0:02

This is Poured Over, a show

0:04

about stories presented by the booksellers of Barnes

0:06

& Noble. I'm

0:12

Ewa Messer. I'm the producer and

0:14

host of Poured Over, and Omar Alacad

0:16

has been on my radar since

0:18

2017, and American War came out. And

0:21

we're seeing sort of a

0:23

resurgence in sales for this dystopian novel

0:25

set in the US in, well,

0:27

let's call it the edge of this

0:29

century, beginning of next. And

0:31

he followed it with another novel

0:33

called What Strange Paradise in 2020 -2021. We

0:35

were trying to remember before we started

0:37

taping. And of course, it was

0:39

that weird moment in world history where

0:41

everything kind of blurs together. And

0:44

now we also have an essay collection. One

0:46

day, everyone will have been against this. And

0:48

we're going to sit down and actually have

0:50

sort of a body of work conversation because

0:52

Omar's worked as a journalist. He's now written

0:54

novels. He's also obviously working as an essayist. And

0:57

there's a lot of overlap,

0:59

but also, well,

1:02

you know, we are talking different genres. And I

1:04

am really excited to have this conversation with you,

1:06

Omar. Thank you so much for making the time. It's

1:09

my pleasure. Thank you for having me. So

1:11

I want to go back to American War because I

1:13

remember when I got a galley of Sunny Mata dropped it

1:16

in the mail to me because, you know, I'm one of those

1:18

booksellers where occasionally you would get mail from Sunny Mata. And it

1:20

was really exciting because he was the head of Knopf and he

1:22

had great taste. And you were like, oh, what is this? And

1:24

I tore through it. in a weekend. And

1:28

then I was kind of like, well, who's

1:30

this guy writing this book set in an

1:32

America I don't quite recognize, but

1:34

could happen. Featuring

1:36

this young woman who I adore, but then

1:38

does a thing where I'm like, there was

1:40

a lot of hmm. And I

1:43

want to go back. You

1:45

were still working as a journalist, I think, full

1:47

time when you were writing American War. Yeah, I

1:49

was. Yeah, I'd been working for the better

1:51

part of a decade. I mean, that

1:54

job I had This newspaper

1:56

in Canada is the only real job

1:58

I've ever had. I've been otherwise unemployed. Do

2:01

we call it unemployed? I mean, you've

2:03

been writing books. That's not technical unemployment,

2:05

my friend. What is going on here?

2:07

What are we talking about? I feel

2:09

like if you're not getting a set

2:11

paycheck every other Friday, then

2:13

you have some claim to

2:15

the term unemployed. But

2:17

yeah, mean, I'd written three

2:19

novels during my time.

2:21

as a journalist, I wrote

2:24

them in my spare

2:26

time. And they were horrible

2:28

and they'll never see the light of day.

2:31

And then I wrote American War. And

2:33

American War was also going to sit on my

2:35

hard drive until I had a bad day at work.

2:37

I had a day where I felt like I

2:39

was just rewriting press releases. And so

2:41

I shipped it off to a literary

2:43

agent. She decided to represent me

2:45

and three months later, she sent

2:47

the manuscript to Sunny right away. She

2:50

was sort of, for obvious reasons, her first

2:52

choice. And we heard nothing for three

2:54

months, and then we get an email that

2:56

just says, I like it or something

2:58

like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's how

3:00

sunny functions. He was not a man

3:02

of many words. And we sold it in

3:04

the fall of 2015, I guess it

3:06

was. Okay, so 2015, pubbed

3:08

in March of 17, if I

3:10

remember. April. April,

3:13

okay. So 2017, though, so it's

3:15

two years before it sees the light

3:17

of day, which makes me feel

3:19

like there'd been some rewrite. I mean,

3:21

you are a Canadian. You

3:23

do decide to set this

3:25

novel in the American South. We're

3:27

looking at a world where

3:29

climate change is very, very real,

3:31

where there has been a

3:33

literal civil war. There is

3:36

a refugee camp of

3:38

the kind that we have

3:40

read about overseas, but

3:42

not experienced necessarily in the

3:44

US. All of

3:46

these elements, and I feel like

3:48

part of it has come

3:50

out of your journalism, but also

3:53

part of it just comes

3:55

out of asking questions that maybe

3:57

an insider wouldn't, like

3:59

you kind of have the ultimate outsider

4:01

experience, yeah? Yeah, I

4:03

mean, I had started writing

4:05

this thing, and I knew

4:07

in an abstract sense what

4:09

I was writing about, but

4:11

nothing more than that. And

4:14

at the time, I was

4:16

working as a US correspondent

4:18

for a non -US paper. But

4:21

it wasn't like my paper was on the other side

4:23

of the planet. It was in Canada. So

4:25

it was a very weird sort

4:27

of, like, distance. Because at

4:29

once it's very close, but also very far

4:31

away. In journalism we have

4:33

this phrase called M -Copy. And

4:35

M -Copy is basically the background paragraphs that

4:37

you put in a story. Just explain

4:39

how we got to this place. And

4:42

when you're writing about the US for

4:44

a Canadian audience, a lot of

4:46

the M -Copy just boils down to, like, No,

4:49

this is how it works down here, like

4:51

that really, you know, like

4:53

healthcare stories, gun violence stories.

4:56

And so I was in that mode of assessing

4:58

the place that I was now living in. But

5:00

yeah, I ended up, I had been bugging

5:02

the foreign editor to let me go down

5:04

to Louisiana and do a story about land

5:06

loss in southern Louisiana. It's the

5:08

site of one of the worst climate change disasters

5:11

on the continent. And it was

5:13

only when I got there that I

5:15

realized I needed to start this book here.

5:17

because my central trick as a writer

5:19

is not particularly clever, it's inversion. I

5:21

take things that are headed this way and I make them

5:23

go that way. And

5:25

in a book that's so concerned with things

5:27

that the United States had done to the

5:30

world, it felt fitting to start

5:32

it in a place where the world

5:34

was doing something to the United States.

5:36

So that's how that sort of came

5:38

about. And then following that, there were

5:40

so many trips to the southern states,

5:42

either for research or for other assignments.

5:45

And that's how I sort of ended up getting

5:47

the topography that I warped to

5:49

such a grotesque extent in the

5:52

novel. But

5:54

that inversion, I mean, I

5:56

remember when American War hit my desk

5:58

and I was thinking, you know, everything

6:01

goes in phases, right? All novels, we're

6:03

having a dystopian moment. You can say it's

6:05

related to the Hunger Games. You can

6:07

say it's related to the Handmaid's Tale. You

6:09

can say it's related to any number

6:11

of things. We're selling 1984 again, you know.

6:14

And it's really kind of fascinating as

6:16

a bookseller to see all of these things

6:18

come back through. But if I think

6:20

back to 2017, American

6:22

War really did stand out. We

6:24

were having kind of a moment where

6:26

it was like, oh, wait. Wait

6:29

a minute. OK. We're

6:33

fast -forwarding ahead a

6:35

century. We've got

6:37

this sort of unnamed narrator who's

6:39

explaining to us that really

6:41

wild, terrible things have happened. There's been a

6:43

plague. There's been a separation. He's

6:45

been sent to exile in Alaska

6:48

and become a historian as a result

6:50

of all of this. And I

6:52

remember thinking, okay, I'm in, but where

6:54

are we going and what's happening? And

6:57

then you give us this

6:59

cast, this family. And

7:02

I really want to start with them

7:04

because I had not quite met a

7:06

family like this before. And

7:08

I think you might not have in

7:10

the earlier books that are sitting in

7:12

a drawer somewhere that will never see

7:14

the light of day. Yeah,

7:16

I mean, one of the things

7:18

that I would find time and time

7:21

again in this part of the world,

7:23

and particularly when I would go to

7:25

the south, is that I

7:27

would meet a certain kind of

7:29

person. I would meet a person

7:31

who was incredibly hospitable, would give

7:33

you the shirt off their backs.

7:36

but also tied to

7:38

some really stubborn

7:40

traditions. Some of them good, some

7:42

of them horrible, and God help you if you try to

7:44

dissuade them from any of it. And

7:47

honestly, it reminded me of the old

7:49

country. It reminded me of growing up

7:51

in the Arab world, where this sense

7:53

of hospitality is greater than I've ever

7:55

seen at anywhere else in the world.

7:57

Also, there's some really old traditions, some

7:59

of them good, some of them horrible,

8:01

and God help you if you try

8:03

to argue against any of it. And

8:05

so this family comes out

8:07

of this strange sense of echoes

8:10

in terms of who I'd

8:12

grown up with, who I was

8:14

seeing now. Looking

8:16

back on it, I think I

8:18

was interested in the family dynamic because

8:20

I think of the family dynamic

8:22

as a proxy for trust. What

8:26

are your circles of trust? What do they

8:28

look like? And to me,

8:30

a lot of this novel is about

8:32

the central character's circle of trust. When

8:34

we first meets her at Chestnut, she's

8:36

a small child, and her

8:39

circle of trust is endless. She

8:41

hasn't been damaged in such a way as

8:43

to change that. She believes everything everyone tells

8:45

her about the world, and it just so

8:47

happens that for the first part of her

8:50

life, like many children, everyone

8:52

is her family. Her family is the

8:54

entirety of the universe. It's the

8:56

star she orbits. And

8:58

then as she grows older and

9:00

as she's subjected to these injustices, as

9:02

she has to live through the aftermath of

9:04

a war, every

9:07

new piece of damage shrinks

9:09

that circle of trust

9:11

until finally it only encompasses

9:13

her sense of revenge.

9:15

That's the only thing she

9:17

can trust anymore. And

9:19

even that is shaky towards the end.

9:22

So that's how I was thinking about that

9:24

family when I first sort of started writing

9:26

them. And then they went off

9:28

in their own directions and particularly the relationship

9:30

between the two sisters. and

9:32

then much later on the relationship between the brother

9:34

and the sister. All of those

9:36

things, I mean, it's the reason you

9:39

write is for that serendipity value where the characters

9:41

get up and tell you, no, no, you have

9:43

no idea what the hell you're talking about. We

9:45

need to go in this direction. And that's

9:47

a lot of what happened there. If I remember

9:49

correctly, too, there was quite a lot of

9:52

rewriting that happened with American War. There was a

9:54

lot of structural change. And can we talk

9:56

about that for a second? Because this book is

9:58

so seamless. And I really

10:00

am rereading it recently, and it had

10:02

been a number of years, obviously, since

10:04

I'd read it. But it was familiar

10:06

and unfamiliar at the same time. The

10:08

pacing is really terrific. And it's also

10:10

very, obviously, it's very disconcerting. There are

10:12

moments where I'm just like, oh,

10:14

okay, I'm in, I'm in, I'm

10:16

here. But at the same time, I

10:19

hadn't remembered every detail. So there

10:21

was quite a lot that felt like

10:23

I was reading it for the

10:25

first time. But I want to just

10:27

talk about structuring Because

10:29

you're cutting back and

10:31

forth between time. You're also

10:33

cutting back and forth

10:36

between place. There has

10:38

to be an internal map for you. There

10:40

was an external map for

10:42

me. I drew maps of the

10:45

central locations that this book

10:47

takes place in. In fact, at

10:49

the time, I had this

10:51

giant wall map of the US

10:53

that I had sort of

10:55

shaded in on my wall. And

10:57

it looks similar to the

10:59

map that you first see when

11:01

you open the book. And

11:03

what I didn't realize for a very long time is at

11:05

the time I was still working as a journalist, we

11:07

would do these video hits where I would sit on

11:09

my computer. And the

11:12

way the computer was facing, you could see the map

11:14

in the background. So there's these

11:16

videos on my newspaper's website where it's

11:18

just me talking. And behind me,

11:20

there's a map with a bunch of posted

11:22

notes that say suicide bombing here or whatever. It's

11:25

not a great look. In

11:28

between the chapters in the book,

11:30

there are these fake historical documents,

11:32

letters from governors and transcripts of

11:34

speeches. Originally, I wasn't

11:36

going to put that in the book.

11:38

I was writing these things as a

11:40

way to keep track of all the

11:43

moving parts of this world because I

11:45

come from a journalism background. I

11:47

spent a lot of my

11:49

time with documentation, with paperwork.

11:52

It was only after

11:54

a few drafts that

11:56

it occurred to me that, or

11:58

maybe later on in the writing process, it

12:01

occurred to me that if I had

12:03

inserted these into the text, they would give

12:05

it an element of texture that I

12:07

wouldn't be able to achieve with just a

12:09

straightforward narrative. So the

12:11

one I always go back to

12:14

is the letter from the

12:16

detainee at Sugarloaf, which is an

12:18

internment camp that is very

12:20

similar to, or prison camp, I

12:22

suppose, that's very similar to

12:24

Guantanamo Bay. And this thing has

12:26

been censored, so when you look at it on

12:28

the page, there's black lines everywhere. And

12:30

when Dion Graham reads the audiobook,

12:32

he just says, redacted, redacted, redacted.

12:35

And the funny thing about that is that Penguin Random

12:37

House actually screwed up some of the redactions, and

12:40

they accidentally unredacted some of the

12:42

stuff. And I thought this is

12:44

so fitting, given my experience with governments and

12:46

censorship, that we're going to keep it this

12:48

way. So there's some accidentally unredacted stuff, but

12:50

it was all... Once it came in to

12:52

the book, it felt like the book needed

12:54

to be that, but early on it was

12:57

just a straightforward narrative and I was just

12:59

doing these things to keep track internally. I'm

13:01

really glad they're in there.

13:03

I appreciate the external context. For

13:06

me, it's world -building. We talk about

13:08

world -building constantly as something that belongs

13:11

only to science fiction and fantasy

13:13

and robots and outer space and all

13:15

of this kind of thing. Obviously,

13:17

American War is a dystopian and that

13:19

gives it gives you and it

13:21

more leeway to be a complete world,

13:24

but also it's very easy to

13:26

get yanked out of a world. And

13:29

I felt

13:31

completely grounded, even

13:33

when I was uncomfortable, I felt completely

13:35

grounded in this space and I understood

13:37

what it smelled like and I understand

13:39

what the people looked like and how

13:41

they were dressed and how they were

13:43

moving their bodies in space, you know,

13:45

how they were moving in the world.

13:48

And I still didn't

13:50

want to leave, but I

13:52

still really needed to understand how

13:54

we got there. And

13:57

I mean, I read fiction

13:59

to understand a larger context

14:01

about time, sometimes space,

14:03

mostly time, mostly

14:05

the passage of historical

14:07

periods. So the idea

14:10

that we can take this and as

14:12

you say, invert it and kick ourselves into

14:14

the future and say, well, look where

14:16

we got ourselves. And yet

14:18

have it feel like Oh, I get

14:20

this. I recognize this. This

14:23

feels like Tuesday. Yeah,

14:26

I mean, I think for me, the

14:29

central trick, again, is this kind

14:31

of inversion, right? And so I

14:33

was taking the things that had

14:35

happened to people and are happening

14:37

to people, and I was casting

14:40

them in the heart of the

14:42

empire. And so, you know, I

14:44

often say that if I'd written this book a hundred years

14:46

earlier, I would have had to call it British War. because

14:48

the point wasn't to set it in the US, the point

14:50

was to set it in the heart of the superpower. And

14:53

it's funny because I can't generally go

14:55

back and read my own writing, I

14:57

don't. And so I haven't gone back

14:59

to American War and now it's been

15:01

a decade since I wrote this theme.

15:04

And it's interesting to me because, A,

15:07

I think it's the best story

15:09

I've ever written. Like, I think what's

15:11

strange paradise on a line level, the

15:14

sentences are better, but I think American

15:16

War is a better story. But it's

15:18

sort of when I think within Penguin

15:20

Random House, when this book first shows

15:22

up, and obviously they have no idea

15:24

who the hell I am, my agent

15:26

had sold Sunny One manuscript in 40

15:28

years. This was the second manuscript. So

15:31

there's a sense of just like who

15:33

the hell is this guy. But

15:35

there was also a sense of like, oh, this

15:37

might be the next Hunger Games. Like this thing

15:39

might sell millions of copies. And obviously he never

15:41

did that. But

15:43

what's interesting to me is that it

15:46

never had this pop. Like,

15:48

you know, my new book showed up on the

15:50

New York Times bestseller this first week and we'll

15:52

find out very shortly whether it drops off the

15:54

face of the earth after that or not. American

15:57

War never did that, but it

15:59

also never kind of went away. There

16:01

was always like this weird,

16:03

like, trickle of relevancy because

16:05

of the various derangements of

16:08

this country echoing back to

16:10

the book. And so to

16:12

this day, It just

16:14

kind of chugs along. It's

16:16

sort of like that 1984 effect,

16:18

but like many orders of magnitude

16:20

less. Like where it's

16:22

just like it doesn't not feel relevant

16:24

to some facet of what's happening in

16:26

this country. I also

16:29

got really attached to Surat. I

16:31

got really attached to her. And

16:33

obviously her arc is her arc.

16:35

And I wasn't surprised to be

16:37

attached to her, but I am.

16:39

And also I'm dancing around spoilers

16:42

as I always do, but. I

16:44

got really attached to her and

16:46

I was really invested in seeing

16:48

what happened. And again, I understand

16:50

the art. It's

16:52

all very organic. It

16:54

is plain as day in many

16:56

ways, but I did not want

16:58

to let go of her. And

17:02

I don't think anyone else

17:04

in her orbit knew really what

17:06

to do with her, though.

17:08

I mean, she really like... I've

17:10

seen comparisons sort of made

17:12

to Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger

17:14

Games, but Sarat's slightly different. I

17:17

mean, there's a similar thread,

17:19

obviously, but Sarat really is

17:21

her own person. And

17:23

to be that invested for

17:26

me in a character like

17:28

that is a mark of

17:30

high praise. You've had to

17:32

let that character go and

17:35

let people decide what they

17:37

were going to... think and

17:39

feel and respond to. Yeah,

17:42

I mean, I think more than any other

17:44

character I've written in any of the novels or

17:46

any of the short stories, she's the one

17:48

who still is with me the most. I don't

17:50

like her, but I love her dearly. I

17:52

don't think that she would like me if we

17:54

ever met. I was

17:56

at this university book club with

17:58

a bunch of professors. One

18:00

of them started yelling at me for what

18:03

she perceived as me trying to get

18:05

people to sympathize with terrorists or something

18:07

like that. And I found

18:09

that fascinating just conceptually of

18:11

what it said about this

18:13

person's expectations of books and

18:15

of storytelling in general. But

18:18

first of all, I don't think there's

18:20

anybody in American War, there's any character

18:22

in that book that you can pledge

18:24

some kind of allegiance to and not

18:26

assume an immediate and somewhat crippling moral

18:28

debt. And

18:32

I think that's true of

18:34

every moment of living through a

18:36

conflict that I've ever witnessed

18:38

in my life. This is what

18:41

the ugliness of the world

18:43

does to people generally. But Surat

18:45

to me, I think, is

18:47

someone who, by the

18:49

end of her life, has

18:52

become a person that, in

18:54

our way of thinking about the world,

18:56

we would only think of at the finish

18:58

line. And it was very,

19:00

very important to me, in fact, it became

19:02

the most important thing about this book, to

19:04

show the rest of that race, to

19:06

show how somebody ends up at that

19:08

destination. And that became the

19:10

thrust of the book for me, was

19:13

to take this human being that when we first

19:15

meet her, is like any

19:17

child you would meet,

19:19

not possessed of that fundamental

19:21

dishonesty of adulthood, right? And

19:23

to take her through the world and show

19:26

how she becomes the person she becomes. That

19:28

ended up consuming me in

19:30

terms of the writing. And

19:33

to this day, when I think of that

19:35

book, I think of Surat and everything else is

19:37

secondary. Absolutely. I

19:40

do. I mean, I

19:42

read a lot of fiction. I

19:44

read a lot of novels. I love

19:46

the interiority. I mean, there is

19:48

no art form that matches quite all

19:50

respect to the screen arts. Love

19:52

you guys too. But there really is

19:54

no other art form that captures

19:56

that. Change

19:58

that interiority that path and

20:01

to see it happening

20:03

and to understand what's happening

20:05

and also not want

20:07

to turn away is really.

20:10

It's going to sound slightly ironic to say

20:12

that's one of the great pleasures of

20:14

reading right that you can make yourself feel

20:17

uncomfortable. And yet.

20:20

It can still. Change

20:22

you in fundamental way. I mean in

20:24

some cases your heart can grow three

20:26

sizes bigger in some cases you can

20:28

simply say I can't and You put

20:30

something down and maybe you come back

20:32

to it and maybe you don't but

20:34

the idea that we have access to

20:36

These different characters and there I mean

20:38

I have to say when I met

20:40

Gaines I was like this no no

20:42

can't get away from this dude fast

20:44

enough cannot get away from this still

20:46

makes my skin crawl That is the

20:48

one sort of reliable piece that I

20:50

was like, oh, this guy again. And

20:53

also the swamp in the watch. I

20:55

was like, oh, yeah, I didn't forget that part.

20:58

You know what I'm talking about with this swamp. I'm

21:01

just going to call it a swamp, but you

21:03

and I know what Surat did. Did writing

21:05

this book change you, though? Did

21:07

it change the way you think? Did it change the way you

21:09

approach your craft? I think it refocused

21:11

a lot of my life up until

21:13

that point. What do you mean? A

21:17

lot of the things

21:20

that happen in that

21:22

book are tethered to

21:24

events that did happen

21:26

in real life. So

21:28

everything in the camp patients section

21:30

of that book is based on Sabra

21:33

and Shatia, a Palestinian refugee camp

21:35

that was the site of a massacre

21:37

some 40 years ago. Sabra is

21:39

the Arabic word for patients, that's where

21:41

that name comes from. But

21:43

someone like Gaines, for example,

21:45

this notion of the mentor, the

21:47

recruiter, that kind of character

21:50

is based on this case in

21:52

Canada that I spent two

21:54

years covering called the Toronto 18

21:56

case, which was this big

21:58

terrorism case where it was mostly

22:01

these kids like 18 years

22:03

old who are planning to bomb

22:05

Parliament Hill or whatever. But

22:08

then there were a couple of older

22:10

guys who had no plans of doing any

22:12

of this stuff themselves, but were very

22:14

much sort of like spiritual guidance. folks.

22:18

And those to me just seemed

22:20

so much more insidious than

22:22

anybody else involved in that case.

22:25

And I think when I was done

22:27

sort of living in the world

22:30

of American War, that

22:33

insidiousness and how much it shapes

22:35

so many of the currents of

22:37

the world, how much

22:39

men like that end up shaping

22:41

the current of the world,

22:43

became much clearer to me. as

22:45

a result of having spent

22:47

all that time in this invented

22:50

world. I mean, you talk

22:52

about interiority, the way I tend to

22:54

think of it, and I think we're thinking

22:56

of the same subject here, but we're

22:58

using different terms. I tend

23:00

to think of it as

23:02

retreat. I don't think anything like

23:04

the novel handles retreat as

23:06

well. Even film, TV, visual

23:08

media, where you can physically show

23:10

someone retreating. It doesn't do

23:13

it as well because in the

23:15

novel, in that kind of

23:17

storytelling form, the retreat

23:19

into oneself, I think, can be

23:21

dissected in ways that are, at

23:23

least to my mind, more difficult

23:25

in any other media. And

23:28

so that's how I was kind of

23:30

thinking about it. But on the other

23:32

side of having written that book, obviously

23:34

there are all kinds of pragmatic changes.

23:36

I become a published author, I quit

23:38

my job, all the rest of that

23:41

stuff. But as a human being, I

23:43

think I had to

23:46

sit with certain uncomfortable

23:48

bits of knowing about

23:50

myself. The central

23:52

one being that there's really

23:54

nothing that I believe

23:57

or spouse or claim to

23:59

be that I don't

24:01

think would change in an

24:03

instant. The second it's

24:05

my neighborhood being bombed to

24:08

the ground. or my family

24:10

being wiped off the face of the earth. And

24:12

so, you know, this obviously comes

24:14

into play with my new book, even though

24:16

that's nonfiction. But I can sit here and

24:18

tell you that I'm a pacifist and I

24:20

can believe all of that. But

24:22

that's a real easy thing to say when

24:24

I'm on the launching side of the bombs, not

24:26

the receiving end. And American

24:28

War, I think the process

24:31

of writing that, crystallized just

24:33

how much of a privilege

24:35

it is. to

24:37

believe yourself to be a certain

24:39

kind of person, knowing full

24:41

well that calamity or atrocity or

24:43

cataclysm could change every facet

24:45

of who you are in an

24:47

instant. And

24:50

before we get to the new book, I

24:52

want to use this to switch over, because

24:54

there's something you said that made me think

24:56

of What Strange Paradise, which is the second

24:58

novel, and this idea

25:00

of the sort of There's

25:04

some supporting characters. It's

25:06

a novel, not just about migration

25:08

and a young boy and the

25:11

friendship he makes with a young

25:13

girl on a Greek island. But

25:15

there are supporting characters who would

25:17

not be out of place in

25:19

American war. And,

25:21

you know, there's some smugglers. There's

25:23

an older uncle. It's

25:25

very situational and they are... of

25:28

a piece and yet you

25:30

have also said that what Strange

25:32

Paradise takes a little bit

25:34

from Fairy Tales and Peter Pan's

25:36

stories. And I just,

25:38

I want to talk about the connection

25:40

between those two pieces because I

25:42

feel like in some ways what Strange

25:45

Paradise is an obvious follow -up to

25:47

American War and yet in other

25:49

ways you're really trying to do something

25:51

differently and it's not just the

25:53

sentence level. I mean, I don't necessarily

25:55

disagree that story is more the

25:58

focus of American war and sentences are

26:00

more the focus of what's strange

26:02

paradise, but there is there's a parallel

26:04

track happening between those two books.

26:06

And I think, again, it comes back

26:08

to the character and the characters,

26:11

I should say. So can we start

26:13

there? Yeah,

26:15

absolutely. I mean, you know, in

26:18

terms of the meta context

26:20

of that book, I think it

26:22

would be disingenuous of me

26:24

to not tell you and the

26:26

listeners of this podcast that

26:28

that book, all the

26:30

enthusiasm for American War, there was none

26:32

of that for this book. I mean,

26:35

I think we had 13

26:37

foreign editions of American War. I

26:40

think 11 or 12 of those publishers

26:42

passed on What Strange Paradise. I

26:44

knew that my own

26:47

publishers, with one exception, were

26:49

not particularly enthused about this book. First of

26:51

all, it wasn't set in the US and

26:53

so generally they didn't think it was going

26:55

to sell as well because the market is

26:58

the market. But also, you know, the people

27:00

who came to American War for the dystopian

27:02

world building, futuristic, whatever you want to call

27:04

it, aspects, that's not here. This

27:07

is a much more sort of focused

27:09

conceptually and geographically focused book. And I

27:11

think it was well on its way

27:13

to sort of wrecking my career or

27:15

what little of a career I had.

27:17

until we got very lucky with a

27:19

really positive New York Times review, and

27:21

then it won this award up in

27:23

Canada, and that kind of changed the

27:25

trajectory of that book. But

27:28

again, I go back to my central trick,

27:30

which is inversion, right? I wanted to take this

27:32

comforting fairy tale that Westerners had been telling

27:34

their kids for a hundred years, and I wanted

27:36

to invert it and use it to tell

27:38

a different kind of story. And

27:40

again, for me, what

27:43

sort of resonates the aftertaste

27:45

of the book that stays with

27:47

me is always relative

27:49

to the disconnect between what the

27:51

characters believe themselves to be

27:53

and what they really are. And

27:56

so when I think of this book, which,

27:58

you know, the two central characters are

28:00

children, those aren't the

28:02

characters that stick out in my

28:04

head. Colonel Kethros is the character

28:06

that sticks out in my head

28:08

because he's a guy who is

28:10

fully at war with himself and

28:12

will never admit it, will never

28:15

sort of address that. And that,

28:17

I think, is a point of

28:19

commonality of what these incredibly unjust

28:21

asymmetrical systems that we've allowed to

28:23

control the world, what they do

28:25

to people in terms of severing

28:27

them from themselves, such

28:29

that people can walk around, and myself

28:32

included, and most people I know included, can

28:34

walk around with this conception of

28:36

self, while at the same time consciously

28:38

or subconsciously being aware that there's

28:41

the reality of themselves and that those

28:43

two people might have almost nothing

28:45

to do with one another. That

28:47

I think is what I end

28:49

up writing about a lot, even if

28:51

I don't know it at the

28:53

time. But the story of the

28:56

other, right? I mean, this is something

28:58

you do. And

29:00

yes, it's, okay, let's call it a

29:02

trope. For one of a better word,

29:04

let's call other is trope, right? And

29:06

I think in some ways it can

29:08

make literature really exciting, and it can

29:10

bring a new perspective. And in some

29:12

ways, I sort of look at it

29:15

and go, oh, right, we're still telling

29:17

the story. Like what actually

29:19

defines other anymore, right? We live in a global

29:21

society. We live in a global world. We

29:23

can pass across borders in ways that we couldn't

29:25

previously. I was doing an event actually the

29:27

other night with Cullum Tavine, and he was talking

29:29

about, well, you know, there was a point

29:31

where you couldn't just get on a plane and

29:33

go home to Ireland. Like

29:35

you just couldn't do

29:37

it. And that is, I

29:40

think we forget what air

29:42

travel has done and sort

29:44

of what the, how porous

29:46

things have become for certain

29:48

classes, right? When I read

29:51

what Strange Paradise and you

29:53

cut before, there are

29:55

the before chapters and the

29:57

after chapters and I think we

29:59

can sort of stick to

30:01

that without giving too much away,

30:03

but flipping between that before

30:05

and after, we're always in a

30:07

hinge moment, right? Like

30:09

we're meeting these kids And

30:11

everything changes. And then

30:13

there is actually no rest,

30:16

right? These kids are always on the

30:18

move. Everyone's always on the move. Everything

30:20

is always changing. And this book is

30:22

half the length of American War. And

30:25

actually, I might argue that

30:27

war happens in a way in

30:29

what's strange paradise than American

30:31

War, because there is absolutely... There's

30:33

one moment where the children

30:35

are in a cave, you

30:38

know, having a

30:40

snack and trying to, but there

30:42

is no rest in this book.

30:44

It's a constant chase. Yeah.

30:46

I mean, there's quite a bit of

30:49

sort of narrative trickery that I think contributes

30:51

to that. For one thing, the

30:53

before chapters are in past tense and the

30:55

after chapters are in present tense. And so you,

30:57

you create a kind of velocity that way,

30:59

which is a little bit of smoke and

31:01

mirrors. And I'm not going to sort of, you

31:03

know, Omar, Omar, it's not just smoke and

31:05

mirrors. It's actually very clever. But

31:09

again, this is the process of putting

31:11

these things together. When you really get

31:13

into how the sausage is made, that

31:15

book, which is half the length of

31:18

American War, went through eight drafts. And

31:20

for the first four drafts, there was

31:22

no before and after chapters. It was

31:24

just one continuous narrative with a ton

31:26

of flashbacks, and the pacing was shot.

31:28

Yeah, this is better. Okay, this is

31:30

better. So at one point,

31:32

it occurred to me that I had this

31:35

very old Testament, New Testament thing with

31:37

the Exodus from Egypt and the miraculous rebirth,

31:39

and I tried to codify it, and that's where before and

31:41

after come from. And so structurally,

31:43

that solved a lot of problems for me. But

31:46

I think one of the

31:48

really fascinating things to me about

31:51

this idea of otherness, right, of

31:53

the suffering of the so -called other, is

31:56

that I think I belong to a

31:58

generation, both in terms of chronology, in

32:00

terms of how old I am, but

32:02

also a writing generation, a

32:04

literary generation, where there is that

32:06

transition from the default trope, and

32:08

I think trope is the right

32:10

word to use here, in

32:12

terms of how you try to

32:14

get someone to care about the

32:16

suffering of the other, because I

32:18

show up in

32:20

time to see the default trope of first they

32:23

came for this and then they came for

32:25

this and then they came for this, which is

32:27

this notion that you should care because eventually

32:29

it's going to be you on that boat trying

32:31

to get somewhere safe or washed up on

32:33

the shore. And I think this has to do

32:35

with this notion of how we perceive distance.

32:37

So when you talk about this idea of like,

32:40

there didn't always used to be plane

32:42

travel, for example. And plane

32:44

travel is this incredible ability

32:47

to close that distance. But the

32:49

thing about it is that you get

32:51

on a plane and you travel

32:53

somewhere and then you are there physically

32:55

to experience it. Whereas the default

32:57

mode now is what you and I

32:59

are doing, which is on a

33:01

computer via the internet, which is a

33:03

perceived closing of distance, overlaid onto

33:05

a very real distance, right? You and

33:07

I are very distant from one

33:09

another. Exactly. And that matters,

33:11

right? Because it sort of

33:13

renders what I think of as pretty

33:16

shaky to begin with, this notion of

33:18

you should care because it's going to

33:20

happen to you. That was shaky to

33:22

begin with, and it renders it even

33:24

shakier because now there is, in our

33:26

default mode of communication, a

33:28

very real distance that we're

33:30

only sort of performatively closing.

33:33

And so for me, that book, What

33:35

Strange Paradise, I think is part of

33:37

my transition from thinking of, hey,

33:39

you should care about this injustice to the other.

33:41

because one day you will become the other, over

33:45

to, no, you should care about the injustice

33:47

the other because that damage is happening to

33:49

you right now. As

33:51

it is destroying this person's life, it is

33:53

destroying your conscience and it's destroying your

33:55

soul and so there is no distance. So

33:57

that's how I think of that book

33:59

in terms of how it exists on that

34:02

continuum of distance from the other and

34:04

the suffering of the other. But

34:06

these are very high -minded things that I

34:08

can think of after the fact. When I'm

34:10

writing this book, I'm not thinking about any

34:12

of this. But also, the

34:14

children are children. Like, you

34:16

don't do that thing where sometimes

34:18

the children are 40 -year -olds, hidden

34:20

in children's bodies, and you're like,

34:24

no, actually, I was not that witty at

34:26

40, and why are we pretending to

34:28

say year -old is? They're actually children, and

34:30

I think we need that freedom in a

34:32

lot of ways. for it

34:34

to be children to take

34:36

us through this particular story. And

34:39

I will say the ending still knocks

34:41

me on my heels. And

34:43

again, this is the second time I've read it,

34:45

and I just, I, mmm, and

34:47

I understand, and it's organic, and it

34:49

is true to the story, and it could

34:51

have ended no other way, still knocks

34:53

me on my heels. And again, it

34:56

feels like it's of a piece

34:58

when I look at sort of

35:00

the trajectory of Surat and even

35:02

her siblings. Right?

35:04

Watching the evolution and

35:06

also who gets to

35:08

evolve. Right? Like

35:11

who actually gets to become an

35:13

adult. And how?

35:16

It's still kind of shocking stuff. Yeah,

35:18

I think of the hundreds of book

35:20

clubs that I've done over the years, the

35:23

thing I get yelled about the most is the

35:25

ending of what Strange Paradise. That still

35:27

is. And to this day, if you

35:29

start googling what's strange paradise, the autocomplete,

35:31

one of the first ones that comes

35:33

up is, did you mean what strange

35:35

paradise ending explained? So

35:38

it's one of those things that the first

35:40

four people to read the manuscript had four

35:42

entirely different interpretations of what was happening. And

35:44

that's when I knew that I was in

35:47

for a similar right to American war, actually,

35:49

which has been read because it came out

35:51

four months into the Trump administration. It

35:53

has been read as a very different book

35:55

than the one I was trying to write. And

35:57

that used to be very frustrating for me,

35:59

and now I find it deeply comforting. I

36:02

like the idea that these

36:04

things that are going to outlive

36:06

me, that they should have

36:08

as many different lives as possible.

36:10

I take great solace in

36:12

that because on this podcast, I

36:14

can tell you my intent. I'm

36:16

not around to tell all readers my

36:18

intent at any given moment, so I like

36:20

that they should go out into the

36:22

world and sort of diffuse into all of

36:25

these different interpretations. But that's

36:27

the power of a book,

36:29

right? Like we all bring our

36:31

own experience to, like not

36:33

every one of us is going

36:35

to respond to the same

36:37

thing in the same way. I

36:39

mean, I do, I need

36:41

a beautiful sentence. I will own

36:44

it. I'm okay. Maybe if

36:46

stuff doesn't happen as much, but

36:48

please, I cannot really, ugly

36:50

sentences are not a thing I

36:52

love. I can read them. I

36:55

can do the thing, sure, but

36:57

I really, I need a little bit

36:59

of poetry. I need a sharp

37:01

insight. I need a little bit of

37:03

a raised eyebrow. I need all

37:05

of the things that you get in

37:07

real life, only not at the

37:09

same time because all of us have

37:11

like slow response mechanisms sometimes. And

37:13

you know, you think of that line

37:15

seven years after you should have

37:17

said, I really do. So I want

37:19

to talk about language for a

37:22

second because you Well,

37:24

I mean your Canadian is great

37:26

But I mean in all honesty

37:28

you were born in Egypt you

37:30

were raised in Qatar But you

37:32

English was sort of the language

37:34

of the Middle East and Asia

37:36

for a really long time and

37:39

And other parts of the world

37:41

too obviously, but we're obviously going

37:43

to use the Middle East in

37:45

this case You started learning to

37:47

speak English when you were five.

37:49

It was your primary language, right?

37:51

From the age of five, my

37:53

parents moved to Qatar. I moved

37:55

to Qatar. And Qatar

37:57

is 90 % non -Cuttery. And,

38:00

you know, least speaking, if you are

38:02

in the middle class on up, you

38:04

send your kids to the British school,

38:06

the American school. You know, this was

38:08

in the 80s and 90s. I went

38:10

back last November. There's now like

38:12

the Italian school and the whatever, you know.

38:15

And part of it,

38:17

I think, is

38:19

the unspoken, sometimes spoken,

38:22

commitment to learning the winner's language and

38:24

learning the language that'll help your

38:26

kids will navigate the power centers of

38:29

the world and all the rest

38:31

of that. And as depressing as it

38:33

is to say, I

38:35

can't lie to you, it's been incredibly

38:37

rewarding to have learned. I don't mean

38:39

that in a personal sense. I mean

38:41

that in the sense that I got

38:43

these book deals and I have less

38:46

trouble going across the border because I

38:48

sound like I'm from here. What's

38:51

harder to sort of pin down and

38:53

to think about is the negative space of

38:55

that little achievement of mine, right? Which

38:57

is how much of my own culture I

38:59

basically jettisoned. Because I did become convinced

39:01

that this was the winner's language and this

39:03

was the winner's way of doing things

39:06

and so on and so forth. So,

39:08

in very real terms,

39:10

I have abandoned a huge

39:13

part of myself and

39:15

a huge part of my

39:17

root system. in

39:19

exchange for whatever it is

39:21

I am. And what it

39:23

is I am has been rewarded

39:25

quite handsomely for that. But

39:29

does it make you chase the language

39:31

in a way where you are looking

39:33

for precision and in some cases have

39:35

to figure out... I mean, in some

39:37

ways you're still living in translation, right?

39:39

Like, aren't any of us... I mean,

39:41

going back to what you said sort

39:43

of at the top of the show

39:45

where we have the separation, right? And

39:47

I'm going to use book characters as

39:49

an example and so does not make

39:52

you feel like we're having a therapy

39:54

session. But this idea that

39:56

there is the piece that you know to

39:58

be true and the thing that you believe, right?

40:02

It is kind of like having to translate

40:04

yourself, right? Like your people, your

40:06

true family are the people you don't have to

40:08

translate yourself for. And sometimes you still

40:10

have to translate yourself for the people that

40:13

you share DNA with. That's

40:15

just a pain. But

40:17

this idea where a novelist, really a

40:19

novelist, a journalist, an essayist, you are

40:21

constantly living in translation because you're taking

40:23

this experience, right? Whether it's made up

40:25

or whether it's sitting right in front

40:27

of you or whether you're just interpreting,

40:29

you're translating an experience and hoping that

40:31

someone else can get something from it.

40:34

In some ways, it's a great way

40:36

to live and in some ways, it's

40:38

a really weird way to live. Yeah.

40:40

I can't disagree with the word you

40:42

said. I think all writers are translators. But

40:45

only translators are good

40:47

translators. Writers are effectively, by

40:49

definition, horrible translators. We

40:51

move through the world translating

40:54

experience into story. And

40:56

the way I think is quite

40:58

narrative. I tend to think in metaphor,

41:00

analogy, storytelling as the default

41:02

means of engaging another human being. If

41:04

I want to explain something to you,

41:06

I could try to explain it directly,

41:09

knowing full well I'm going to fail

41:11

miserably. or I could try to find

41:13

a story that gets to what I'm

41:15

trying to say. And I always,

41:17

always opt for the latter. So

41:20

there's that layer of

41:22

just the work we do

41:24

is very much based

41:26

in a kind of literal

41:28

and metaphorical translation. But

41:30

then on top of that, when

41:32

you're thinking in multiple languages, as

41:34

I quite often do, for

41:37

example, I find that when I get

41:39

really stressed out, I switch to Arabic. And

41:41

so most of my swearing, for example,

41:43

is done in Arabic. Last

41:45

November, I was back in Qatar

41:47

for the first extended stretch in 20

41:49

years or so. And I found

41:51

myself comfortable in my own skin for

41:53

the first time in a very

41:55

long time, not because of the place,

41:58

but because I'm driving around with an

42:00

old high school friend and we naturally

42:02

fall into that weird mix of Arabic

42:05

and English. and had to re -curse words

42:07

from the 90s that if you didn't

42:09

grow up there, you would never. And

42:11

it just happens to

42:14

be the room temperature language

42:16

for me, the language in

42:18

which I don't feel too hot or too cold. But

42:20

the other thing it does when

42:22

you think that way is it

42:24

makes you much more attuned to

42:26

trickery as a narrative device. You

42:30

can hide things in

42:32

the space between languages.

42:35

Particularly in Arab literary traditions in

42:37

the last 50, 60, 70 years,

42:39

there's been a necessity to hide

42:41

things because there's an authoritarian government

42:43

most of the time. And if

42:45

you say the thing outright, you

42:47

might get disappeared the next day. And

42:50

so you look at the work of

42:52

everyone from Nagyb Mahfouz to Basm Abdelaziz,

42:54

and there's trickery there. And some

42:56

of that is linguistic, some of it is

42:58

metaphorical. So I steal

43:00

a lot of that. and it makes

43:02

it easier to hide these things.

43:04

And there's so many of them hidden

43:06

in what strange paradise in particular

43:08

that hardly anybody talks to me about

43:10

because, again, the

43:12

number of people who were born in Egypt and then

43:14

grew up in Qatar and then moved to Canada at 16

43:16

and now live on the west coast of the US, it's

43:19

a very small Venn diagram. So

43:23

I can get away with hiding it

43:25

even though I don't have the talent of

43:27

the writers I just listed. But

43:29

I can use I can't pull

43:31

from the same bag of tricks. But

43:33

I think you also have to have an eye for

43:36

detail. I mean, certainly as a journalist, right? You've got

43:38

to find that thing where you can drop it into

43:40

single line and have it explained. I know you just

43:42

explained about M copy for folks who didn't understand, but

43:44

you really have to be able to, sometimes

43:46

you get a subhead in six words and

43:49

you're lucky you got six words. So you

43:51

have to be able to find the thing

43:53

that speaks the truth as quickly as possible.

43:56

I think purely from a

43:58

craft perspective, This

44:00

is the thing I'm fixated

44:02

on so much that it actually,

44:04

it becomes a problem sometimes

44:06

in the sense that, for example,

44:08

with dialogue, you're thinking

44:11

of that economy. And

44:13

obviously, you've now spoken to me for the

44:15

better part of an hour. You know that economy

44:17

is not my strong suit. So

44:20

how do I do that? Because

44:23

sometimes people ramble in conversation. Sometimes

44:25

conversation is boring. So

44:28

do you give people the boring dialogue

44:30

that's realistic, or do you make it super

44:32

efficient to the point where it feels like

44:34

no human being could have possibly said these

44:36

words in this order, except if you were

44:38

trying to get to a narrative purpose? And

44:41

so you can see that. You can see that in

44:43

What Strange Paradise, for example. There's places

44:45

where it's clear I'm working

44:48

backwards from a thing I need

44:50

a person to say. And

44:52

so you can see the other

44:54

character kind of slow pitching the

44:56

softball to them. so that they

44:58

can hit it out of park

45:00

in a particular way. I don't

45:02

think it's unique to me, but

45:04

I see it in my own

45:07

writing quite a bit where that

45:09

economy of phrasing and that economy

45:11

of emotional vectors becomes too economical,

45:13

whereas someone like Dennis Johnson, for

45:15

example, can get you that,

45:17

can get you both somehow. And

45:19

I don't know how he does it, but

45:21

he does. I'm not sure Dennis Johnson knew

45:23

how he did it. Honestly, and then you

45:25

get Tree of Life and you're like, how

45:29

did we get from Jesus'

45:31

son and angels to... And I'm

45:33

delighted we got there. And

45:35

I've read every single word ever,

45:37

but at the same time,

45:39

I'm not entirely sure how we

45:41

got to Tree of Life.

45:43

And I I mean, listen, having

45:45

read you multiple times now,

45:47

I think you're worried about the

45:49

seams showing more than they

45:51

actually do. That's

45:53

never going away. Yeah, no, I

45:55

understand that but I'm I'm a

45:57

pretty close reader But it does

45:59

bring us to the book which

46:01

is different It is part metaphor.

46:03

It is part essay. It is

46:05

not a polemic It does have

46:08

a very distinct point of view

46:10

and it started with a tweet

46:12

And I think we start there

46:14

because if we're talking about language

46:16

140 characters is I mean There's

46:18

a lot Yeah, I

46:20

mean in late October of 2023 I

46:22

was watching the slaughter and it has a

46:25

and I posted this thing I wasn't

46:27

much of a social media person back then

46:29

right I've now left all of it

46:31

behind effectively. I don't do any of it

46:33

anymore Mm -hmm, but I basically posted something

46:35

about how you know one day when

46:37

it's too late to do anything about this

46:40

everyone will have always been against it

46:42

and for some reason this tweet gained traction.

46:44

Mm -hmm independent of that I was working

46:46

on what ended up being this book,

46:48

okay? And the original title was actually the

46:50

glass coffin. I was

46:52

thinking about this idea that

46:54

when you're on the receiving end

46:57

of injustice of such a

46:59

great magnitude, that one of the

47:01

most dangerous things you can

47:03

do is just show the body,

47:05

just show the thing. And

47:08

so it was only after the first

47:10

or second draft that somebody at Penguin Random

47:12

House suggested that I repurpose the line

47:14

from the tweet. And so that's what we

47:16

did. And I'm grateful to them because

47:18

I think it fits the book perfectly. But

47:20

it has given many people the impression

47:22

that I've taken a tweet and sort of

47:24

stretched it out to 200 pages, which

47:26

I promise you was not what happened. No.

47:28

And having read it a couple of

47:30

times, I can promise that isn't what has

47:32

happened as well. But I think it's

47:35

interesting, too, that when we look at the

47:37

entire body of work, right, between your

47:39

journalism, which is its own very

47:41

specific art. And

47:43

the novels and then this

47:45

book, the new book feels

47:47

like it is not something

47:49

that could have been fictionalized.

47:51

Like American War, you're doing

47:53

a lot. Fiction gives you

47:55

the freedom to talk about all of the

47:57

things that need to be discussed in ways they

47:59

need to be discussed that people might not

48:01

be able to hear otherwise, right? This is all

48:03

based in some ways in reporting that you've

48:05

been doing. And then again, the migrant crisis with

48:08

what's strange paradise. I mean, when we look

48:10

at how that works out and now obviously, We

48:12

have the new book

48:14

in Gaza and the idea

48:17

that you have to

48:19

flip between genre. And

48:21

I think it's fair to say genre,

48:23

right? Essays are their own. I

48:25

love a great essay. What can I

48:27

say? But to get the language to do

48:29

what you need it to do and

48:31

connect in the way you need it to

48:33

connect. And I

48:35

feel like this book was written very quickly,

48:37

but it sounds like too you started

48:39

it before I knew. It

48:41

existed. Yeah,

48:44

it was a pretty furious writing

48:46

process in the sense that we're talking

48:48

about, you know, every day, every

48:50

day for months on end. It's the

48:52

only thing I could write about

48:54

sitting there for hours and hours and

48:56

hours. And that's not necessarily a

48:58

good thing. It's not necessarily a good

49:00

thing to be that obsessed and

49:02

that angry and also trying to produce

49:04

something like this. But it

49:06

was all I could think about. One

49:09

of the interesting

49:11

things just conceptually for

49:13

me is the

49:15

symmetry of expectation versus

49:18

intent that exists. For

49:20

example, a lot of people will talk

49:22

about this book as the sort of

49:25

Israel -Palestine book. And quite

49:27

often I would say, well, I did write

49:29

an Israel -Palestine book. It was called American War,

49:31

and nobody has ever read it that way in

49:33

this part of the world. And I get

49:35

that, right? Whereas this book, this new

49:37

one, I think of very much as a book

49:39

about here. It's a book about the West. That's

49:42

what I was autopsying.

49:44

I think generally speaking,

49:47

because of the part of the world

49:49

I come from, and in particular because

49:51

of the governments that run that part

49:53

the world, I have

49:56

an almost sort

49:58

of allergic reaction to

50:00

fraudulent narrative. And

50:02

the narrative feels like it's fundamentally broken, but

50:04

I'm asked to believe in it anyway. I

50:07

just have a very, very bad reaction to

50:09

that because I grew up in a world

50:11

where there was nothing but that. There

50:14

was nothing but, you know, every

50:16

year it would rain maybe once in

50:18

Qatar a year if you were very,

50:20

very lucky sort of thing. And

50:23

no matter when it rained, the first item

50:25

on the news that night would be thanking

50:27

the Amir for having done the rain prayer,

50:29

which was the reason we were getting it.

50:31

You're sitting there and you're just like, a

50:34

narrative is being presented to me and I

50:36

realize my life would be a lot easier if

50:38

I just went with it and I can't. And

50:40

I think a lot of this new book,

50:43

which has, you know, it goes without

50:45

saying almost, has gotten the

50:47

most intense responses of anything I've

50:49

ever written. The journalism, the

50:51

novels, the short stories, nothing compares

50:54

to the amount of love and the

50:56

amount of hatred I've gotten over

50:58

this book. But I think the one

51:00

thing that ties it to all

51:02

of the other work is that it

51:04

is born of that allergic reaction

51:06

to what at least I, and I'm

51:08

not expecting you to agree with

51:10

me or anybody else, but at least

51:12

I perceive as a fraudulent narrative

51:14

that my life would be much easier

51:16

if I just went along with

51:18

and I decided not to, and this

51:20

is sort of the result of

51:23

that. But you also covered the Arab

51:25

Spring. And I think a lot

51:27

of us from the West were looking

51:29

at that moment in history thinking,

51:31

oh, this is monumental. This

51:33

is world changing. I mean, we felt the

51:35

same way when we saw Tiananmen Square. And

51:38

some of us even remember when

51:40

the Berlin Wall fell. And all

51:42

of these global markers, right, where

51:45

you thought, oh, this is it.

51:47

This is the moment. And

51:49

then the change gets clogged

51:52

back. And

51:54

you and I are of a similar generation where

51:56

we were raised to believe that, you know, the West

51:58

is the solution for everything, right? And having lots

52:00

of conversations about the Vietnam War recently, and I'm like,

52:02

so let's look at the legacy of Vietnam and

52:05

where it got us. And it's trippy because when I

52:07

was coming through college, you know, all of the

52:09

young men were studying Vietnam. And now I'm just like,

52:11

so you know this war that called the Vietnam

52:13

War, yeah? And it's kind

52:15

of, it's really, the passage of time

52:17

is a very strange thing sometimes, I

52:20

think. You know, you toss

52:22

around the name McGeorge Bundy and there are people

52:24

who are like, what? Who? Like,

52:26

so this dude, who's the architect

52:28

of the... I'm not making light of

52:30

any of this. It's just, it's

52:32

everything is sort of, it's these cycles

52:34

of world history, right? We

52:36

seem to keep folding back on ourselves.

52:38

It's just the location moves. I

52:40

mean, yeah, I think, again, I think

52:43

I agree with all of that. Every

52:46

now and then, because of the kind of

52:48

stuff I write about, I'll be asked, you

52:50

know, so what's the best book for me

52:52

to read to understand what the US did

52:54

in Iraq or Afghanistan? And

52:56

I would often say, A

52:59

Bright Shining Lie by Neil

53:01

Sheehan, which came out 30

53:03

or 40 years before the

53:05

stuff happened, and is a

53:07

dissection of how everything went

53:10

to hell in Vietnam for

53:12

the US. But is, to

53:15

my mind, at least, the

53:17

most penetrating account of

53:19

a particular facet of the

53:21

American psyche that is

53:23

very difficult to address or

53:25

even acknowledge in this

53:27

country. And so, yes, absolutely,

53:29

these cycles repeat themselves. And one of

53:31

the interesting things to me about

53:34

moments such as the collapse of South

53:36

African apartheid, the collapse of the

53:38

Berlin Wall, is

53:40

that you realize that you're

53:42

living through this incredibly cataclysmic

53:44

moment where figuratively or quite

53:46

literally a wall is coming

53:48

down. But you're also coming

53:50

to the realization that most

53:52

of the people around you

53:55

knew that this was wrong

53:57

and are happy to go

53:59

with it now because the

54:01

thing is happening. Somebody

54:03

else had to do that work to get them there.

54:06

And this idea of

54:08

the tragedy of a

54:10

functioning moral compass in

54:13

what is otherwise a vacuum,

54:16

has always struck me as a

54:18

really fascinating aspect of the

54:21

human condition. The

54:23

deep down, almost all of us

54:25

are walking around fully cognizant

54:27

of what's right and what's wrong.

54:30

And again, we go back to this idea

54:32

of the distance, the gap, the

54:34

dissociation between what I understand

54:37

on a core moral level and

54:39

what I'm willing to do

54:41

or even acknowledge publicly and how

54:43

easy it is for me

54:45

to fit those two very distant

54:47

versions of myself into the

54:50

same costume and into the same

54:52

body. I

54:54

think a lot of that

54:56

shows up in the

54:58

whatever is incendiary about the

55:00

new book, I think,

55:02

comes from that place. I

55:04

have a line from Hanif Abduhra

55:07

Keeb's last book, Tattooed on My Arm.

55:10

And it says Nostalgia is a relentless

55:12

hustler. I

55:15

like that. And I do feel like Hanif

55:17

is a genius. He is,

55:19

Hanif Abdurraqib is an absolute genius,

55:21

but it goes back to everything. It

55:25

goes back to why I read. It goes

55:27

back to, and why I read across

55:29

shot and I read fiction. I read nonfiction. I, you

55:31

know, I cannot stay away from history. I was actually

55:33

a history major, which is kind of how you end

55:35

up being a bookseller, I suppose, but. this

55:38

idea that we keep walking

55:40

ourselves back to where we've been

55:42

before and we don't actually

55:44

know what that necessarily looks like

55:46

or how to translate that

55:48

for ourselves. I think books are

55:50

really great in that regard.

55:52

I think they can help us

55:54

in a lot of ways

55:56

to expand our understanding. Years

55:58

ago, there was that study that said, hey,

56:00

reading fiction builds your empathy muscle. Like,

56:02

I would like to see that. That would be cool.

56:05

Could we do more of that? But I will say,

56:07

Omar, I think you and I could keep going for

56:09

a really long time. And

56:11

I going to say thank you so

56:13

much for joining us on Port Over.

56:15

This was the conversation I needed today,

56:17

So thank you. This was

56:19

a privilege. Thank you so much

56:21

for having me. Thank

56:26

you for listening. Port Over is

56:28

a Barnes & Noble production. To help other

56:30

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56:32

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