Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist—or so you will find written across the pages of many journals’ and publishers’ websites, alongside her stories in Arabic and their English translations. But she is so much more, as anyone who has had the pleasure of reading her works can attest to. Born in a land continually reeling with political unrest, she has been denied the privilege of free learning—such as of foreign languages—and suppressed and prosecuted for shedding light on the suffering of people past and present. Still, she weaves magic with words, painting vivid scenes with surreal imagery, and draws you into dialogue and contemplation by first making you smile.
The imagery used in her pieces is enchanting, which is perhaps not a surprise given how images drive her. Her novel The Slave Yards, which made her the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for the International Award for Arab Fiction, was catalyzed from an incident wherein she saw a photograph of Benghazi at a friend’s place; the photograph compelled her to show the reality and horrors of the slave trade in Libya. While there have been attempts to shut her down—which have succeeded in making her emigrate to Italy—her oppressors have failed to silence a voice that incorporates the many people, dialects, values, and thoughts she embodies.
Her latest publication, Catalogue of a Private Life, is a collection of short stories translated form Arabic by Sawad Hussain, and it is a tapestry that incorporates many dualities of a people and their identity: their quirks and rigidity, their ready acceptance of bizarre circumstances and tunnel vision in regular circumstances, their warm humour and the dread of their situations. It won the 2019 English PEN Translates award, and I had the pleasure to talk to her about her life as well as the stories in this collection.
Chinmay Rastogi (CR): Your work has been a guiding light towards the suffering of people in Libya, but it also unveils the atrocities conducted by people of the region in the past, as in The Slave Yards. How difficult is it to stand on middle ground, to give both accounts through your writing?
Najwa Bin Shatwan (NBS): Writing in culturally thorny areas such as the Arab region is not easy, especially if the writer dismantles topics of social or political sensitivity—whether from the past or the present. It is easy for a book’s subject to incite conflict or escalate into a declaration of hostility. Our writing, which focuses on real matters, creates enemies, and such antagonism does not stop at a point of view that differs from what the writer’s. Rather, it may escalate into bloodshed or physical assault, simply because the writer presents a proposal that is different from the society’s vision, and is not in line with the prevailing ideology.
I felt the ferocity of this difference in my writing in terms of its social and political orientation, and with the spread of freedom of expression—which reached a chaotic peak with the emergence of social media—it became possible for those who disagree with a writer to inflame or incite public opinion against them.
Words are like gunpowder—they can ignite at any moment, and the type of writing that touches open wounds is not welcome; people prefer to proceed with their lives in denial, and believe that adopting a false mental attitude regarding many issues is better than getting into trouble.
As a writer, I work honestly and impartially, without complacency, and I feel the danger to my life, to my chances and fortunes in general.
CR: You work as an academic and write short stories and novels, as well as plays. Do you find it challenging to switch between such forms? And is there any one which you feel more partial towards?
NBS: I do not pay much attention to the classifications of what I write; I respond to the idea when it comes to me, and leave it in the form by which it chooses to crystallize. The idea leads me to its final form and is not bound by template, so I found myself writing smoothly in various literary genres until I continued with the short story—despite the fact that the Arab market is not one for the short story, but rather for the novel.
CR: The characters in the stories of Catalogue of a Private Life are all regular people who seem to have an unbelievable capacity to deal with situations that are surreal, and those that for most outside the country would be unreal. Is that something that extends to life as you know it and the people in Libya?
NBS: Our reality often exceeds magical realism. It is a post-fantasy reality. What you consider unreasonable, logically fallic, or absurd is our ordinary reality, imposed onto us by certain circumstances to accept its strangeness.
CR: The humour and absurdity in these stories is delightful, despite its often dark nature. Whether it is the burglar who is pinched and bit by young girls living in the house, a marathon becoming the stage for an old Volkswagen Beetle, or the bodyguard who wants to kill his megalomaniac general to bring peace—but isn’t sure if the war will end by doing so. It’s what drew me towards your writing in the first place, with your story Portrait of a Libyan Scream. Is using humour a conscious choice to speak about topics that are otherwise difficult to put out, and be read by one and all?
NBS: Humour, as Terry Eagleton says, is a way of talking rather than being simple. Through humour, I can say a lot about things that are beyond the bounds of possibility. I don’t make things up for humour; what is there stems from an ability to make fun of my ingrained qualities.
CR: How deep would you say is the role of folktales and superstitions in the daily lives and ideologies of Libya? Having grown up in India, I am no stranger to how these things can become a part of your being no matter how open or rebellious you might be towards them. I felt a similar undercurrent in the minds of the characters in your stories here.
NBS: Folk myths, superstitions, and legends are present in all people, not only in eastern societies. I discovered a huge archive of them during my reading of folk stories among the Scandinavian peoples, the Romans, and the Greeks.
In the present era, superstitions continue to exist under a name appropriate to the era, which is “science fiction”—although science has nothing to do with superstitions! It seems to me that life is unbearable without superstitions and legends.
CR: The way some of the stories end softly, without an overarching climax, gives them a very slice-of-life sensibility, despite their tense settings. They seem more about the people than anything else: their daily situations that are heart-wrenching in nature but heartwarming in the way people deal with them. What is your approach to endings?
NBS: The endings of my stories impose themselves on me; sometimes I have more than one beautiful ending for one story. I call it the lock, and my locks are often like the last note that the symphony ends with. It is not known where it comes from, or how it chooses its location.
CR: You mentioned in one of your early interviews how being unable to learn European languages during your school years has been a source of anger for you. After living in Italy and picking up Italian, would you say that your stories and the wonderful imagery you often employ come to you now in a different manner—that your characters too are able to move around more freely?
NBS: The language I think in is the one I sense and feel, and I think my mother tongue is more fluid in my subconscious mind than any other. Before Italian, I learned Braille and sign language, but my use of them did not go beyond the university fence. The Italian language in terms of freedom is similar to the Arabic language—free within its geographical scope only, but outside its borders there is no freedom for it as people are less likely to use it and understand it, and therefore this is good during moments of anger, as no one will understand what you say!
Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist, born in 1970. She is the author of two novels: The Horses’ Hair (2007) and Orange Content (2008), three collections of short stories, and a play. In 2005, The Horses’ Hair won the inaugural Sudanese al-Begrawiya Festival prize, in the same year that Sudan was Capital of Arab Culture. She was chosen as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty by the Beirut39 project and her story, “The Pool and the Piano,” was included in the Beirut39 anthology.
Chinmay Rastogi is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, Kitaab and elsewhere. He likes to add colour to the lives of those around him and can often be found smiling or grumbling under a motorcycle helmet or behind a harmonica.
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