Overview
What these books taught me was to tell the story not as a tool to educate, but to confer empathy, dignity, and compassion on the characters and the situation.
It’s strange to consider that the origins of Midnight, At The War rest in the early 1990s. First, it originated with my graduate school professor, scholar, and author Evelyne Accad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I was working on a master’s degree in South & West Asian Studies in 1991, and I studied with Professor Accad. She taught a small group of us a survey course on modern Arabic literature in translation – with a creative writing component.
For several hours each week, I was immersed in this brave new world of literature in translation. During her class, I started a novel that would never be published, but from which components would be mined in my subsequent published works decades later.
Together we read and analyzed several books including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novels Palace Walk (first book of the Cairo Trilogy) and Midaq Alley, an allegory of Egypt and how it shifted through colonialism through the lens of a local girl; Hanan Al-Shaykh’s novel, The Story of Zahra, a novel about an acne-riddled Lebanese woman, and how her fate is intertwined with the fate of her nation before and after civil war. Later, we read Evelyne’s book The Excised, a story about female circumcision and the treatment of women, after the English translation was made available.
I had no designs to write Midnight, At The War – a novel about family & love, the news & facts, global politics & conflict, and the treatment of women – until three or four years ago. But I will say that it’s been percolating for decades. As a former newspaper reporter, I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century shouting at the TV and the pages of my local newspaper. I’m dismayed by what now passes for news. Too often, print and broadcast journalists deliver more opinion than fact. There’s a real assault occurring on ideas — on thinking that stretches beyond the sound bite or social media post. The combination of 24-hour news cycles and the race to be first rather than right has left the public numb.
And here comes that devastating “nut-graf” (that reporters and ex-reporters write in their stories and essays to contextualize their perspective) that I feel necessary to state in most of my nonfiction work: Through no fault of my own, the bulk of my work was taken from me in 2010. So, I had to start over. So, this life cycle of my writing practice is only 11 years old, though I’ve been writing since the age of nine.
Now that I am excavating how I got here, I see that there is a straight line from that seminal class 34 years ago and the gentle touch of an excellent teacher. It gave me permission to write about hard things, to question the status quo, and the people in charge, to shine a light on patriarchy and misogyny – and colonialism and all its consequences. These books are so important because they discuss the human condition without being centered in the United States.
I graduated from UIUC in 1992 and worked as a newspaper reporter in Honolulu for a while before I moved to New York, after being admitted to the School of the Arts at Columbia University. There, I had a chance to study with the late Maureen Howard, in the mid 1990s, another survey course on contemporary literature, with a creative writing component. This time, a wider range of books: the two that have stuck with me are Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Don DeLillo’s Mao II.
As a poet first, I was drawn to the strong language in Invisible Cities, the beautiful descriptions, the mysterious conversations between an emperor and a world traveler. When we got to Mao II, I was hooked by the suspense, the way the book moved through history and geography without making me feel ignorant and without succumbing to standard history textbook language. Many things are going on in DeLillo’s 10th novel, and I loved how the author kept all the balls in the air, juggling beautifully in this fast-paced book and keeping the reader close, drawing us into the pages of the world he created, a world that mirrored the contemporary world at that time.
When I sat to write the final draft of Midnight, At The War, I remembered DeLillo, and I remembered Calvino – and I laughed aloud to an empty room when I realized where I had drawn the names of two of the prominent characters in my book, Hanan and Zahra.
I am borrowing with gratitude from these amazing writers. What these books taught me was to tell the story not as a tool to educate, but to confer empathy, dignity, and compassion on the characters and the situation.
In Mao II, for example, DeLillo does that with ease as we are enveloped in his suspenseful world. We only know what we know about the contemporary world as we begin – and that is enough to propel us to communicate with the book, enjoy it, and have it resonate with us decades later.