5 Questions with Yumna Kassab
Yumna Kassab is a writer from Western Sydney. She is the author of The House of Youssef, Australiana and The Lovers. Her latest book, Politica, is available from Ultimo Press.
She has been listed for the Stella Prize, Miles Franklin Award, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, QLD Literary Awards, Victorian Premier's Literary Award and NSW Premier's Award.
She is the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature.
No.1
I remember asking you in 2022 how Australiana was conceived and you said that there was no concrete starting point, but that you’re interested in experimentalism, saying that ideas are ‘poised and waiting for the writer to pluck them for the metaphorical air. […] That is how everything is written.’ As such what I will ask you about Politica is this: how did it evolve over time?
I write in a continuous way and I am never sure if I am writing fragments that will add up to something or if what’s written will end up being a little story that exists by itself.
Australiana and Politica overlapped a lot in terms of when they were written. Also, The Lovers began its life as part of Politica but then I thought I’ll cut out Jamila and Amir’s story, and have that live separately.
When it comes to arranging a project, I make my decisions based on setting and theme. The story ‘Numbers in the Dark’ could’ve been in either Australiana or Politica. It ended up in the latter because of where I imagined it being set. On the subject of theme, I see Politica as the effect of politics on people’s lives during a time of revolution and conflict. It’s set in a fictional version of the Arab world and it is not bound by the border of a single country. So I ended up grouping the stories in this book around a setting (a fictional version of the Arab world) and then a theme (the effect of conflict on people).
For the actual arrangement of Politica, I considered every possible order for the five parts that make up the book. Robert Watkins, my publisher at Ultimo Press, was a patient witness to these many arrangements but I knew I wanted the book to end with the fragments and the fallout from a conflict. Politica begins with that conflict and then traces the effect on a community across five decades. In a sense, the book starts with the characters able to make choices over their lives (to join a cause, a revolution) and it ends in fragmentation, dispossession and displacement. This arrangement made sense to me because it has an accurate parallel in history.
No.2
When I read Politica, I felt as if I was reading a prequel of your first book The House of Youssef—the former seems to set-up the latter even if they weren’t published chronologically. Together they illustrate how strife results in displacement and then continues to displace even in the new country, and in between all this we have to find ways to continue our physical and psychic survival. Can you speak more to this?
I started writing Politica in 2019 around the time The House of Youssef was about to be released. I was thinking about the circumstances that brought migrants such as my parents to Australia. In this sense, Politica is a prequel in that it is exploring the instability and conflict that will make people move to a different part of the world where they don’t have the language and they’re migrating with limited money or personal possessions.
I called the book Politica as a reference to my long-held interest in Latin America. In Spanish, ‘politica’ is a feminine noun and so the book is [intended as] a feminine telling of politics. There’s this school of thought that says politics is dates and times, it’s the chronology of battles—but I think the real story is the effect of politics on people’s lives. I believe this is the only way to understand the impact of any event in a country or a region. In a sense I don’t have time for history narrated as a sequence of factual events. It’s a view that favours the names of leaders and specific places, and doesn’t convey the reality for ordinary people.
In October 2019 there were massive protests in Chile due to a proposed metro hike. Even though the dictator Pinochet was no longer the leader, the country was still dealing with the legacy of that dictatorship. In Lebanon around the same time, there were also massive protests because the government was going to charge for WhatsApp calls. People were already struggling to make ends meet. It was a lightbulb moment because in both countries, the legacy of the past is ongoing. And that is why there’s such a focus on long-term effects in Politica. In many places in the world, people are trying to deal with the history of their country, especially the effects of violence, colonisation and imperialism.
So the book has many influences and draws on the history of many places. The fourth section is titled ‘1973’ and the character Salma says she never recovered from the events of 1973, that she can divide her life into two periods: before 1973 and after 1973. I believe we all have 1973 moments in our lives. I chose that year as it was a reference to the coup in Chile that installed the dictator Pinochet. In a way, if it weren’t for my interest in Latin America, there’s a possibility Politica wouldn’t exist or would be a very different book.
No.3
The women characters in Politica are worth a mention. I find that in your stories, you tend to gesture to the long tail of patriarchy, and how it affects women in subtle and overt ways, as well as the ways in which they resist. For example, an impoverished young woman marries an older man to gain a more secure future; a long-suffering wife drives her husband’s car away towards liberation; and a middle-aged woman invites her young male helper for lunch every day even if the status quo considers this a taboo. Why do you choose to portray women in this way?
People are complex and I like to portray that complexity. Across my four books, I often have characters who reach a point where they snap, and [then] they refuse to go on living as they lived before.
In Australiana, there’s the woman who moves to Broome to escape her family, and there’s the boy who torches the family crop because his father burnt his library books. I am greatly interested in the response of people under great stress. Right at the start of Politica, a war is going on and Jamal immediately wants to do something other than go to school. There is also the man who sets himself on fire in ‘The Flames of Peace’, an echo of the event that sparked the Arab Spring.
On the subject of Arab men and women, I’m tired of the stereotypes. We all know the stereotypes and those stereotypes have zero to do with the people I know. Sometimes we suffer from monolithic thinking that seeks to define a group of people by a single idea. I mean, it makes life a lot simpler to think in a two-dimensional way but it’s got nothing to do with reality. I don’t set out to write in a deliberate way about women in my books or about any group of people, but I’m sure we can all agree humans are complex. Therefore, I’d say I’m just portraying the reality of humans as they live.
In organising the book, the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ was very important to me. If there’s a single theme to the book, it’s the personal experience of people and how that’s inherently political. In my stories, I tend to keep my focus on individuals but always within the context of community. That said, I don’t think there is that much choice about the stories and how the people in them are portrayed. I am the scribe, and all the blame lies with the muse.
No.4
What does your writing process look like?
Every day I aim for a minimum of fifteen minutes and I go to a cafe to write. This takes me out of my regular environment to a place where I’m less likely to be distracted.
I write by hand. I have my A4 notebook with me wherever I go and because I have my notebook with me all the time, I have the chance to consider what I’ve written across a number of weeks before the book runs out of pages. By then, I have read over every page many times before it is typed.
My bottleneck [moment] is at the typing stage; I have a backlog of nine notebooks currently. I haven’t felt like typing anything across the last five months but slowly, I tell myself to type a few pages here and there. On a daily level, I write whatever I feel like. Sometimes it’s poetry, sometimes it’s fiction or it may be nonfiction. If I find that I’m coming back to the same subject or character again, I will begin to code the pages. When I was writing The Lovers, I’d put an ‘L’ at the top of the page. Some of my pieces at the moment have a simplified version of a crown on them. The coding allows me to find the pieces easily so that I can type them towards a project.
In terms of putting a project together, I’m always looking for broader themes and making lists of potential projects. Eventually a list will be repeated over and over, and I’ll know that a project is in the process of being arranged. A title helps a lot with grouping pieces. I played around a lot with the essay ‘The Rooster and the Watermelon’, but it only took its final shape once I had the title. The essay came together very quickly soon after.
That’s roughly my process and I’ve been experimenting with it for a number of years. I change things a bit with life’s demands but what doesn’t change is the following: I write daily by hand and I have my notebook with me almost all of the time.
No.5
In an excellent Sydney Morning Herald review, critic Sonia Nair mentioned that your work is ‘timely’. What would you say to that?
To an extent, I’d agree with Sonia’s assessment. I’m thinking particularly about [the stories] ‘Equality’ (p. 12), ‘Human Shields’ (p. 200), ‘Propaganda’ (p.38) and ‘Broker the Peace’ (p.58). I find ‘An Ode to Reason’ (p. 48) [particularly] difficult to consider right now. History has a way of being circular and the violence we see in Gaza and the Middle East right now has its basis in history.
There is another side to this though. If I were to write Politica today, the book would be more violent and brutal. The reality is impossible to ignore—I don’t know about other writers out there but it’s difficult to write fiction about what’s happening [as it unfolds]. I currently feel an obligation to keep a record of the violence: to say this happened, this is how the world reacted, and that for the violence we witnessed, people found a way to justify it. I would want to write about the silence and the insistence on neutrality, and if written today, Politica would likely be a documentary.
I find myself struggling on a day-to-day level to comprehend firstly the violence and then the normalisation of that violence. This fallout is going to take a long time to reckon with. Most days, I feel a bit like Salma in the 1973 section of the book—someone has pressed pause on my life and there’s a double living in my place. [Like Salma], I have this sense of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and I ask myself daily: how am I to live with this? I keep asking [this question] daily because I have no satisfactory answer and meanwhile I write fragments. I’m not sure there’s a narrative for this bloodshed or for all the children that have been killed. I just balk at the scale of destruction and really I’m balking at the governments and the individuals who found genocide to be acceptable and within the parameters of what we call humanity. So, if I were to write Politica right this moment, I’d most likely focus the stories on violence, silence and complicity.
As conflict plays out across an unnamed region, its inhabitants deal with the fallout. Families are torn apart and brought together. A divide grows between those on either side of the war, compromises are struck as the toll of violence impacts near and far. We learn about those who are left behind and those who choose to leave in a great scattering. As the stories of those affected play out they weave together to show the whole of a society in the most extreme of circumstances. Even after the last shot is fired, their world will never recover.
From the acclaimed author of The House of Youssef, Australiana and The Lovers comes a powerful new novel that asks again if it’s possible to ever measure the personal cost of war.
Get it from Ultimo Press here.