’t respect it enough…"

"The thing that is exciting about any project or any book is that you have to push yourself, you have to push beyond what makes you comfortable."

"Recently the things that I’ve enjoyed reading are writers from Africa, like Maaza Mengiste, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These are people who are doing brilliantly well I think, and in both of those cases, they’ve just published their second novels. So very early in their writing careers."

"There is no war that does not impact the lives of children, so children and what happens to them in migration or conflict are important to me, and we generally don’t hear enough about it. And it’s difficult because they don’t know yet how to express their perspectives very well, so I’m interested in that, how their vocabulary doesn’t yet capture what they are seeing and feeling. As a writer, that becomes an interesting vehicle through which to tell a story."

"I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed."

"I think what writing should be at its essence is a creative expression, it should be informed by the needs of the story, by the dictates of your characters…I feel like I can write any character I want—an African, a European, a writer can do anything, it just has to feel true to the story."

"One challenge for me is in remembering what the process of writing the novel was like. For me, it’s a bit like childbirth (or so I hear) in that one forgets the pain as soon as it’s over…"

"What is profound about fiction is that it creates a place where we can imagine the possible futures of these kinds of movements. Those are the kinds of questions we have to ask as writers."

"I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths."

"What is war? You send soldiers out and, although nobody wants to say it, you know a certain number will be killed, and you hope there will be fewer than the casualties on the other side. War is dealing with human beings as objects. (2017)"

"Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward."

"It was not until a revolution tore my country apart that I began to understand how war could render decent people unrecognisable. Only when I had felt real terror did I begin to comprehend the many ways that conflict can devour us without spilling a drop of blood. (2020)"

"Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy."

"in many ways, Ethiopia is an oral culture., I spent a lot of time listening to stories and histories told around dinner tables or in the sitting room. The stories my grandfather would tell were often about the Italo-Ethiopian wars, both the first and the second, and also life lessons. Those stories of my grandfather's really informed how I viewed-history, how I viewed Ethiopia; what it meant to be Ethiopian. Those were my books, the stories that I learned. When I think back to the stories that I would hear, especially when my parents would tell stories, that cadence in which they told them, and the momentum they had while telling it, that's something I am always trying to emulate in my writing. So I count them as an influence as much as anything that I've read."

"part of what I’ve realized with this [second] book is that creativity is always about running against and into yourself. In every way. (2017)"

"What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else."