CANR
WORK TITLE: A Curious Land
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: www.susanmuaddidarraj.com
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STATE: MD
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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PERSONAL
Born c. 1975, in Philadelphia, PA.; married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Rutgers University–Camden, B.A., 1997, M.A. 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, academic. Harford Community College, Bel Air, MD, associate professor of English; Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program, lecturer; Fairfield University‘s MFA program, faculty member. Former editor, Barrelhouse Magazine and Baltimore Review.
MEMBER:Middle East Studies Association (MESA); Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI); Association of Writers and Writing Progams (AWP); National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA); Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).
AWARDS:Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, 2014, American Book Award, 2016, and Arab American Book Award, 2016, all for A Curious Land: Stories from Home; Ford Foundation Fellowship, United States Artists, 2018; Rose Nader Award, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 2019.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction and essays have appeared in Orchid Literary Review, Mizna, Sukoon, Banipal, Christian Science Monitor, Little Patuxent Review, Baltimore City Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer, Al-Jadid, Baltimore Magazine, Pages Magazine, Sojourner, Calyx, and Urbanite, among others. Muaddi Darraj has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections.
SIDELIGHTS
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the award-winning author of two story collections, A Curious Land: Stories from Home and The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly. Both collections deal with the lives of Palestinians in their home country and in new homes in the United States and elsewhere abroad. Darraj, of Palestinian descent, was born in Philadelphia and earned her B.A. and M.A. at Rutgers University–Camden. An Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland as well as a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program, Darraj has also written numerous biographies and volumes of historical narrative for younger readers in the Chelsea House imprint.
Growing up, Darraj rejected the media representation of Arab women as oppressed. Instead, she focused on powerful women like Hanan Ashrawi, a legislator in Palestine, as well as a scholar and activist. As Darraj noted in an interview in the online Arab American News, Ashrawi was one of the “first positive image[s] for Arab women” depicted in the news. Darraj was also an avid reader, inspired by the works of Alice Walker and June Jordan, who “expressed what it was like to be in America and to be an insider and an outsider all at once,” as she further commented in Arab American News. When it came to writing her own works, Darraj decided she needed to portray the vital role of women in the history of Palestine.
In a Fifth Wednesday Journal website interview with Daniel Libman, Darraj commented on her writing regimen: “I’m very disciplined. I have three young children and I have to make time for myself to write. It’s funny because I have friends who get up early in the morning to exercise and they say if you get up early in the morning, you’ll feel good the rest of the day. I’ve adapted that for my writing. For the last fifteen years I’ve been getting up at 4:45am, I make a pot of coffee, and at 5 o’clock I sit down with my words. . . . It’s not always writing. Sometimes I’m stuck. But I’ll always do some reading or some journaling for two hours, from 5-7.”
In her 2007 collection, The Inheritance of Exile, Darraj interweaves the stories of four Arab American women: Hanan, Reema, Nadia, and Aliyah. These are the daughters of Palestinian immigrants who settled in the southern district of Philadelphia, and who struggle to balance their Palestinian identity with their American identity, caught in a cultural tug-of-war between the two locations. Darraj also blends the reflections of these young women’s mothers to help illuminate the gulf between the generations of immigrants.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Darraj “succeeds admirably in suggesting the diversity of Palestinian-Americans.” Similarly, a contributor in the online Diary of an Eccentric noted: “Darraj does a wonderful job moving between the characters and the stories, giving each a distinctive voice. The stories flowed so beautifully and read so easily that it wasn’t long before I turned the last page, and it was sad, feeling like I’d closed the door on old friends.”
Darraj’s 2015 A Curious Land is an interconnected collection of stories dealing with several generations of Palestinians who all originate from the village of Tel al-Hilou. The collection won numerous awards, including the Grace Paley Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the American Book Award. In a Books Are Not a Luxury website interview with Zahie El Kouri, Darraj commented regarding the book’s reception: “I feel grateful that the book has been received quite well in the Arab American community — it won the 2016 Arab American Book Award for fiction, which was a lovely surprise. I was happy because the book does not always portray Palestinian culture and values in a ‘positive light,’ so to speak — there is a philandering priest, there are abusive husbands, there are hostile mothers-in-law. I did worry what people would say, but I’ve been lucky to have an outpouring of support from my community.”
The nine stories in the volume deal directly or indirectly with the fallout of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The collection begins in 1916 as the First World War spreads chaos across the Levant. From there, the tales spread out with the Palestinian diaspora. Writing in Electronic Intifada website, Sarah Irving had praise for A Curious Land, terming it a “both a richly enjoyable tale spanning a century of Palestinian history and a nuanced meditation on the meaning of memory, home, longing and belonging.” Online Necessary Fiction reviewer Saadia Faruqi was also impressed with the collection, commenting that it “humanizes a political situation, offering the reader a way to understand the steady settlement activity of the Israeli occupation through the eyes and ears of the inhabitants of the villagers,” who are all “vividly brought to life in this collection.” Writing in the online JMWW, Rosalia Scalia noted: “These nine stories offer readers a look at the transformative powers of love.” Scalia added, “The stories in this collection also resonate with humor and hilarity. … This collection offers a glimpse of what it means to be what it means to belong to a place and to be connected to people so deeply that one can’t easily forget them.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2007, Hazel Rochman, review of Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams: Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland, p. 87.
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2007, review of The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly, p. 58.
School Library Journal, August, 2010, Ann W. Moore, review of The Collapse of the Soviet Union, p. 118.
ONLINE
Arab American News, https://www.arabamericannews.com/ (April 14, 2017), Zahraa Farhat, “Arab American Author Tells Stories from the Intersection betweent Cultures.”
Books are Not a Luxury, https://booksarenotaluxury.com/ (March 22, 2017), Zahie El Kouri, “A Q&A with Susan Muaddi Darraj.”
Diary of an Eccentric, https://diaryofaneccentric.wordpress.com/ (December 11, 2008), review of The Inheritance of Exile.
Electronic Intifada, https://electronicintifada.net/ (June 13, 2016), review of A Curious Land.
Fifth Wednesday Journal, http://www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com/ (July 19, 2019), “Takes the Fifth with Daniel Libman.”
Harford Community College website, https://www.harford.edu/ (March 7, 2019), “Susan Muaddi Darraj Receives Rose Nader Award.”
JMWW, https://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/ (February 16, 2016 ), Rosalia Scalia, review of A Curious Land.
John Hopkins University website, https://advanced.jhu.edu/ (July 19, 2019), “Susan Muaddi-Darraj.”
Lebanese Studies, North Carolina State University website, https://lebanesestudies.news.chass.ncsu.edu/ (October 31, 2017 ), Marjorie Stevens, review of A Curious Land.
Necessary Fiction, http://necessaryfiction.com/ (February 15, 2016), Saadia Faruqi, review of A Curious Land; (June 13, 2017), Amina Gautier, “An interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj.”
Palestine Book Awards website, https://www.palestinebookawards.com/ (July 19, 2019), “Susan Muaddi Darraj.”
Rutgers Camden College of Arts and Sciences website, https://fas.camden.rutgers.edu/ (August 18, 2014), “Susan Muaddi Darraj.”
Susan Muaddi Darraj website, https://susanmuaddidarraj.com (July 19, 2019).
United States Artist website, https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/ (July 19, 2019), (July 19, 2019), “Susan Muaddi Darraj.”
Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (January 6, 2019), Leila Fadel, author interview.
Biography
Susan Muaddi Darraj is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. A 2018 USA Ford Fellow, Susan is also a Lecturer in the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program and a faculty member in Fairfield University‘s MFA program.
In 2014, her short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jaime Manrique. The book was published in December 2015 by the University of Massachusetts Press. It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press.
In January 2020, Capstone Books will launch her debut children’s chapter book series, Farah Rocks, about a smart, brave Palestinian American girl named Farah Hajjar.
In 2018, she was named a 2018 Ford Fellow by USA Artists. Susan also is a two-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. She has also been awarded a Ruby’s Artist Grant from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation.
In 2019, she launched the viral #TweetYourThobe social media campaign to promote Palestinian culture. Later that year, she was named winner of the Rose Nader Award, by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an award given by the Nader family to a person who “demonstrates an unwavering dedication and commitment to values of equality and justice.”
She edited Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing , which was published in 2004 by Praeger Publishers. With Waïl Hassan, she co-edited a volume for the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. She has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies and collections, including Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Her other books include young adult biographies of Indira Gandhi, Amy Tan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others, for Chelsea House Publishers.
Susan is a former editor at Barrelhouse Magazine and The Baltimore Review. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Stories, The Orchid Literary Review, Mizna, Sukoon, Banipal, and elsewhere. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Little Patuxent Review, The Baltimore City Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Al-Jadid, Baltimore Magazine, Pages Magazine, Sojourner, Calyx, Urbanite, and other forums.
A co-founder (along with the editors of The Potomac Review and Barrelhouse) of the annual conference, Conversations & Connections: Practical Advice on Getting Published , Susan speaks often at conferences on topics ranging from Arab-American literature to creative writing to pedagogy.
She has been an invited speaker at the University of Hartford, the Community College of Baltimore County, the University of Maryland, Rutgers University, the University of Baltmore, the University of Miami, Stanford University, and other institutions.
She belongs to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI), the Association of Writers and Writing Progams (AWP), the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She is a former Board Member of RAWI.
A participating author with the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program, Susan is also a professional member of the PEN America Center. She served as a member of the selection committee for the One Maryland One Book (OMOB) program of the Maryland Humanities Council, and she frequently serves as a judge for writing contests and as a panelist on state and national grant programs in the creative arts.
She can be found on Twitter/Instagram at @SusanDarraj. You can also visit her Amazon Author Page.
Susan Muaddi-Darraj, Adjunct Faculty
Advanced Academic Programs | Johns Hopkins University > About Us > Faculty > Susan Muaddi-Darraj, Adjunct Faculty
MA in Writing Faculty, Fiction
Susan Muaddi Darraj’s A Curious Land: Stories from Home, won the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, came out in 2007 and other books include young adult biographies of Indira Gandhi, Amy Tan, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She is a former editor at Barrelhouse Magazine and The Baltimore Review, edited Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing (2004), and co-edited a volume for the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In 2018, she was named a Ford Fellow by USA Artists.
Her website is susanmuaddidarraj.com.
QUOTE:
I feel grateful that the book has been received quite well in the Arab American community — it won the 2016 Arab American Book Award for fiction, which was a lovely surprise. I was happy because the book does not always portray Palestinian culture and values in a “positive light,” so to speak — there is a philandering priest, there are abusive husbands, there are hostile mothers-in-law. I did worry what people would say, but I’ve been lucky to have an outpouring of support from my community.
March 22, 2017
A Q&A with Susan Muaddi Darraj
By Zahie El Kouri
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of two story collections, including the Grace Paley Award-winning A Curious Land: Stories from Home.
A Curious Land: Stories from Home is a collection of interconnected stories spanning generations and continents, all generating from the Palestinian village of Tel al-Hilou. Reading this book was a very powerful experience for me. Not only was it amazing in terms of characterization, structure, and line-by-line writing, but it also answered so many questions I didn’t know I had about Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and immigrant culture. In 2016, A Curious Land won both an American Book Award and an Arab American Book Award. The author’s previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was honored by the U.S. State Department’s Arabic Book Program.
Zahie El Kouri
The book is compelling both for and beyond its exploration of the Palestinian and immigrant experience. How has it been received both within and outside Middle Eastern communities?
What is it like to discuss the book with non-Arab readers? Do the non-Arab readers catch things like Abu Ammar (the familial name for Yasser Arafat) and “combleet jerk” in “Christmas in Palestine”? (There is no letter “p” in Arabic.) Do they ask what those details mean?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
I feel grateful that the book has been received quite well in the Arab American community — it won the 2016 Arab American Book Award for fiction, which was a lovely surprise. I was happy because the book does not always portray Palestinian culture and values in a “positive light,” so to speak — there is a philandering priest, there are abusive husbands, there are hostile mothers-in-law. I did worry what people would say, but I’ve been lucky to have an outpouring of support from my community.
The book also was shortlisted for the Palestine Award, which is sponsored by the Middle East Monitor and given to books about Palestine written in English. That was quite an honor as well, and gave me a sense of how the book was received on a more international scope.
Non-Arab readers seem to like those details you mention in A Curious Land. They get some of the jokes I’ve planted. They have mostly responded to how familiar some of the characters and their situations feel, which makes me feel great to know that the book appeals to so many people.
Zahie El Kouri
The title A Curious Land is attributed to WEB DuBois, and you include his full quote from The Souls of Black Folk in the epigraph. Can you discuss how his work influenced you?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
When I was younger, I didn’t know of any books by Arab American authors. Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful novel Habibi wasn’t published until the 1990s, when I was in college, and there have been many books since then, by Randa Jarrar, Ahdaf Soueif, and others. But in the 1980s and early 1990s I discovered African-American writers, and I understood my own identity struggle through that lens: I read bell hooks, Alice Walker, June Jordan. And of course, DuBois, who writes much earlier, in the early 1900s. His theory of ‘double consciousness’ –the concept that African-American people develop a “two-ness” by which they see themselves through the eyes of others — spoke to me. It helped me understand how Arab Americans were viewed, how people already thought they understood us before they even spoke to us.
DuBois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk, is his attempt, in 1901, to take a “snapshot” picture of the African-American community in the United States at that particular moment in history. I think I was trying to do something like this in A Curious Land, to describe the history of Palestine and all its wars and all its tragedies, in a fictional format.
In The Souls of Black Folk, he says in a description of the deep South, “How curious a land is this — how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!” These words, in my opinion, can also apply to Palestine — it’s filled with stories that have never been told.
Zahie El Kouri
In other interviews, you have mentioned your love of Indian Anglophone literature and of Gish Jen. How and why has Asian diaspora literature influenced you? What are your favorites?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
I am influenced by the ways in which other “hyphenated” American or Anglophone writers express identity and the intersection of cultures. My absolute favorite writer is Rohinton Mistry; his novel, A Fine Balance, is a masterpiece of historical fiction. I also enjoy reading Jhumpa Lahiri, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Gish Jen. I recently read Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong—what a marvelous novel.
Zahie El Kouri
The stories in this book are separate and can be enjoyed independently, but they also link together in a larger narrative. How did you go about linking these stories? Why did you approach the narrative in this way, rather than writing a novel?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
The history of Palestine has been so fragmented by wars, and the landscape so fragmented by occupation and settlements, that I felt this format worked. I wanted the book to have an ‘epic’ feeling, and so I thought I could also cover more of the timeline I wanted to by using interconnected short stories.
I began with one story, “Abu Sufayan,” and that character of the old man himself. I wrote that story first. I was fascinated by him—a man who has seen so much, and is such an icon of the village, but a man who is willing to go against tradition. What would make him so different? Why wouldn’t he be like all the other men in his tribe? So I started to invent a backstory for him, and that is when I wrote “The Journey Home.” From there, I wrote the story of Abu Sufayan’s granddaughter, Salma—what became of her? And before you know it, I began populating this village.
Zahie El Kouri
This is amazing! The two stories felt so organic. I felt like I wanted to be drawing a diagram of the character connections while I was reading the book. Now I have a million questions about the process of constructing the village. How did you do it? Did you have notecards? Timelines?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
You can buy A Curious Land at your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.
I was just giving a talk at Valdosta State University in Georgia, and I was asked this question. I explained to the audience there that I actually drew a physical map of the village, as a way to keep the setting straight in my mind. One reason this was helpful was that, in constructing a village, or a place, to make it real, you have to have landmarks. There were some places that appeared over and over in the stories—the Orthodox church, the qahwah (coffee shop), the Israeli settlement on the opposite hill. So I drew a map of the village on large sheets of white paper and hung them up above my writing table, so I could keep that visual. As the stories developed, the village changed, and so new maps were sketched out and rehung.
Another thing that helped me was to draw a family tree, with birthdates and years, because many of the characters are the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, of ones who appear in earlier stories. I had to make sure the dates were right, because if Abu Sufayan were 60 in one story, he had to be in his early thirties in an earlier story, because it was set during World War I, for example. I spent a lot of time on things like that, adding and subtracting. The reader may not know (or care) how old Abu Sufayan was in a particular story, but I needed to know that information as I write the story because he had to be clear and real in my mind.
Zahie El Kouri
I was struck by the fact that the title of the Abu Sufayan eponymous story is the name of a person who would not exist if not for the choice the protagonist makes in the preceding story. If Jamil had not kept his promise to marry Hilwa, he might have had another life with Rabab and maybe a different son, and a different “father of” name.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Yes. One reviewer, Amina Gautier, said that Jamil and Rabab are like the Adam and Eve of this book, that all the other major characters emanate from their story. I love that.
Zahie El Kouri
I love the elliptical nature of time in “Rocky Soil”. I love how the story begins with Eveline’s death, because that is how Arabs think about things, always the joy with the shadow of sadness, usually death or separation from family: “They were all dressed in black, like a flock of crows that had descended on the village, picking at every morsel of grief, holding it up for all to see and inspire new tears.” Why did you choose this structure for the story?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
In that story, I was playing with a narrative voice that was close to Emad but also distant, a narrator who spans time and can “see” the whole timeline of the story’s events. I liked the feeling of that narrative voice, so I went with it. I liked the idea of backtracking from a funeral, to tell the love story from its origins. It’s one of my favorite stories in the book, actually.
Zahie El Kouri
One of the most interesting and sympathetic characters is Salma, the granddaughter of Abu Sufayan. Her story is especially sad, but also uplifting. How did you come to create her character? Is she intended to be representative of Palestinian women?
I loved the fact that we see so much of Salma’s life from other perspectives before we hear her story in Behind the Pillars of the Orthodox Church. My experience is that having children was the most important thing a person could do (male or female) and the fact that Salma meant so much to so many people without having been a mother was very important.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
No, Salma is not intended to be representative of all Palestinian women, but of a “type” of Palestinian woman—the local activist, the woman (every village has one) who is dependable, reliable, and everyone’s “auntie.” The rare woman whom all the men in the village respect and to whom they defer.
In her story, I wanted to show how sometimes your life can change because of someone else’s mistake. How no matter what you plan for your life to turn out otherwise, your plans will be thwarted. It’s like Robert Burns’ line about “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”—they will go awry. That also gave me an opportunity to show how political violence—the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1948—affected so many people, even those who did not make it into the history books.
Also, Salma was a victim of her own family as well as of the political upheaval of the time. It was important for me to show that.
Zahie El Kouri
In “The Fall,” Sufi muses on how he fundamentally misunderstands the past, how he is adding details about cacti in his mother’s life in Guatemala and vineyards in Palestine. Did you grow up feeling like there were gaps in your understanding of your family history? And how have you filled these with research? Did you do oral histories, or were stories passed down to you that were detail-rich enough to be able to represent the past? What books about Palestinian and Middle Eastern history were the most important to your understanding?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
I grew up, like many children of immigrants, with stories my parents told about “back home.” Being Palestinian, hearing about “back home” was sort of a disconnect, because Palestine is neither a place you can locate on a map of the world, nor a nation that others recognize. So Palestine existed for me in stories. We also visited the West Bank over many summers, and one summer, while in college, I studied at BirZeit University, near Ramallah, which was a wonderful experience.
I did conduct some research, however, because I do cover almost one hundred years of history, and I cover events like the Arab Strike, the bombing of the King David Hotel, the intifadah, the few years after the Oslo Accords. I wanted to get things right. Palestinian history is always being denied and contested, so I wanted to make sure that—even though I am writing fiction—I am writing historical fiction, and there is an obligation to be accurate.
I have been reading Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, whose books are thoroughly researched and richly detailed. Rashid Khalidi is another wonderful source — all of his books are excellent.
A few years ago, I became interested in Palestinian “village books,” which are being written by people to preserve and document their village history and genealogies. I read Rochelle Davis’ book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, which is excellent. Salma, in A Curious Land, writes a village book about Tel al-Hilou because she fears that the village will be overrun by the nearby Israeli settlement on the opposite hilltop.
Zahie El Kouri
There is a lot of criticism here of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but there is also criticism of Palestinian cultural norms as well. In “Rocky Soil,” Eveline’s family proudly displays the wedding night bed sheet to demonstrate Eveline’s virginity, but Manal is educated and able to live in a different village as a teacher, and no one thinks she is an inappropriate match for Emad. And in “The Well,” Amira makes a choice about whom to marry and follows through on it even though her parents don’t like it. And in “Village Gossip,” Jibril reverts to an older idea of a woman’s role in marriage, and when his father tries to question his attitude, explains that “the occupation made a man feel like less than a man.” Did you struggle with this? Many writers are critiqued by their own communities for writing plainly—Alice Walker, for example. Were you conscious of opening yourself up to criticism over this?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Yes, I struggled with that quite a bit, but I felt like I had to be honest and accurate. Every culture has its progressive and its regressive aspects, and so I wanted to show the entire range. I have not had much criticism over this, maybe because overall, Palestinian history and culture is so beautiful, and I hope I have been able to put that on display.
Zahie El Kouri
A recurring theme is how the choices people are making are influenced by war and the threat of war. How people are looking to marriages and children and religious callings as a way to have peace within external turmoil. When Samar insists on marrying at 17, she says, “There’s a war, Mama”, and her mother understands, “There’s no time to wait and think.”
And in “Abu Sufayan,” the protagonist says “(a)n accident calls for sulha, not the spilling of blood. This village has not spilled blood since I was a child! Let’s remember our ways, our laws. We have them, despite what the British soldiers think of us.” I was deeply affected by this internal village conflict, that this intra-familial conflict was going on with the backdrop of the British and with the Jewish settlements. Am I reading correctly that there was a suggestion that just as maybe the two families would have been able to resolve their differences without blood, maybe the Jews and Arabs would have been able to live in peace without the Ottomans and British? That they were pushed to behave more drastically by the way the Ottomans and British were treating them?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
I’ve always been intrigued by the question of “How much do our circumstances (especially stressful circumstances)—rather than our values—dictate our actions?” In other words, in “Rocky Soil,” Eveline’s parents marry her off—in one week!—to an Arab American who’s come “home” looking for a bride. They are better people than this, but of course, the economic situation in the West Bank is crumbling, and in their minds, this is a chance to offer her a better life. Eveline is really a victim here, and so naive—she buys into the “dream” and gets into the hastily-prepared wedding festivities. But of course, when she gets to America, she realizes she has married into a nightmare.
How could her parents have predicted this? It’s easy to criticize them, and I believe the tone of the story generally does, because the narrative is aligned with the view of Emad, her jilted boyfriend. And yet, the reader can hopefully put himself or herself in their dire situation—what other hope is there? For them, the American who has come home and takes a liking to their daughter is like winning the lottery. Should Eveline stay in the West Bank, what are her options? A highly educated woman has a slim chance of landing a job that suits her, and she might be miserable. Also war is always looming in the background, which is terrifying.
Zahie El Kouri
That’s interesting. Even though I was also aligned with Emad, I really felt for Eveline’s parents in that story as well. I was struck by how kind and welcoming they were when Emad came to visit after Eveline returned. They clearly felt so much embarrassment and shame, but they were still able to open their hearts to him.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Yes, I wanted to show that they felt embarrassed, they realized what they had done was misguided, and that, in viewing Emad’s renewed interest, they hoped he would now help them solve a bigger problem—how to marry off a daughter who is divorced and with a child. Of course, we also see Emad’s family reacting strongly against this, and they warn Emad that they won’t accept such a marriage.
The theme here is the way in which the culture (this is the culture of the 1970s in the West Bank) and the political situation (the Israeli occupation) threaten Eveline’s happiness, and Emad has to decide how far he will go to have autonomy and agency over his own life. He’s been concerned with this all along, and when their schoolmate is killed during a demonstration, Emad is plagued with the thought that no matter how hard you strive to reach your goals, a soldier with a gun can just end your life on a whim. He hopes that money, being frugal, will give him agency, but he realizes, with Eveline’s return, that he has to make difficult choices.
There are other characters, besides Eveline’s parents, whom the reader may dislike, but I try to clarify the reasons for their behavior. For example, Salma’s parents favor her brother over her, which is painfully clear to her as a young woman. However, they are living in the early to mid-1900s, when having a son is so integral to one’s identity—your name is changed in your society when you have a son, for example. Can we try to understand, if we cannot approve of, their actions, their attempts to always push their son forward, to give him every opportunity?
Zahie El Kouri
Adlah, the main character in “Christmas in Palestine,” makes a momentous journey back to Palestine and Tel al-Hilou. How did you shape Adlah’s character and her struggle to be a mother? Her story intersects with the overall narrative of the death of Demetri, the young child who is killed in the second story, “Abu Sufayan.” Why did you link these together?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Adlah’s struggle with infertility was based on my own. I wanted to connect her story to that of Demetri as a way to “close the loop”—the book is a collection of interconnected stories, but there is an overall narrative: how does the death of Demetri ripple through subsequent generations? Adlah has to face the fact that her chances at motherhood are gone, and she has to grieve for that. Of course, she’s already lost so much in her life, including her mother and her country.
Zahie El Kouri
Yes, that makes so much sense. I thought it was so powerful that Amira chose motherhood over love and then found love, and that Adlah had to reconnect with her loving stepmother to feel the possibility that motherhood can come in different forms. Whose story came to you first?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Adlah’s story was first, because I had been trying to write a story with a character who suffers from infertility for some time. I experienced it myself, and it’s an agonizing process. I could tap into the longing and the heartache that my character was feeling.
Zahie El Kouri
How is writing about Palestine an act of resistance? What is the work of an Arab-American writer in a culture full of so much hate, for Palestinians, for Jews, for Muslims, and for so many others? I feel like I continue to read stories about this village and its diaspora forever. Will you continue to tell these stories, or will your next project be different?
Susan Muaddi Darraj
I’m stunned by the hostility we see today against Muslims and Arabs in the United States. I think that it’s important to have stories and books where young Arab Americans can see themselves and their lives and the lives of their families mirrored, because it’s isolating and frightening to be an Arab in this country today. I think often of Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—they were killed by a neighbor in their apartment in Chapel Hill, NC, in 2015—young people, full of life, who were nevertheless murdered for being “the other.” This new travel ban is a Muslim ban, no matter how anyone in the administration tries to explain it or justify it, and it’s clear that this country reviles Arabs when in fact, more murders are committed by non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Fear trumps facts, but literature can trump fear. So we have to keep writing and keep insisting on a place for our stories in the literary canon.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
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Susan Muaddi Darraj is an Arab American writer. She has written several articles on Arab and Arab American women and feminism, as well as a collection of short fiction, The Inheritance of Exile,[1] which won several awards. A Curious Land: Stories from Home, has the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction[2] and was shortlisted for the 2016 Palestine Book Award.[3] She won an American Book Award in 2016, and United States Artists awarded her a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 2018.
Bibliography[edit]
A Curious Land: Stories from Home (short story collection). University of Massachusetts Press, October 2015.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz (co-editor). Modern Language Association of America, 2012.
The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (short story collection). University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab-American Women’s Voices on Writing (editor). Praeger Publishers, August 2004.
Susan Muaddi Darraj won the 2016 American Book Award for her second short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home. She is also the author of The Inheritance of Exile, as well as numerous young adult biographies, articles, book reviews, and essays. She also has been awarded the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction and the Arab American Book Award, and A Curious Land was also shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award. You can visit her at www.SusanMuaddiDarraj.com or via Twitter at @SusanDarraj. She has been recognized twice by a literary grant by the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance recently named her one of its 2016 Ruby's Literary Arts grant awardees. She lives in Baltimore, MD.
Quote:
I’m very disciplined. I have three young children and I have to make time for myself to write. It’s funny because I have friends who get up early in the morning to exercise and they say if you get up early in the morning, you’ll feel good the rest of the day. I’ve adapted that for my writing. For the last fifteen years I’ve been getting up at 4:45am, I make a pot of coffee, and at 5 o’clock I sit down with my words . . .. It’s not always writing. Sometimes I’m stuck. But I’ll always do some reading or some journaling for two hours, from 5-7.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Takes the Fifth WITH DANIEL LIBMAN
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of The Inheritance of Exile, which was a finalist in the AWP Book Awards Series and named ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year (Short Fiction). She is a fiction editor for Barrelhouse Magazine and co-founder of the annual Conversations & Connections Conference: Practical Advice on Getting Published. Her new book, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named winner of the AWP Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction and the American Book Award, and shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award. She is a two-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Daniel Libman
Fifth Wednesday Journal: The phrase “linked stories” is almost meaningless because it’s used so much to market collections, but yours is the real deal: stories that connect, comment and greatly enrich each other when read together.
Susan Muaddi Darraj: I definitely did think of it as a conceptual whole, trying to tell the story of a community. That was my goal although I didn’t know that when I started out. I was just writing one story, “Abu Sufayan.” The original version was much shorter and I got it published in Mizna, an Arab American literary journal. Even several months later, I kept coming back to it and I thought: my character is very unusual. He’s a man who’s a wise and reflective person in a tumultuous time. He’s the voice of reason. I kept thinking, what made him that way? Characters are like real people in that their experiences help create their future personalities. I wondered what made him so wise and rational. Later I wrote what became the first story in the book, “The Journey Home.” That was a difficult story to write because it was loosely based on my grandfather’s experience.
FWJ: It’s a family story?
SMD: Loosely. He was born in 1885 so he was young man in the beginning of WWI. The Ottomans had begun to conscript people, Lebanese and Palestinians, to the front lines and he was forcibly drafted to the war and he did run away from the Turkish army. He never really talked about it, but the story goes he was taken one day and a year later he showed up again. He walked from Damascus to my family’s village, which is close to Jerusalem.
FWJ: In the place where most of the stories in A Curious Land are set?
SMD: The village I create in the book is a composite of several villages. But, yes, that escape is a true story, although I imagined the rest, what happened to him during that time, how he escaped. He never really talked about the specifics, as far as I know. Probably some PTSD there.
FWJ: There was a different kind of a code on what men said about war.
SMD: Exactly. And what you would admit. But I know later events; for example, in the 1948 war and in 1967 he had his doors open to the refugees who came through my family’s village. He was very keen on helping people. His house was always open to anyone who needed a place to stay or to hide. For me as a fiction writer I put that all together and kind of imagined what happened to him at that time, that he was found by a group of Bedouins. I know from my historical research Bedouins were affected very much by World War I. So I just put all those elements together. I found out from research this was an actual policy during the Ottoman Empire to conscript young Arab men during those last days of the war when the Ottomans knew they were losing. So yes, a lot of family stories are braided into this book, and a lot of historical research is also weaved in. I’m trying to create a sense of place and time, which is difficult because the place stays the same but I’m moving throughout an entire century.
FWJ: When did you write that story and when did you decide it would be the lead piece in the collection?
SMD: “The Journey Home” was the second story I wrote and it wasn’t until later when I thought about how to order them. Originally I was going to put it second. In other words, in “Abu Sufayan” you learn he has this past and then in the second story you would find out what it is. But my reader is a Western reader. I was throwing a lot of unfamiliar names and terms and cultural facts at the reader. I thought I should give a timeline that was familiar, a chronological timeline.
FWJ: So the stories are in chronological order as a guideline for the reader?
SMD: That’s the challenge for linked short stories. The reader has to put things together and is a very active part of the process. As a writer, you have to create links for readers to hold on to.
FWJ: The stories contain some italicized Arab words and terms. Some I eventually figured out from context, like servees, but others I never did, although the words worked on the level atmosphere and authenticity. Is it difficult to know when to go with an Arab word versus when to translate? Is the process deliberate or mostly intuitive?
SMD: It’s really tough! I know 20 or 25 years ago people who were using foreign words in their writing were really working hard to make sure the readers got it. Some writers put glossaries in the back.
FWJ: I have to admit I did flip back once to see if there was a glossary.
SMD: Did you? Well, a lot of people included them and other writers will work very hard to define what the word means in context. I think lately we see — especially with Latin American writers — people are just dropping the words and telling the reader: here, figure it out. Junot Diaz does that quite a bit. His narrators drop in Spanish words. The narrators aren’t helping but Junot Diaz the author is behind the scenes offering some contextual clues. It’s brilliant. I tried to do it the same way, use some of the words for atmosphere as you say, but not make it too artificial, not make the attempt at helping the reader too obvious. The more difficult part is translating what people said from Arabic to English so a lot of the English sentences are translations of phrases like “God willing,” I put that in there a lot. That’s a translation of the phrase inshallah, which people say all the time. When you hear people saying it English, it sounds overdone but it is really what people are saying in Arabic.
FWJ: But it’s idiomatic? People aren’t trying to invoke God every time they say it.
SMD: Exactly. They’ll say something like, “The Orioles are playing tonight. They will win inshallah.” It can be a very casual thing.
FWJ: Your stories are as rooted in character as they are in place. When you’re starting out a story which is the stronger pull?
SMD: I’m definitely more motivated with character. Like with Abu Sufayan, why is he able to not go along with everyone else in the village? His wife and his son are participating when they want to take revenge. Why is he that way and what problems will that cause for him later on? And then I became interested in his granddaughter, who hides his secret that night and later on has her own secrets to hide. I definitely am fascinated by character and I think that’s one way when you’re writing about unfamiliar places your readers can still latch on to a familiar person. We all have wise elders in our lives, aunts who know everyone’s business, for example. The characters feel familiar even if the place does not.
FWJ: “The Fall” is a story told in a male first person voice, very modern and very American. Was it difficult to switch gears like that?
SMD: That was the most familiar for me because I know that voice really well. It was really fun as a female writer to write from that working class, young, breezy male voice. I love that character. That story was interesting because I thought originally of telling the story from the perspective of the father. But the father is so…
FWJ: Closed off?
SMD: Right. He tries not to think about what he did in the past and he’s just so immersed in his own sense of guilt. I thought, well, a father who’s like that would surely have an impact. That personality when you’re a parent has ramifications on the children, so what are his kids like? I gave him one child and wrote it from the perspective of his son. That story I rewrote many, many times. But I’m proud of that story and have gotten a good response.
FWJ: I also know that voice really well and you nailed it. The story “Ride Along” which appears in this issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal is also in first person.
SMD: It’s a young man whose sister has been thrown out of their family by the father. Their mother has died some years ago. The sister is getting her life back together, she’s in college and she’s dating an African American man and so the main character is sort of going between the father and the sister, trying to handle the family tensions that normally would have been his mother’s task
FWJ: In A Curious Land, after deciding to present in chronological order, did you write them in that order?
SMD: Not really. The third story I wrote is actually the last story in the book.
FWJ: The Christmas story?
SMD: I never thought of putting it in the book and then later as I realized I was working on a collection, I rewrote it in a substantive way to help it tie into the book. Originally my two characters were not related to the village, then I gave my female character a link; she’s the stepdaughter of Amira so it was a different kind of story. It was much longer than the others — originally I thought of titling the book Christmas in Palestine and Other Stories but then I felt it didn’t quite capture the mood of the whole book.
FWJ: That story does feels like a coda, like it is separate from the others.
SMD: Well, it was challenging too because, throughout the book, a lot of my characters leave the village and go to other countries — Palestinians are in a Diaspora currently — but in this one I had a character who was coming back and witnessing the changes. And also that’s the story where I offer some criticisms of the Palestinian Authority, in the way that the Arafat regime was taxing people to death and making it impossible to build a state after the Oslo Accords. Obviously, the Israeli military and the ongoing occupation helped kill the peace deal, but the Authority also made it really difficult for people to return.
FWJ: You could interpret a political undertone in that title if it had been the title of the book — how much were you thinking about politics when you published these stories? Were you concerned at all that your work would politicized? How much of that was in your thinking as you wrote?
SMD: I thought about that a lot because I feel like “Palestinian” is automatically a political identity. If you tell someone you’re Palestinian American, they immediately start talking politics with you, or it has been my experience that if they’re pro-Israeli, they will often start contesting your identity. I had a college professor — I’ve written about this—who told me, “There’s no such thing as Palestinian people. Your family is really Jordanian.” I’ve had that experience many times so the Palestinian identity, whether we like it or not, is political. But I’m an American fiction writer and American fiction is character-driven and so that’s where I was going with this, hoping to really humanize a very political story. I was hoping my readers would look at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that perspective. I deliberately did not insert a lot of politics in the stories for that reason.
FWJ: A lot of the time, as you write it, politics are in the background, murmured opinions, the back channeled thoughts about global events — while your characters are experiencing real life, for lack of a better term. “Intifada Love Story” is the story where the reader is most aware of a global political situation and its impact on the personal.
SMD: It’s funny, when you’re writing fiction you’re doing a lot of stagecraft. I want to bring out the tensions of these characters, so I had to think: what situation can I put them in that will bring out those tensions? What I was really focused on was the frustration of this young man, the main character. I wanted to get him to be stuck in the house with his family. I had heard from relatives about how after a skirmish, the military will literally find the tallest building in a village and turn it into their post. The family in the house is locked down because of that. So that’s what I did: I had him locked in the house with his family and I had the military right there on the roof. Every scene of the story is told from a day to day perspective: Day one, day four… And I could track the mounting frustration of the family in that way. That was an interesting story to write because you don’t want to demonize the other side. That’s another kind of struggle I have as a writer, to not demonize either side. You want the reader to trust you and a lot of the elements are based on things that actually happened to people I know.
FWJ: Let’s talk about you as a writer. Did you have a clear moment of epiphany when you decided you were going to write?
SMD: I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer. As an elementary school student, I was writing stories in leftover notebooks from the school year. My father and my uncle are both poets — my uncle has published a few books of his poems in Arabic — and I grew up in a house where reading was highly encouraged. My father recited Arabic poetry from memory. In the Middle East, the oral tradition is still very intense. My father has volumes of poetry he’s memorized and he will sit at breakfast and recite a few lines from something. I grew up with the sounds of poetry and literature.
FWJ: This was in Philadelphia?
SMD: Yes, before the era of Nintendo, Wii, and other such distractions. I read a lot. My mother encouraged my brothers and me to read a lot. We went to the Free Library every Saturday and loaded up on books. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but whenever those Scholastic book forms came home from school each month, my mother would make sure I ordered several books each time. So I loved to read, but of course, I never saw an Arab character in a book. I thought, growing up as an Arab American, that literature was about Caucasian characters. My favorite book growing up was Anne of Green Gables. I still love that book. But I thought literature involved people who were not like me. At Rutgers University my professor there, Lisa Zeidner, a great poet and novelist, said to me during one of our conferences, “You’re Palestinian American right?” I said, “yeah.” She said, “So why are you writing stories about people named Heather and Jennifer?” And believe it or not, I had never really thought I could create literary stories about Arab American characters. I started to read books by African American writers. Alice Walker is a big influence on me. Latina writers like Julia Alvarez and Esmeralda Santiago’s book When We Were Puerto Rican — I love that book. Also South Asian writers. Probably my favorite writer is Rohinton Mistry. He’s one of those writers who just drops words into the text. I learned from other ethnic American writers how to write about my own community. In fact the title of my book comes from a book by Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, where he talks about the Deep South as an unknown territory, a curious land. And I felt that way about Palestine. People think they know what Palestinians are like, but I’m going to show them in this book what they’re really like. I was thinking, for example, of Alice Walker. She’s very critical of the black community and I knew I was going to be critical of my community as well. I knew I was going to write about these traditions, even the ones I find abhorrent, because I want my reader to trust me. Because this community is very politicized, if the reader is going to trust what I say about the Israeli military using the family water tank as a urinal, they’ll trust me if I write critically about other traditions, like hanging up the bed sheet on the wedding night.
FWJ: I also want to ask some Paris Review type questions about your writing habits.
SMD: Oh good — I’m always happy to answer those questions because I like reading about the habits of other writers.
FWJ: Me too. So how disciplined are you in terms of your writing time? What’s your routine?
SMD: I’m very disciplined. I have three young children and I have to make time for myself to write. It’s funny because I have friends who get up early in the morning to exercise and they say if you get up early in the morning, you’ll feel good the rest of the day. I’ve adapted that for my writing. For the last fifteen years I’ve been getting up at 4:45am, I make a pot of coffee, and at 5 o’clock I sit down with my words . . .. It’s not always writing. Sometimes I’m stuck. But I’ll always do some reading or some journaling for two hours, from 5-7.
FWJ: What do you write on?
SMD: It depends. If I’m writing nonfiction, I’ll often write on a laptop. If I’m writing fiction, I usually write longhand. My first major revision is when I type it into my laptop.
FWJ: Cursive? Legal pad?
SMD: Yes! I have excellent penmanship — Catholic school education — and I write on yellow legal pad with a black gel pen.
FWJ: Fine point?
SMD: No. The point seven millimeter. Sort of an in-between size.
FWJ: You stay there for two hours no matter what?
SMD: Yes, and if I’m not writing I’m reading something. I just feel good when I’m done. I feel productive. I’ve moved something along. The rest of the day I don’t feel resentful of my busy schedule. I have children and work full time and that’s a very intense schedule. But I feel like I’ve had my time, so now I can give my time to other things.
FWJ: And when you are stuck and reading instead of writing, what is it you’re reading?
SMD A lot of fiction. Sometimes I read craft books. Benjamin Percy has a book titled Thrill Me which is a wonderful collection on writing. Zadie Smith’s essay collection Changing My Mind is wonderful. Deborah Spark has a book of essays, Curious Attractions, which is also really good. In terms of fiction I have shelves and shelves of things I’m reading, like Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, and he’s already got a new one out.
FWJ: Do you reread a lot of books?
SMD: Very rarely. But I do mark up my books quite a bit and I will go back and look through the passages I’ve marked. Colm Tóibín has a novel called Brooklyn, and the other day I was marking it up because he has a scene where he handles time really well. The main character reflects how three weeks have already passed since she’s been in America and she’s relating what happened to her in a series of letters home. I thought it was a great way to do that which didn’t seem artificial.
FWJ: It’s like you’re collecting material for your own in book on craft.
SMD: Well, as a writer you’re always learning, always figuring out how other people have done it, taking notes. I feel like I’ll probably be that way forever. I hope I’ll be that way forever.
FWJ: Can I ask what you’re working now or are you superstitious about talking about it?
SMD: Isn’t that funny that people are so superstitious about that stuff? I’m working on a novel, not a short story collection, set in Philadelphia in the 1970s shortly after the Vietnam war. I’m still finishing the first draft and my agent is waiting for it. I write very slowly. There are two major characters, one of whom is a young woman who’s had a baby out of wedlock and she’s been sort of thrown out of the family by her immigrant parents but she remains in touch with her siblings. The other major character is a young man who has come back from the war.
FWJ: Is it difficult to transition from thinking in terms of the short story to the novel?
SMD: I’m reading to learn how to do it. I’ve thought of my collections as bigger pieces but I’m telling the story in a more fragmented way. This is different. I’m reading a lot of novels to see how they’re done and I just read a great one, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong by Aimee Phan, a young Vietnamese writer. I love how she tells it because she switches points of view, inserts fragments of letters from people. I love the model she came up with. I’m really big on structure, on story structure.
FWJ: Do you enjoy teaching? Does it impact your writing?
SMD: When I’m teaching — I just came back from the summer residency at Fairfield University where I taught a workshop — I just leave that environment with so much energy. There is something very empowering about looking at a student’s story and saying, here is where it works and here it where it needs improvement. And then sitting with them and working on making those improvements. It shows you that anyone can get better at telling a story. It’s also empowering because sometimes the improvement that needs to be made is simply shifting the point of view. I make them write each scene on a separate postcard and then we lay out the cards. I borrowed this trick from somebody, it’s not something I came up with. But we lay out the postcards and now we have the skeleton of the story and I say, is this progressing? Is this moving forward? What if we take the last scene and put it at the beginning of the story and work our way backwards. Would that build the suspense a little bit more? Would that intensify the telling of the story? Would that invest the reader sooner? It’s interesting and fun to do and forces them to take a second look at a story. And I leave with a lot of energy. On the train ride home I was just writing like crazy. It triggered a lot of my own ideas.
FWJ: A lot of writers complain that having to read so much student writing and say it subtracts from their own creative energy, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with you.
SMD: No, I really enjoy it. My life is busy, so when I’m teaching I feel I’m with people who care just as much about the written word as I do. That’s a very nice community to be with, to sit and talk about a single sentence for a half hour because it matters to all of us. I look around and I think, these are my people. This is my tribe.
FWJ: That’s interesting since in so many of your stories, a sense of community is what drives your characters.
SMD: Right now I feel that way about the Arab American writing community. I’m on the board of directors of RAWI, the Arab American Writers Association. That community of writers is wonderful. When my publisher asked me to find people to blurb my book, every Arab American writer I asked was very happy to do it for me. I’ve tried to pay that back when I’m asked to blurb something or give feedback on a manuscript. I try to be a good citizen.
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Daniel Libman is Pushcart Prize and Paris Review Discovery Prize winner and the author of the story collection, Married But Looking. He regularly writes the “Taking the Fifth” interview and is a founding editor of Fifth Wednesday Journal.
Interviews · 06/13/2017
An interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj
by Amina Gautier
I first met Susan Muaddi Darraj at an MLA convention in Philadelphia, where she was speaking on an editor’s panel on publishing. Sometime after that I ran into her again, this time at the AWP conference, where she was signing copies of her linked short story collection Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). We have kept in touch since then, seeing one another at AWP and various writers’ venues, where we meet, reminisce about Philadelphia, and discuss our love of the short stories. A Philadelphia native, Darraj currently lives in Baltimore, where she teaches at Harford Community College and is a fiction editor for Barrelhouse. Darraj’s newest collection A Curious Land: Stories from Home (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), which recently won an American Book Award, provides a generational view of the Israel-Palestine conflict by recounting the lives of characters in the fictional Palestinian village of Tel-Al-Hilou. In this interview, we discuss the relationship between Darraj’s first and second collections, the use of imagery, and the importance of place in fiction.
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At one of your talks, I heard you mention the necessity of seizing the narrative. What does it mean for you, as an author, to do so? What responsibilities do you think writers have, if any?
I think a lot about WEB Du Bois when I say writers should “seize the narrative.” When he wrote The Souls of Black Folk, he was determined to offer a picture of what African American life was like in the United States at the turn of the last century — he wasn’t going to let white sociologists and historians do it. He did it, and in that way, he seized the narrative of Black life in America.
This is what I strive for when I write: so much has been written about Israel/Palestine, and about Arabs in America. The current administration, with its executive orders on banning people from specific countries, is trying to write a certain narrative, and it’s actually an old narrative, about Arabs in America: that our community brings trouble, that we’re different, we’re unable to contribute to America.
I said in a previous interview that fear trumps facts, but literature trumps fear. That’s because literature presents a more accurate narrative, it offers stories of experience, and in the face of this complexity, stereotypes usually collapse. So, as a writer, trying to “seize the narrative” about the Palestinian American community, all I can do is write as authentically as I can, without being didactic, without being sentimental, and hope that my books challenge the stereotypes of Palestinian Americans that some reader has encountered elsewhere. At the same time, of course, perhaps more importantly, I hope I can intrigue and captivate that reader by offering a good story.
Your first book Inheritance of Exile deals with familiar terrain for you. It’s set in South Philly and you’re a South Philly girl. However, your second book A Curious Land is located wholly in Palestine, with stories being set as early as 1916. Please tell us a little about the research that went into the second book. How long did it take you to complete the second project?
Well, it took me about 8 years to write A Curious Land, but not because I was writing that whole time. I was having children and working towards tenure, and so for years, I worked on the book only sporadically. However, I was reading — and reading quite a bit. I read several works about the history of Israel/Palestine, Ilan Pape’s A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. I also read Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced by Rochelle Davis, which records how Palestinians are trying to document their shrinking and destroyed villages by writing these very personalized village history books. Therefore, while I was not writing, I was “filling the well,” so to speak, by reading and noting certain details and facts about the Palestinian experience in the West Bank.
Then there was a two-year “burst” in which I was really attentive to the book, and writing every day, sometimes for hours a day and that is because I had figured out how I wanted to shape the book. I realized that the book should tell the history of Palestine by focusing on a specific village, and that the stories should link together (as my first book had) and present a composite picture of the Palestinian diaspora. Once I drafted all the stories, it took months for me to go back and tie them together carefully, to make sure that one character reappears realistically, several years later, in another story.
On occasion, you’ve mentioned the difficulties in writing about a place that some would say doesn’t “exist” or can’t be pointed out on a map. Yet in creating the village of Tel-Al Hilou, the fictional village so central to A Curious Land, you’ve literally created a place that doesn’t exist on any map. How did you decide to create this village? What were the difficulties, if any, of creating a landscape from scratch? In which ways did doing so artistically constrain or free you? And, lastly, does the village’s name have any special significance?
When I was growing up in Philadelphia, and later in New Jersey, I used to love hearing my parents tell stories about their childhoods. My father, for example, had terrific stories about his boyhood in Taybeh, our village, which is outside of Ramallah. And many times, our family would travel to Taybeh in the summers, an experience that my parents referred to as “going home” but that my Americans friends called “going on vacation.” The difference is subtle, but interesting. However, when friends would ask me to explain where we were going, where we’d be spending most of July and August, what could I say? There was no way to point out Palestine on a world map – it didn’t exist.
But, yes, you’re right, I did make up the village of Tel al-Hilou, which means “the pretty hilltop” in Arabic. Why did I do that? I think I didn’t want to be tied to a particular place, like Ramallah or Jenin, because Palestinians are very attuned to the history and details of their cities and villages, since they always feel that their way of life is under assault. I didn’t want to be confronted with “the house you described is actually on the north side of the village, not the east side.” And I always loved what Marquez did in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in creating Macondo. It is a fictional village, right? But is there any doubt that it’s a Colombian village? None at all.
For me, Tel al-Hilou represents a typical Palestinian village without being a specific one: it has a place of worship, it has a central town surrounded by farms, it has a coffee shop, etc. I’ve had people write to me — Palestinians — and ask me “Is this based on Beit Jala?” or “Is your town modeled after Birzeit?” That makes me feel great, actually, because that means I have done a realistic job in this depiction.
Both of your collections are linked. The first one depicts stories about four South Philly families and they all take place in the same location within the same time frame, the second one being linked by the inhabitants of the village but crossing generations. Because of their thematic unity, it’s easy to imagine that either or both of these collections could have been written as novels instead of story collections. What makes them a linked collection, or a novel in stories? Is there a conceptual difference for you? Were they ever conceived of or drafted as novels?
They were always conceived of as short stories, and I found a way to link them because I wished for them to make a larger, collective point. The Inheritance of Exile was an attempt to paint a portrait of this immigrant community in a specific, urban neighborhood, and A Curious Land attempts to document Palestinian history, in the West Bank and in the diaspora. A novel is a very different thing, and independent short stories are their own thing — a collection of linked short stories is like a separate genre, I think. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, are examples of this genre, and I feel very comfortable working in it. Linked short stories give me the space to do several things: 1) I can explore specific moments in time, but 2) I can also pull back, as with a movie camera, and offer a panoptic view of a particular place. 3) I am able to transition over large gaps in time, from World War I to the Arab Revolt, for example, or from 1948 to the years before the 1967 Arab Israeli War. Those advantages — plus the fun of linking together these characters — make it an enjoyable genre in which to write.
In both of your collections, you have a story entitled “The Journey Home.” Was this a deliberate choice, or what was your reasoning behind doing so? What does this title mean to you?
I know. What a literary faux pas, right? And yet, I feel like there are different ways of exploring this theme of returning home. In Inheritance, Hanan wants to go home, but doesn’t know what that home is. Same thing in A Curious Land — Rabab doesn’t actually have a home, and she wishes for one. As the daughter of immigrants, this is a theme that is always on my mind.
The stories in A Curious Land seem to be built upon the foundation of a material object that is introduced in the first story i.e. the lira bracelet, which appears and reappears in later stories. In fiction we would call this image/object an objective correlative because of all of the weight you’ve imbued it with. This bracelet even appears as the book’s front cover art. How important was the use of this image to your overall creation of the narrative? What does it signify in the collection?
I’m a visual person, and I’m a visual writer. I like structure in a book, and I look for images that work on multiple levels. For example, I just read Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which is about a Vietnamese family separated during the fall of Saigon. The two sides of the family go in opposite directions — one side becomes refugees in the United States and the other side finds asylum in Europe. The novel is divided into separate points of view, so the narrative swings back and forth, just as one family is developing and growing independently of the other. Phan also divides the novel into chapters and sections by using letter fragments. Later, we will learn the importance of these letters to the family secret that triggered the separation. So we have the physical separation, we have the letters — everything just fits well in this novel. As I said, structure is really important to me, and Phan achieves a structure that reflects the content and theme of her beautiful book.
In A Curious Land, the stories are linked, but they stand alone as well. That bracelet, which is a traditional wedding gift in Palestine — a bracelet of Turkish liras, of coins linked together — reflects the structure of the book. The stories are individual coins, valuable in their own right, but when they are linked together, they make something new altogether. Of course, the bracelet also plays an important role in several of the stories — it will save Rabab, in the opening story, and it will remind Adlah, in the final story, of the importance of family.
In many ways, The Inheritance of Exile and A Curious Land seem to be different sides of the same coin, that is to say, that the two collections seem to speak to one another. For example, in The Inheritance of Exile, there is the story of the young Palestinian-American woman who spends a summer in Palestine and becomes affianced there, but is nevertheless viewed as an outsider, even by her fiancé, who ultimately chooses a local girl over her. Echoes of this story appear in A Curious Land’s story “Rocky Soil” when Emad initially loses the love of his life to a Palestinian-American man who returns to the village to visit with his family, and further echoes crop up in the last story in the collection “Christmas in Palestine” when a native of Tel-Al Hilou returns to her village for a short stint after having lived in the U.S. for some time. Were you looking toward A Curious Land when you wrote The Inheritance of Exile? How did writing the first collection teach you and/or prepare you to write the second collection?
In Inheritance, I was writing from my own experiences — growing up in Philadelphia, in an immigrant community, among other immigrant communities (Italians, Vietnamese, etc). That “third space”, between two cultures, is an isolating place, because you never quite belong to one culture. I remember being asked so many ridiculous questions by my schoolmates, about owning camels, and whether my own marriage would be arranged, whether I knew any terrorists. Unbelievable stuff, really, but hurtful. But lest I imagine that I was fully Palestinian, there were summertime visits “back home,” in which I was reminded regularly that I did not belong. I mean, those summers were terrific, but there was always something that made me stand out as an American. So I was never fully embraced or felt fully comfortable in either place. I think Inheritance reflects this tension.
In A Curious Land, I attempted to stretch myself as a writer, to write from a perspective that was not natural for me. I’d lived my entire life in the United States, but I have cousins who have spent their lives in Palestine. My life in the US is a consequence of my father’s deciding to emigrate in 1967, to look for work. I could have easily grown up in the West Bank, prohibited from moving around freely, limited in my choices, but on the flip side, more fluent in Arabic, more connected to that culture.
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Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of The Inheritance of Exile (University of Notre Dame Press 2007), and A Curious Land: Stories from Home (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). Inheritance of Exile was a Finalist in the AWP Book Awards Series in Fiction and named Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year (Short Fiction). A Curious Land was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, received an American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Darraj is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland, and a fiction editor for Barrelhouse Magazine.
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Amina Gautier is the author of the short story collections At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Her interviews and reviews appear in Fiction Advocate, Necessary Fiction, and The Rumpus.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Susan Muaddi Darraj’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in New York Stories, Orchid Literary Review, Banipal, Mizna, al-Jadid, and several anthologies. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was honoured by the U.S. State Department’s Arabic Book Program. She is a recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. A Philadelphia native, she currently lives in Baltimore.
Susan Muaddi
Darraj
Writer, Fiction
Phoenix, MD
2018 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Ford Foundation.
_
Susan Muaddi Darraj won the American Book Award for her short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home (2015), which depicts the lives of Palestinians over the course of nearly a century. A Curious Land also received the Arab American Book Award and the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her first book, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007. A former literary magazine editor, Darraj currently serves as a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and a committee member of the One Maryland One Book program. She is an Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College, and she teaches in the graduate writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and Fairfield University.
susanmuaddidarraj.com
Susan Muaddi Darraj Receives Rose Nader Award
For release: 07 March, 2019
Susan Muaddi Darraj, Harford Community College Associate Professor of Humanities, recently received the 2019 Rose Nader Award at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Convention in Washington, DC. She received the award for her commitment to working for equality and justice. The Rose Nader Award is named for Ralph Nader’s mother, a well-known activist and mother of the frequent third party candidate. The award has previously been awarded to Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who pursued the issue of lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.
The author of two books, Susan's A Curious Land: Stories From Home received an American Book Award and was named Best Fiction Book by Baltimore City Paper in 2016. The fictional short story collection about the inhabitants of a West Bank village explores the experiences of Palestinians in the last century and the true meaning of home. The book previously won the prestigious Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, sponsored by the Association of Writing Programs and Amazon.com.
Susan has authored other works as well. The State Department bought the translation rights to Muaddi Darraj’s short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, as part of its prestigious Arabic Book Program in 2011.
Greenwood Press previously published a five-volume Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature containing several entries authored by Prof. Muaddi Darraj. Edited by distinguished scholar Emmanuel S. Nelson, the encyclopedia was the first of its kind and featured more than 1,100 entries by more than 300 scholars. It covered the entire range of ethnic American literature, from the colonial era to the present, and demonstrated the accomplishments of members of diverse cultural groups.
Muaddi Darraj’s articles have also appeared in various publications and anthologies including “Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century” and “Colonize This: Young Women of Color on Feminism.” Scheherazade’s Legacy, a text edited by Susan Muaddi Darraj, was published by Praeger in 2004.
In addition, United States Artists named Muaddi Darraj a 2018 Ford Fellow, earning her a $50,000 award funded by the Ford Foundation.
In 2013, Muaddi Darraj was named to a list of the Top 25 Women Professors in Maryland by StateStats.org. StateStats.org, in conjunction with partner website OnlineSchoolsMaryland.com, set out to find postsecondary educators who had been recognized recently for excellence in the classroom, on campus, and in the community.
Muaddi Darraj is also a lecturer in Johns Hopkins University's MA in Writing program.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Last week, the 116th Congress was sworn in. And it's the most diverse in American history. It includes the first Muslim women, the first Native American women and the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress. And during their swearing in, some new members chose to celebrate their heritage with traditional garments.
Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, one of two Muslim women sworn into Congress, wore a thobe to honor her Palestinian background. The thobe is a gown with elaborate, cross-stitched embroidery. On social media, her supporters did the same. They tweeted themselves using the hashtag #TweetYourThobe to congratulate the new congresswoman and to share their own stories.
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the founder of that campaign. She's a writer and professor at Harford Community College in Maryland. She joins us now from member station WYPR in Baltimore. Welcome.
SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ: Thank you for having me.
FADEL: Well, I guess, for those who don't know, can you talk about what a Palestinian thobe is for women?
DARRAJ: Sure. Well, a thobe is - it simply means a dress in Arabic. And they are very special dresses. And they're worn at special occasions - like baptisms, weddings, graduations.
FADEL: Right.
DARRAJ: They're gorgeous. And every region has its own color patterns and particular preferred fabrics. They're made by hand. And they're often passed down from mother to daughter. I thought it was wonderful that the congresswoman decided to wear hers at her swearing-in.
FADEL: So she's really wearing her history on her body, basically.
DARRAJ: Yes, and I believe her dress was, actually, handmade by her mother for her. So that makes it even more special.
FADEL: You came up with this hashtag #TweetYourThobe. How did this all start?
DARRAJ: So I was really excited when I heard that she was going to wear her dress at her swearing-in. And then the backlash on Twitter was immediate and fierce. People were calling it un-American, nasty comments about promoting Sharia law and Palestinian heritage and these sorts of unbelievable things.
FADEL: Because she's Muslim and because she's Arab.
DARRAJ: Because she's Muslim, right. And so what can I say? I mean, for example, there's so much diversity among Palestinians. I'm a Palestinian Christian, so I decided that I wanted to try to promote awareness of what this dress means and a little bit about Palestinian culture. So I had this movement to sort of educate people and also celebrate her achievement. There were people who participated in our campaign who were Jewish, who were Muslim, who were Christian, Buddhists, who were atheists.
FADEL: What were your favorites? Or what were the things that you were seeing?
DARRAJ: I saw several women who posted pictures of their thobes that had been made by their great-grandmothers. One woman posted a thobe that was 100 years old. People asking questions about what the dresses mean. Actually, the other day, we just posted a map of Palestinian areas that somebody made. And on the map is superimposed the pieces of fabric, so you can look at a dress and see where the person is from based on the map.
FADEL: Oh, wow. And what did you tweet?
DARRAJ: I tweeted a picture of myself wearing a beautiful thobe that I just received last year from my aunt. And she had a thobe made for me in the West Bank. And I was thrilled to wear that.
FADEL: So it wasn't just Congresswoman Tlaib who wore cultural garments. Representative Deb Haaland, who's one of the first Native American women in Congress along with Sharice Davids - she wore a traditional Pueblo dress. Representative Ilhan Omar - she's the first woman Somali-American Muslim to wear hijab - the religious head covering - in Congress. So it's a record year for women, women of color. You're a woman of color. What was it like to see that?
DARRAJ: I love seeing these women bring their heritage with them to the government. You know, we need to recognize that there are differences among us, but those differences don't have to be obstacles between us. They can be moments for celebration.
FADEL: That was Susan Muaddi Darraj, founder of the social media campaign #TweetYourThobe.
Thanks for talking with us.
DARRAJ: Thank you for having me.
QUOTE:
first positive image for Arab women
expressed what it was like to be in America and to be an insider and an outsider all at once.
The Philadelphia-born, award-winning author also aims to highlight Palestinian women’s vital role in the history of Palestine to date in a picture that is “more complete, more rounded, than the one-dimensional depiction we have now.”
The Philadelphia-born, award-winning author
Arab American author tells stories from the intersection between cultures
POSTED: FRIDAY 04.14.2017 11:19 AM ZAHRAA FARHAT ART & CULTURE
BALTIMORE —Author Susan Muaddi Darraj intersects her identities as a Palestinian and as an American to tell stories from the “third space— the space between two cultures” that ultimately shapes the characters involved in her tales.
According to Darraj, there are so many stories that could be told about the Palestinian immigrant community, but there’s always an inhibitor that reproaches her in a way.
“It’s like I have a voice chiding me, ‘Write positively about our community,'” she said. “But, of course, our community had its problems, as does every immigrant community. So the key is probably to be balanced.”
As for Arab women’s experiences, Darraj has felt the need to dispel misconceptions that revolve around their identities.
Growing up, she never recognized the Arab women whom mainstream media seem to only portray as “oppressed and silenced.” They seemed unfamiliar. Instead, she was captivated by women like Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian legislator, activist and scholar, whom she remembers seeing as the “first positive image for Arab women” in the news.
“I was drawn to her because she represented the Arab women in my own life,” Darraj said. “She was smart, articulate, passionate.”
However, even though Darraj writes about Arab women, specifically Palestinians, she said she cannot be a representative for all their experiences.
“The Palestinian women carry so many burdens, both those who live in the diaspora and those who are in Palestine,” she said. “I don’t want to be a spokesperson for Palestinian women’s experiences. I cannot do that, but I can write about my own experiences growing up and living in the United States, where so little is known about Palestine— despite our government having so much influence in the region.”
Darraj said to be Palestinian is “a political identity, whether we like it or not.” So, as a writer, she gets to “bridge [her] reality of being Palestinian with other people’s ideas and/or misconceptions of that identity.”
The Philadelphia-born, award-winning author also aims to highlight Palestinian women’s vital role in the history of Palestine to date in a picture that is “more complete, more rounded, than the one-dimensional depiction we have now.”
She said her determination to become a writer emerged from her love of reading as a child— in essence, reinforcing the importance of reading to writers.
Darraj recalled how lots of books moved her and affected her in diverse ways at various stages in her life.
“I found ‘The Bronze Bow’ to be a marvelous book,” she said, adding that other childhood favorites included the “Anne of Green Gables” books, “Nancy Drew”, “The Hardy Boys” and the “Sweet Valley Twins” series.
When she grew older, Darraj found inspiration in African American writers like Alice Walker and June Jordan.
“[They] were very influential on my writing,” she said. “They expressed what it was like to be in America and to be an insider and an outsider all at once. They also write passionately about what it was like to feel like you were not in sync with your own community…. this is something that really struck me.”
And so, Darraj began to write about existing in the “the space between two cultures.”
In 2015, her short story collection, “A Curious Land: Stories from Home”, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. It won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award.
“My [story collection] is a fictional ‘village book’ about Palestine,” Darraj said. “…Many Palestinians are documenting their villages, which were lost due to the military occupation. One of my characters is writing a village book about the two, Tel al-Hilou, and my book is itself a history of this town and its inhabitants. I write several stories, which link together to tell one larger narrative, and the stories span almost 100 years of Palestinian history.”
The University of Notre Dame Press published her preceding short story collection, “The Inheritance of Exile”, in 2007. Darraj also edited “Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing”, which was published in 2004 by Praeger Publishers. She co-edited with Waïl Hassan a volume for the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series on Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
Also, she has contributed book chapters to numerous anthologies and collections. Other books she’s written include young adult biographies of Indira Gandhi, Amy Tan and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Chelsea House Publishers.
In addition to being an author, Darraj is an associate professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland and a lecturer in Johns Hopkins University’s masters in writing program. She said the best part about teaching creative writing is “seeing [her] students write their own stories, tell their own truths.”
“Everyone has a story to tell,” she said. “Whether you’re a veteran, a person of color, from a rural or urban background, whether your struggle is with mental health, physical disability, emotional trauma, identity crises — or an intersection or some or many of these things. Students feel able to write in my class in a safe space; they are free to experiment.”
Darraj advised aspiring authors to write anything they want and make a schedule for themselves.
“You’re not a writer until you write,” she said. “Join a writing group or take a class, through your local college or community center or online. Join a professional organization like the AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) and definitely join RAWI — the membership is free, and there are lots of people who can mentor you.”
We R Arts and Sciences: Susan Muaddi Darraj
Posted August 18, 2014, in Alumni News, Featured News, News, We R Arts and Sciences Student Spotlight.
Every success story starts somewhere. For Susan Muaddi Darraj, who is an associate professor of English, a writer, and a conference founder and organizer, her roots are firmly entrenched in the classrooms of Rutgers University–Camden, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. Drawn to Rutgers University–Camden because it was close to her South Jersey home, she quickly discovered a place where she was constantly encouraged and inspired, particularly by English faculty members Dr. Rafey Habib, Dr. Chris Fitter, Dr. Tim Martin, Ms. Lisa Zeidner, and Dr. Bill Lutz (faculty emeritus). It was this support that served as her springboard into a very successful career, as a writer and college professor.
After she completed her bachelor’s degree, Ms. Muaddi Darraj stayed at Rutgers University–Camden to earn her master’s degree because she wanted to keep working with specific professors, from whom she felt she was learning so much. At Rutgers University–Camden she was also able to get teaching experience as a teaching assistant, an opportunity she calls “vital.” Her time as a teaching assistant convinced her that teaching at the college level was the career she wanted to pursue, and in 2004 she was hired at Harford Community College, located in Bel Air, Maryland. She was awarded tenure at Harford in 2010. Not only has her career choice been rewarding, but she particularly appreciates her place of employment, as well. “I love teaching at Harford Community College because the role of the community college is important to me – the idea that every student has the right and opportunity to learn is a wonderful mission.” Ms. Muaddi Darraj also serves as a lecturer for the Johns Hopkins University Advanced Academic Programs – MA in Writing Program.
In addition to teaching, Ms. Muaddi Darraj is an accomplished writer. Growing up, the self-described “bookworm” began writing her own stories in middle school, and she hasn’t stopped since. She’s the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, the editor of Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab-American Women on Writing, and the author of The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly, which was recognized by the U.S. State Department’s Arabic Book Program, and was a finalist for both the AWP Award Series in Short Fiction and the John Gardener Fiction Prize.
Recently, she submitted her current manuscript, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, for consideration for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, a contest run by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). Much to her surprise and delight, her manuscript won the award, and with it, a publication contract with the University of Massachusetts Press.
A Curious Land: Stories from Home is a collection of linked stories featuring villagers from Tel al-Hilou, and their descendants, who have, over the course of one hundred years, immigrated to the United States of America. According to contest judge Jaime Manrique, “[Ms. Muaddi Darraj’s] empathy for the large cast of embattled characters is miraculous. In particular, we get to know the quietly heroic Palestinian women in these stories as intimately as we know the people closest to us. Astonishingly, this collection is, above all, about the transformative powers of love.”
Clearly, writing is important to Ms. Muaddi Darraj, and it’s something she’s passionate about sharing with others. After she and a colleague attended a writers’ conference that was, in her words “terrible – just terrible,” she, Dave Housley, an editor at Barrelhouse, and Julie Wakeman-Linn, editor-in-chief at the Potomac Review, decided to organize their own conference. In 2007, the Conversations and Connections Conference: Practical Advice on Getting Published began, and it’s still going strong, seven years later. As Ms. Muaddi Darraj explained during an interview with Ploughshares Literary Magazine, this conference centers around what “would be useful to writers, where they would leave having made contacts with editors and writers, and where they would feel more connected to their local literary scene – knowing the journals and presses right in their region.”
Ms. Muaddi Darraj’s list of accomplishments is already long, and the list is certain to get longer. She credits Rutgers University–Camden with providing her with a strong foundation, saying “I’ll always be grateful for the six years I spent at Rutgers University–Camden.”
About Susan Muaddi Darraj
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Major: English
Camden College of Arts and Sciences Graduation Date: 1997
Graduate Program: English
Graduate School-Camden Graduation Date: 1999
Written By Julie Roncinske
The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly
Publishers Weekly. 254.9 (Feb. 26, 2007): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ. Univ. of Notre Dame, $20 paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-268-03503-7
Darraj, who edited Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, makes a capable debut with this collection that follows Palestinian-American emigre families in South Philadelphia. Darraj succeeds admirably in suggesting the diversity of Palestinian-Americans: the four friends Nadia, Aliyah, Hanan and Reema each comes from a family with its own story of exile. Nadia's mother, a doctor's daughter, discovers in "The New World" that the mysterious "tall, slim blonde woman" whom she nicknames "Homewrecker Barbie" was her husband's former green-card wife. Aliya spends "An Afternoon in Jerusalem" at the Dome of the Rock where a hijab-wearing woman, noticing her crucifix, welcomes her in and shows her how to wrap her hair. After suffering the patronizing attitudes of her husband John's parents and graduate school colleagues, Hanan makes "The Journey Home," reconciling with her parents and practicing her mother's craft, basket making, with commercial success. In "The Scent of Oranges," Reema's mother retells her refugee camp experience, specifically for her daughter. Darraj's first-person narrators are not distinct, and her vignette-like stories remain at the edge of plot. There's a passionate sense here of inheritance as a two-way street that transforms immigrants and their children, but Darraj doesn't quite connect the dots. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2007, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A160333164/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bdb22117. Accessed 10 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A160333164
Darraj, Susan Muaddi. Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams: Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland
Hazel Rochman
Booklist. 103.12 (Feb. 15, 2007): p87.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Darraj, Susan Muaddi. Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams: Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland. 2006. 106p. illus. index. Chelsea House, lib. ed., $30 (9780791090015). 941. Gr. 7-10.
This dual biography, part of the new Modern Peacemakers series, which profiles the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. focuses on two Irish women who founded the Community for Peace People. Darraj takes the political history back to twelfth-century Britain before focusing on the recent conflict and violent struggle. The politics is fair to all sides, and Darraj treats each woman's personal conflicts with directness: Corrigan's questioning of her faith and her growing support for nonviolence; Williams' initial support for the IRA, then her turnaround after witnessing the murder of innocents. Occasional photos and boxed insets enhance both the content (Corrigan's "Open Letter to the IRA") and the design. The back matter is extensive, with carefully documented chapter notes, a bibliography, Web sites, and the text of the acceptance speech for the prize.--Hazel Rochman
Rochman, Hazel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rochman, Hazel. "Darraj, Susan Muaddi. Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams: Partners for Peace in Northern Ireland." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2007, p. 87. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A159963458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=422e95b6. Accessed 10 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A159963458
Darraj, Susan Muaddi. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Ann W. Moore
School Library Journal. 56.8 (Aug. 2010): p118.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
DARRAJ, Susan Muaddi. The Collapse of the Soviet Union. 124p. ISBN 978-1-60413-493-3. LC 2008054808.
DAVENPORT, John C. D-Day and the Liberation of France. 136p. maps. ISBN 978-1-60413-280-9. LC 2009022335.
ea vol: (Milestones in Modern World History Series). photos, reprods, bibliog. chron, further reading, index, notes. Web sites. CIP. Chelsea House. 2010. Tr $35.
Gr 9 Up--Both books suffer from major errors, omissions, misspellings, internal inconsistencies, and poor organization. Many footnotes are incorrect, with an unusually high number of citations in D-Day mangled or taken out of context. Collapse has no maps, a deplorable oversight; D-Day contains only one, and it's small and incomplete. Although both titles include chronologies and time lines, the latter are merely highlights from the former, and thus redundant. The lack of glossaries is a definite drawback. Both authors overuse the passive voice. Davenport plunges right in to D-Day preparations with no explanation, assuming basic familiarity with World War II. He makes a thrilling military event tedious, dull, and overwhelmingly confusing, and concludes on a decidedly negative note. Of numerous titles on D-Day, the best for this age is R. Conrad Stein's The World War II D-Day Invasion in American History (Endow, 2004). Darraj uses five of nine chapters to review Russian history from the 800s through the early 1980s. She dramatically begins with Reagan's "Tear down this [Berlin] wall" speech while ignoring his far more influential "evil empire" reference and repeatedly and annoyingly defers to scholars and historians for unimportant quotes or items that are common knowledge.--Ann W. Moore, Schenectady County Public Library, IVY
Moore, Ann W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Moore, Ann W. "Darraj, Susan Muaddi. The Collapse of the Soviet Union." School Library Journal, Aug. 2010, p. 118. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234147786/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f355d41d. Accessed 10 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A234147786
QUOTE:
presents us with both a richly enjoyable tale spanning a century of Palestinian history and a nuanced meditation on the meaning of memory, home, longing and belonging.
Memory, home and belonging in “A Curious Land”
Sarah Irving The Electronic Intifada 13 June 2016
A Curious Land: Stories from Home by Susan Muaddi Darraj, University of Massachusetts Press (2015)
The tantalizing news, almost a year before its publication, that Susan Muaddi Darraj’s A Curious Land had won the Grace Paley Prize for short fiction and was shortlisted for the Pressgang Prize suggested that patient readers would be well rewarded.
The predictions weren’t wrong. In this collection of interlinked short stories, centered on the village of Tel al-Hilou, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Muaddi Darraj presents us with both a richly enjoyable tale spanning a century of Palestinian history and a nuanced meditation on the meaning of memory, home, longing and belonging.
For readers who find comparisons useful in thinking about books, two spring to mind. The first — somewhat obvious given the century-long span and focus on the interwoven tales of a single town — is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s global classic A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Where Garcia Marquez implies mysterious grandiosity and magical realism, Muaddi Darraj, however, works on a more human, domestic scale — one might say a more “female” approach — and of individual lives and loves.
In this, Muaddi Darraj’s work is also reminiscent of Louise Erdrich’s acclaimed novels of Native American life. In addition to Erdrich’s multivoiced style, A Curious Land shares her ability to paint warmly affectionate, carefully critical and subtly political portraits of life in communities subject to oppression and marginalization — but where people are refusing to be defined by their experiences of suffering.
Domestic realism
A Curious Land begins in 1916 with a group of Bedouin refugees fleeing the violence and famine which wreaked havoc across the Levant during the First World War.
Although many of the characters encountered in this first story are subsequently never mentioned again, the way they are presented is key to how Palestine is seen and conceptualized. The borders which rigidly divide the modern Middle East are meaningless; this small band of survivors passes from the Jordanian town of al-Salt (closely linked to Nablus through trade and familial connections since the 18th century), across the Galilee and into what is now Lebanon.
The members of the group, although bound by family ties, are also from diverse origins: one mentions a European slave in her ancestry, another lays claim to Roma blood in explaining her gypsy-like skills in healing. This is an image of “Palestinian-ness” which is generous and inclusive.
And while Muaddi Darraj pays tribute to the classic literature of Palestinian identity in the Mahmoud Darwish-like image of men who “love the land as they would love a woman,” the foregrounding of strong, yet eminently human, female characters gives the stories a rootedness and domestic realism lacking in much writing by men.
This isn’t to say that the characters of either gender are perfect; Muaddi Darraj’s greatest skill is perhaps her ability to create portraits of flawed, ordinary humans — few of them out-and-out heroes or villains — with whom the reader can feel joy, pain and empathy.
There is no idealization, either, of Palestinian history or culture. The actual village of Tel al-Hilou, with its ancient homes and deeply rooted community, is depicted as at the core of its people’s identity. But its customs and beliefs are double-edged — at times a source of strength to its inhabitants, but also confining and constraining.
Abu Sufayan, who is first introduced as a young escapee from the Ottoman army, pleas for sulha (a truce and agreed resolution) after a boy in the village is accidentally killed by another child. In doing so, he marks himself a traitor to his fellow villagers as well as a literary symbol of the tension between differing social values. This symbolism continues throughout the book, into his later stages of life.
As the length of time between stories shortens and the body of knowledge about the people of Tel al-Hilou and their loves, jealousies, ambitions and failures builds up, we witness the ways in which ideas about tradition can be wielded for personal interest. Friendships, religion and children all take their places at the center of small, everyday conflicts.
Web of relationships
This speeding up of the interlinked stories has another effect of bringing about a sense of increasing confinement as the outlines of the space in which the tales take place slowly shrink. They shift from the broad sweep of the Ottoman Levant to the Mandate period where — despite the arrogance and violence of British troops — Abu Sufayan can still visit Jerusalem; to the current situation of many West Bank towns, hemmed in by Israeli walls and settlements.
The only way in which it seems that the village’s offspring can escape the effects of the occupation is to leave. But, whether from Guatemala or the United States, these stories of diaspora existence reinforce the sense that even those who leave Tel al-Hilou physically remain bound up in its web of relationships, emotions and cause-and-effect.
A final impact of Muaddi Darraj’s choice to write the book in short stories is the sense of contingency within the unfolding narratives. There are few definite endings or neat resolutions — or if there are, we hear about them tangentially, decades later, as an aside.
This device emphasizes the internal contradiction of West Bank Palestinian life: the combination of connections to land and history with the unpredictable changes imposed from the outside by one form of empire and colonialism or another.
Despite the various messages its stories contain, however, A Curious Land is first and foremost a deeply satisfying and enjoyable work of literature (despite a few minor historical infelicities).
On the one hand, it puts Muaddi Darraj alongside women writers on Palestine who have given us profoundly human stories which transcend easy narratives of nation and nationalism. And on the other, it places her with other hybrid-American authors of African, Latin American, Jewish and other heritages who ensure that our understandings of notions of identity and home remain diverse and complex.
Sarah Irving is author of a biography of Leila Khaled and of the Bradt Guide to Palestine and co-editor of A Bird is not a Stone.
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"humanizes a political situation, offering the reader a way to understand the steady settlement activity of the Israeli occupation through the eyes and ears of the inhabitants of the villagers," who are all "vividly brought to life in this collection."
Book Reviews · 02/15/2016
A Curious Land: Stories from Home by Susan Muaddi Darraj
Reviewed by Saadia Faruqi
U Mass Press, 2015
A Curious Land: Stories from Home is a collection of interconnected short stories, set primarily in Tel al-Hilou, a village in the West Bank in Palestine, spanning almost a century. A small church with a pock-marked statue of the Virgin Mary stands tall as if in protection over the village inhabitants. Some have been buried in the rich soil of the village, others have migrated to the U.S., Europe, even South America. Armies march across this beleaguered land, men are killed, while the inhabitants of Tel al-Hilou live lives full of pain, laughter, childbirth, marriage and death. As one character puts it: “Everything changes, nothing changes.”
A Curious Land is based on the lives of the villagers. There is twenty year old Amira, who decides to forego a life with nuns to marry a widower with three children. There is Emad, an unlucky lover pining for the girl of his dreams, and teenager Jamil who finds four Israeli soldiers sitting on his roof one morning urinating in his water tank.
Some stories are lighthearted, as is Jamil’s secret crush on his neighbor Muna while war rages on:
Jamil napped, not knowing what else to do until dinner, but his thoughts were filled with Muna: Muna next to him in algebra class, Muna secretly holding his hand under their white robes during their confirmation ceremony, Muna being attacked in a jail cell by a soldier wearing thick black boots, Muna collapsing into his arms after he’d broken in, kung-fu style, to rescue her.
Other stories are full of pain. A young Raed escapes after an accidental killing that takes him from the West Bank to Guatemala to Texas, unable to free himself from guilt:
I thought he was going to start crying, and I held my breath.
But he didn’t. Instead, he suddenly thrust both hands deep into the vine and pulled, and he screamed at the top of his lungs. A roar that came from deep within him, filled with – anguish. And I felt my own tears climbing up inside my throat, as he stood there, wresting with the old vines and roaring.
Still other stories are of hilarious or larger-than-life characters like the mother-in-law who gossips all day long or a priest who has affairs with married women:
I do know, I’ve seen his fine silk shirt, his eyes rolling towards every woman in a skirt. How he turns his “Our Father who art in heaven” into a flirtation.
These are stories of love, of hatred, of struggle and of faith. The church looms large in their hearts as it does in this entirely Christian village: “the inside painted yellow, the color of the sun … tall windows, six on each side for the twelve apostles, each shaped like a teardrop, the glass so old it was permanently fogged.”
The one recurring character, in person or in mention, is Miss Salma. A long-standing spinster, we learn about her life and trials only when she is an old woman, and we weep along with her for everything she has seen the village go through from her birth to her death:
That was when I made these walls my fortress, because I was the only one strong enough to last, to conquer the things that subdue other people, and I removed the wire and loop from the roof door, and I come up on this roof whenever I want, alone, after an evening spent on the book, and watch the moon and remember you.
Of course, the Israeli occupation isn’t far from the reader’s mind throughout the collection, but we get mere glimpses of it: a new building each year on the far hill, the check posts, the guards on the way to Jerusalem. It is there in the metaphors the author uses:
Mrs. Farah’s body was heavier than an IDF tank, but her tongue could dart more quickly than the feet of all the members of the Ladies’ society.
The inconveniences and the tragedies faced by the Palestinians are mentioned as backdrop, when a village boy is killed at a protest, or a woman returning home from America is searched for hours at the airport. The politics are woven into the stories, bringing home to readers the way of life in Palestine, a diminishing place on earth:
The few buildings my father was talking about are now an entire city, on the hilltop opposite this one, on which Tel al-Hilou rests. In the last sixty years, they have not stopped building, and the fences are now walls, topped with barbed wires and lookout posts around the perimeter, the walls are so high, so they don’t have to see us and can pretend we don’t exist.
The book is not based solely in Tel al-Hilou. A few stories take us further from the homeland, as both men and women flee the village for better, safer lives. From thousands of miles away, their lives are still intertwined with those who are left behind. There is a sister in Michigan, sons in Guatemala, a daughter in New York. We go back and forth, see the landscape change through the eyes of young and old.
A Curious Land humanizes a political situation, offering the reader a way to understand the steady settlement activity of the Israeli occupation through the eyes and ears of the inhabitants of the villagers. The human toll of occupation, the struggle of everyday people who emigrate for safety and security, and the families they leave behind – all are vividly brought to life in this collection.
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Susan Muaddi Darraj’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in New York Stories, Orchid Literary Review, Banipal, Mizna, al-Jadid, and several anthologies. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was honored by the U.S. State Department’s Arabic Book Program. She is a recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. A Philadelphia native, she currently lives in Baltimore.
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Saadia Faruqi is the author of Brick Walls: Tales of Hope & Courage from Pakistan and editor-in-chief of the Blue Minaret Literary Magazine. Originally from Pakistan, she now lives in Houston, Texas with her family.
Review of “A Curious Land: Stories from Home,” by Susan Muaddi Darraj
October 31, 2017 | Marjorie Stevens
This book review is written by Joseph Geha, professor emeritus at Iowa State University and author of two books; Through and Through: Toledo Stories and Lebanese Blonde. Geha is the 2016 Khayrallah Prize winner for his novel, Lebanese Blonde. He has authored several book reviews including Rawi Hage’s, Cockroach and Rabih Alameddine’s, An Unnecessary Woman.
In time, after many generations inhabit a single portion of land—build homes there, give birth and bury their dead, tear down and rebuild––an earthen rise will form over the area. In the Middle East such a mound is known as a tel, a word that derives from the root for hill in both Hebrew and Arabic. Archeological digs reveal that the structures within a tel are often found to overlap, inter-twining the different ages and cultures that have lived on that one piece of ground. Similarly, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s prize-winning collection, A Curious Land (UMass. Press, 2015) reveals to us generations of people whose lives overlapped and inter-twined throughout nearly a century in the history of a single town on the West Bank named Tel al-Hilou, The Beautiful Hill.
It’s fitting that Muaddi Darraj subtitles her book Stories from Home, because home is at the very heart of this finely wrought collection. Within each narrative, the sense of home becomes the context in which the people of Tel al-Hilou define their individual struggles for love, dignity, freedom. But as the stories carry us from decade to decade of the last century, we see a growing threat to the sense of home. That threat is foreign occupation.
First the British, then the Israelis. The occupation touches everything, becoming so pervasive in the daily lives of the townspeople, that they begin to see in it their own annihilation. Salma, a character who appears prominently in a number of the stories, points out a hillside of encroaching settlements to explain why she has taken on the role of Tel al-Hilou’s self-appointed archivist:
Look at that…. Every year, since I’ve been a little girl, they add a new building…. They want to push us out. And if they do it, how will we remember what we lost?
Whether a story’s focus is on a pair of lovers stealing hurried kisses, or an old man defying long-standing cultural mores to prevent blood feud, the Occupation is always present, behind everything. In the curfews and checkpoints, in the impromptu searches and the endless waiting in line. It even forms the imagery of their language, as in “Rocky Soil” when a young suitor is rejected by the parents of his beloved:
(He) understood that this is what it had to be, and that knowledge was like a bulldozer forking down and pulling up his heart.
But nowhere does Muaddi Darraj present the occupation’s insidious omnipresence with greater irony than in the brilliantly conceived “Intifada, A Love Story.” One morning during the troubles of the late 1980’s a Palestinian family awakens to discover that four Israeli soldiers have set up camp on the roof of their house. Why? And for how long? They receive no answers. Only orders sent down to Jamil, the family’s teen-aged son, for sandwiches and fresh water. Day after day after day the soldiers remain up there, literally perched over their heads, a weight pressing down on them.
Now it felt like the room, the whole house didn’t belong to him anymore….What if they stayed up there, nested, made the rooftop and the house their base, and Jamil stayed locked in this house forever? He’d never finish high school, never get married, never have children.
Another major threat these stories address is the plight of the female within a male-oriented culture, which itself also can be seen as a kind of occupation. In the opening story, “The Journey Home,” Rabab, a young woman just coming of age observes, “Everything was easier when you were a man….The sun rose in the sky, it seemed, because it was a woman and men commanded her to shine.” It is 1916, and Rabab, one of a group of starving Bedouin refugees on the run from the approaching battle lines, is being forced into marriage as second wife to an abusive, much older man. She imagines herself as “prey, a rabbit to be hunted.” But then a wise voice intervenes. “Learn to observe things, to understand people,” her mother instructs her. This advice, like that given by so many mothers to their teen-aged daughters, is presented as both a rebuke and an encouragement: open your eyes! Wise up! And indeed Rabab does just that, learning there is power already within her, if she would only use it. Her escape to freedom is painful and life changing, but also self-affirming. It leaves her “astounded by her own power.”
Like the collection’s first story, its last is also a journey home. Adlah, an Arab American woman, returns to Tel al-Hilou as translator for a group of archaeologists. Like the Bedouin Rabab of the first story, she too faces a choice: where is home? Here, in the Occupied West Bank with the rich, dashing Rafah, who shares with her the same cultural roots to which she yearns to return? Or is it back in the States and the loving marriage to her American husband, Ken? What’s key to the story isn’t her final choice so much as the accompanying recognition that our sense of home, and the peace that comes with it, is already within us.
That realization, which resonates throughout the interwoven stories staged upon a single, troubled plot of earth, brings closure to this vibrant and powerfully imagined collection.
QUOTE:
"These nine stories offer readers a look at the transformative powers of love." Scalia added, "The stories in this collection also resonate with humor and hilarity. ... This collection offers a glimpse of what it means to be what it means to belong to a place and to be connected to people so deeply that one can’t easily forget them."
Review: A Curious Land: Stories from Home by Susan Mauddi Darraj (reviewed by Rosalia Scalia)
February 16, 2016 · by jmwwblog · in Reviews. ·
A Curious Land: Stories from Home
(Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction)
by Susan Mauddi Darraj
288 Pages
University of Massachusetts Press
$24.95, hardcover
ISBN-10: 1625341873
Rosalia Scalia
After reading A Curious Land: Stories From Home, it’s immediately apparent to me why it won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction in 2014. Published by The University of Massachusetts Press, the collection contains nine stories depicting the lives of various inhabitants of a Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou. The characters who live in Palestine in the last century link to their descendants, and readers care and worry about them, suffering with them as they struggle to understand changing times that bring challenges to their long held and cherished traditions.
Although some characters are not revisited directly, readers can piece together how their lives may have unfolded indirectly through other stories that feature their granddaughters or their children as elderly grandparents. Because the stories are linked to place and people, they span generations and continents, exploring what it means to live within that place with people who want to honor those long-established traditions even when doing so is clearly impractical. Place plays such a vital role in these character’s essential truths as human beings, it doesn’t matter what traditions they break or how far they travel, all of them remain connected to the village and each other as if tethered by an invisible thread pulling everyone like the tail of a kite. Muaddi Darraj explores that invisible thread in these stories that ask what it means to belong to a place and to each other, however imperfect they are. A disclosure—I have seen snippets of a handful of these stories in their embryonic stages; Muaddi Darraj and I belong to the same writer’s group, but I have not read any of the stories in their final form until now. This collection offers a much needed and in-depth understanding of what it means to be Arab, Palestinian, and Christian, in the U.S. and in Palestine.
In the opening story, titled, “The Journey Home,” readers meet a precocious teenager, Rabab, who at 15, is selected to be the second wife by the tribe leader of her people. Rabab, however, harbors other ideas about her future and takes bold, decisive action, setting her on a life-changing course; she later learns that her mother, though she’s never mentioned it to Rabab, supports her decision for a different life, despite the cutting sacrifice that come with such defiance. Although we never return to Rabab, we eventually meet her granddaughter, Lydia, in a subsequent story.
In the story, “Rocky Ground,” we meet Emad, a man of patience and substance who thought he lost all that was important to him. One of my favorite stories in the collection, Emad’s mourning of his loss and his efforts to distract his mind leads him to embrace a self-improvement regimen, working hard, taking solace in routine, and saving all his money, actions that pay off when circumstances returns to him what he lost and more. He then finds himself in the position of having to choose between tradition and happiness. This story provides hope to all those stalwart hearts like Emud’s, whose understanding of himself allows him to claim what is rightfully his, despite what other’s may think and fueling his willingness to overlook the stain and stigma of divorce to grasp happiness when it’s within reach.
In the story about Rebab, we meet a good looking and mysterious stranger named Jamal who helps Rabab’s bold decision about her future to succeed. In the story about Rabab, titled “Journey Home,” Jamal is a young man. We meet him again in the story titled “Abu Sufayan,” except now he’s an old grandfather, but still marching to his own sense of morality; consequently, he finds himself at odds with his wife and fellow villagers over the punishment for an accidental killing. Respected as an elder and referred to as Abu Sufayan, Jamal remains true to his nature and his faith, and he is compelled to act with compassion and empathy. Unbeknownst to anyone in the village, he saves another life, this time, the young man and the family responsible for the accidental death. In a different story, readers encounter that young man again, but now he’s an old grandfather living in the US, indelibly marked by the accidental killing. His adult son struggles to understand and connect with his father without knowing how his father’s past marked him.
These nine stories offer readers a look at the transformative powers of love. Readers come to know and love the characters, heroic women like Amira whose love for Lydia and Lydia’s children cause her to sacrifice her deep desire to enter the convent; many years later and in a different story, the struggle of Adlah, Lydia’s daughter to conceive, takes center stage; the compassion of Jamal who defies those around him to do what he thinks is morally right, despite the clamor against him; the steadfast patience of Emud whose loss helps him to find himself; the lifelong loyalty of Salma to a secret lover who was murdered; the humiliation and anger of Jamil and his family at the hands of enemy soldiers.
The stories in this collection also resonate with humor and hilarity. Who cannot laugh when Salma says she’s returned to church, and the villagers think Jesus has found her again, but her saucy voice tells us she’s attending for reasons that has nothing to do with religion or God. She provides a refreshing take on the less than stellar behavior of the priest, which of course, she clearly sees, unlike the rest of the blind flock and uses to her advantage.
If you want to spend time with memorable characters who populate magnetic stories, if you want to an elegant book that enables you to understand something new in subsequent readings, this is the book you want. Muaddi Darraj gives us flawed but authentic characters trying to live as honorably as possible, despite the changing circumstances around them. This collection offers a glimpse of what it means to be what it means to belong to a place and to be connected to people so deeply that one can’t easily forget them. Belonging to both people and place play a vital role in shaping the truths of these characters and how they navigate in the world.
Rosalia Scalia
QUOTE:
Darraj does a wonderful job moving between the characters and the stories, giving each a distinctive voice. The stories flowed so beautifully and read so easily that it wasn’t long before I turned the last page, and it was sad, feeling like I’d closed the door on old friends.
Review and Author Interview: The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly by Susan Muaddi Darraj
December 11, 2008 by Anna
Back in April, I had the pleasure of hearing Susan Muaddi Darraj read from her collection of stories, The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly. The reading was the kickoff for a writer’s conference I attended the next day with Serena (you can read about my experience here). The excerpt Muaddi Darraj read pulled me in right away, and I snagged a copy of the book at the end of the reading. (She even signed it while I sat there staring dumbly because I never know what to say to an author when they’re standing right in front of me.)
It only took me two days of commuter reading to finish The Inheritance of Exile. These stories, which can stand alone but fit perfectly together as a novel, focus on four Arab-American women, friends who grew up together in Philadelphia: Nadia, whose mother won’t let her tell her boyfriend about the extent of her injuries from a car accident because it would shame his family; Aliyah, a writer who clashes with her parents when she inserts true family stories into her fiction and who meets a man during a summer visit to Ramallah and realizes she’s too Arab to be an American and too American to be an Arab; Hanan, whose decision to marry an American drives a wedge between her and her mother and who later realizes her husband doesn’t understand her; and Reema, whose boyfriend is obsessed with the idea of Arabian harems and gets all of his ideas about her culture from old movies.
In weaving in stories of their mothers, who are Palestinian immigrants, The Inheritance of Exile reminds me a lot of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (which is a good thing because The Joy Luck Club is among my all-time favorite books). Cultural tensions abound, but there also is a sense of fierce love, of a mother’s desire for her daughter to accomplish more than she did in her homeland. Here are two passages from Hanan’s story, “Preparing a Face,” that illustrate these tensions:
She walked out of the kitchen, out of the house, though before the door closed, she heard her mother say, “That’s how she is, my American daughter–if she doesn’t like something, she leaves. Too busy for us stupid Arabs. She thinks she hurts us by doing that.” (page 85)
“So you fight with your mother, it seems,” said Rola, moving closer to her. Hanan felt suddenly protective of her. “Does it happen very much?”
“Once in awhile,” said Hanan. “She thinks I should be some perfect Arabic girl, you know, that I should enjoy making cookies and looking for a husband.” (page 91)
Muaddi Darraj does a wonderful job moving between the characters and the stories, giving each a distinctive voice. The stories flowed so beautifully and read so easily that it wasn’t long before I turned the last page, and it was sad, feeling like I’d closed the door on old friends. I don’t know what it’s like to live with immigrant parents (my mom was 3 when she moved to the U.S. from Germany and doesn’t remember much about her life there), nor do I know what it’s like to feel like I don’t belong, but Muaddi Darraj made it easy to connect with and feel for her characters. This is one of those few books I could read again and again.
I might not have known what to say when I briefly met Susan at the pre-conference reading, but I had no problem asking her questions via email, and Susan graciously answered them all!
Is The Inheritance of Exile inspired by personal experience?
Everyone asks me this, and the answer is yes and no. “Yes” in the sense that it is set in a neighborhood where I grew up–the St. Nicholas of Tolentine parish on 9th and Watkins Streets in South Philly–but “no” in that none of the events in the lives of the characters happened to me or to anyone I know. Of course, generational conflicts, intercultural tensions are things that I experienced, too, but not in the specific ways that my characters did.
Which of the characters, if any, are you most like? Has your family been supportive of your need to write about the immigrant experience and clashes between immigrants and their American children?
I guess I am most like Aliyah, the one who is a writer. Again, though, I have a father–unlike Aliyah’s–who encouraged me to write, without limitations on subject. He was and is always supportive of what I do. I guess in Aliyah’s story, I tried to imagine, “What if I did NOT have that support? How would things be different?”
I come from a family of readers: my father is a literary reader, and he especially loves poetry. I have said in the past that he used to walk around the house, doing chores, etc., and just recite passages of Arabic poetry from memory. My mother is more of a nonfiction reader, and she taught me how to read–how to put words and sounds together–when I was a child, before I even started school. She used to read books to my brothers and me all the time, take us to the library on a regular basis. My father always told us stories at night, before bedtime, stories that he would make up to entertain us.
What is your favorite story in the book? Was there one that was harder to write or more personal than the others?
Probably “The Journey Home” was most difficult to write. I had to stretch my imagination there, because Hanan has such a tense relationship with her mother, whereas for me, my mother and I are quite like best friends.
Do you have a particular writing routine? Where is your favorite place to write?
Right now, I have two toddlers at home and a third baby on the way, so my writing/reading time has been traded away for Eric Carle and Dr.Seuss books! I do snatch away some writing time during the Christmas holiday and summertime, when I am not teaching. Once in a while, I go back to my old routine, which was getting up early–by 5am–and writing until 8am or so… that was always my favorite time and most productive time.
What is the best book you’ve read this year?
The Map of Home by Randa Jarrar
Are you working on another book? If so, could you give us a hint as to what it’s about?
I’m halfway through a novel, although it is still “forming”–I may cut out a lot of what I have already written as it gels.
Any advice to aspiring novelists?
Just write a lot and read even more. Reading is the best education for a writer. It’s also useful to read magazines of the writing profession, like Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle, which often have terrific essays on craft.
Susan, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer my questions! I wish you the best in your writing endeavors! And congratulations on the new baby!
If you’d like a chance to win a signed copy of Susan Muaddi Darraj’s ,The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly please leave a comment on this post and include your e-mail address. (If I don’t have a way to contact you, either through e-mail or a blog, your entry won’t be counted!) The giveaway is open internationally and will end at 11:59 pm EST on Dec. 17, 2008.