Sinan Antoon's second novel The Corpse Washer (2013) is a remarkable achievement for two reasons. First, it showcases starkly and poetically the day-to-day struggles and calamities faced by Iraqi civilians from shock-and-awe bombings and post-Saddam sectarian slaughter. Second, after publishing it in Arabic, Antoon – born to an Iraqi father and an American mother – translated it himself into English, scooping the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his efforts.
“I translated a lot of poetry before I translated my novel,” he tells me on the phone from his home in New York. “It is another way of reading texts closely.”
Thanks to Antoon, Anglophone audiences are able to appreciate Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence and the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef's late work, Nostalgia, My Enemy. "It all springs from passion and love," he says. "I read these poets in Arabic and wanted to share their poetry with others."
But it was his own work that Antoon shared with others at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair this month. That work is wide-ranging. As well as being a novelist and translator, Antoon is a poet and essayist. He has a doctorate from Harvard in Arabic and Islamic Studies and currently teaches at New York University. In 2003 he co-directed About Baghdad, a documentary film that collected the views of native Iraqis on life under Saddam and during American occupation.
Despite evenly spreading his talent around, it is as a novelist that Antoon is most celebrated. On completing The Corpse Washer he had what he admits was "a kind of depression" after having lived so intensely with his characters for three years. With this in mind, it would have been understandable if Antoon had handed the translation duties to a neutral party. Not so. "I wanted to go back to be with these characters again. I was so invested emotionally in the novel that I didn't want anyone else to translate it. So I did it myself."
His third novel Ya Maryam (Ave Maria), which was shortlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was translated by Maia Tabet. It focuses on two generations of an Iraqi Christian family in Baghdad, charting their collisions within themselves and their persecution from external forces. The subject matter was not only too "horrific" for Antoon to translate, it was too personal. "I come from a Christian family and what happened in the book happened to some of my extended family. I thought it would be too much for me to do it myself. I had to preserve some sanity."
Antoon relates that friends and colleagues have asked him why he doesn’t write in English. “I love Arabic,” is his answer. “I enjoy the time I spend writing in Arabic. I feel more at home in Arabic and have maximum access to the language.”
Is he, I wonder, aware of the debate about the prevalence of English here as a taught language, and the belief, particularly among younger people, that English, not Arabic, is the passport to success and interconnectedness?
“Well, there is this notion now that success is somehow linked to a certain language and cultural environment. There’s more emphasis in the Gulf on business and that is linked to English as that is the corporate language. English is simply a more practical language. But,” he adds, “I think it is very dangerous and counterproductive when one discounts the importance of their mother tongue.
“Language isn’t just a means of communication, it’s a reservoir of memory, tradition and heritage. Sooner or later those who are embracing a foreign language at the expense of their mother tongue will find themselves alienated.”
Arabic gets a bad rap, Antoon claims, from those who connect it only with dictators and oppressive regimes. But English, he argues, is “the language of the coloniser”. “I love English,” he says, as if to obviate any misunderstanding, “but the reason it is the global language is because of imperialism.” It is a fair point, and one I suspect he has made before to defend the good name of the language he predominantly writes in.
I bring him back to his work and ask him if he agrees with some Arabic authors who maintain that you haven’t truly made it as a writer until your books are published in English.
He laughs. “Oh, I think people, whether writers or readers, confuse and conflate commercial success with literary value. We always know the most widely read books are rarely the best books. We live in a world with an Anglophone hegemony and where certain capitals in the western hemisphere dictate what is inducted into the so-called state of world literature. That is a very problematic term, but in the Arab world, especially among writers, there is this notion that you don’t really become a global writer or an international writer unless you are translated. Some of the material that is translated is excellent but some is very weakly translated from English to Arabic.
“In the US when it comes to translated literature the situation is horrible because it’s only three per cent.” This, I put to him, must make him something of a curiosity over there: a niche writer, a rarefied writer whose work belongs to a small, select market.
“Yes, of course. I’m a hybrid because I write essays in English but I write my novels in Arabic. I’m primarily interested in the audience in the Arab world. And frankly and honestly I don’t perform the expected task of a writer living in the US. My novels are not published by the mainstream presses.”
What is that “expected task” and how are those mainstream presses different from the smaller ones in terms of the books they take on?
“There is space for serious writing here,” he says. “There are lots of excellent small presses with an interest in good literature that comes from other parts of the world. But in the mainstream in the US...” he tails off and marshals his thoughts. “After all of these years and after two wars in Iraq, the interest is for the writing of the veterans. The American veterans are the victims of the war and the Iraqi civilians disappear.
"This film, American Sniper, which came out recently and was so successful, it tells you what kind of perspective the general viewer is comfortable with. It's this old image of the American hero out in the wilderness and all the Iraqis are the bad guys."
I imagine his frustration in having to field such shopworn stereotypes and warped perceptions. But isn’t there greater, more acute discomfort to be felt from the fact that he is living in the country that invaded and unleashed chaos in his homeland?
“That’s a very good question. I wrote a series of essays called ‘A Barbarian in Rome’ about what it means to be living in a country that is not the country of your birth, and the way in which this war continues and how detached the majority of the population is from what its government is doing abroad. It plays an important role in the novel I am writing now. The militarisation of the US and its culture and how war is normalised. The feeling of alienation. It’s difficult. I’ve said many times, there is no recognition yet of the crimes the US committed, never a serious discussion in this country about why this war was waged and who was responsible for it.”
Antoon takes heart from those Americans who have an interest in Arab culture. There are people, like his students, who passionately want to read and engage with Arabic literature, and who feel it is “the duty of citizens to learn a little more about these countries that the army of their government has destroyed”. However, there are others who “follow the notion of know thy enemy” and who after 9/11 developed what Antoon calls a “forensic interest in Arabic culture and literature”. But surely a forensic interest is better than no interest at all. Antoon disagrees. “What you get is this unhealthy interest whereby people think that by reading novels or poetry they will understand politics.”
Reading Sinan Antoon may not help us understand politics, nor will his books effect political change – but it would be churlish to say they don’t shine a valuable light on conflict that has been triggered from wrongheaded political decisions.
The novel he is presently working on should shine more of that penetrating light.
“It has two narrators,” he says, “one living in Baghdad selling books and the other living in New York. It’s a conversation between them, two different perspectives.”
Despite his first use of New York as a novelistic setting, Antoon won’t be letting go of Iraq any time soon.
“I still have much more to write about the place,’ he says. “There are so many untold stories from Iraq that I have in my memory.”
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance essayist and reviewer.