Locus, June 2013 Read online

  Samatar’s debut novel A Stranger in Olondria appeared in 2013. She began publishing short fiction in 2012, and so far her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Apex, among others. She also publishes poetry and book reviews.

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  ‘‘My dad is Somali, and my mom is American, a Swiss-German Mennonite from North Dakota. My mom is retired now, but she taught English as a second language, and she was in Somalia for seven years – that’s where my parents met. Dad teaches African history at Rutgers. I went to graduate school almost right after college, but I was not ready for academia at all. I just did it because I didn’t know what else to do. I got married and moved to southern Sudan to teach English, and that’s where I wrote the first draft of A Stranger in Olondria. It was written in what’s now South Sudan, when the civil war was still going on.

  ‘‘My husband Keith Miller and I taught high school there for three years and then moved to Egypt. We actually wanted to go to Egypt first. Keith is American but grew up in Kenya, so we had East Africa in common: for him it was growing up there, for me it was my ethnic background. We’re both also very bookish. We like languages that have a lot of literature in them. Arabic was the obvious language to get interested in, and we wanted to go somewhere where people spoke Arabic, so Egypt was the obvious choice.

  ‘‘We wanted to go to Egypt, but when we were looking for jobs, this opportunity in Sudan came up. Keith had worked in northern Sudan before we got married, and he pointed out that because of the war, southern Sudan was a part of the world you couldn’t get to unless you had a reason to go there (like a job). We could go to Egypt on vacation, but we couldn’t see southern Sudan. He had worked in the north and really loved it, and he had a lot of southern Sudanese friends, and he’d always wanted to go to the south. To travel from north to south you had to go through Kenya, and we had different passports – it was like being spies because northern and southern Sudan were at war, and it was really complicated. After that we lived in Egypt for nine years. I taught English as a second language all those years, then decided, okay, now I’m ready to do the academic thing, and returned to Madison to get my PhD. I’ve loved it.

  ‘‘I’ve always been a writer. I’m not trained, so I taught myself to write by writing A Stranger in Olondria. It was a hot mess when I wrote the first draft. That took me two years. I was writing longhand. It was 200,000 words, which is about twice as long as it is now. It didn’t need to be that long – it wasn’t like beautiful things were lost! I spent the next 10 years revising it, on and off. I wrote a sequel, which is also a mess, that I’m trying to revise now. I didn’t imagine the books as a long series, but I did imagine two Olondria books.

  ‘‘When I came back to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to the convention WisCon for the first time. I’d never been to a convention before. I knew that I loved Small Beer Press – loved their books, I love everything they do, everything Kelly Link does ever. But I had published nothing, no short stories, nothing. I went to the Small Beer table and I met Gavin Grant and said, ‘I wrote this book.’ He said, ‘What’s it about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, it’s about somebody who leaves home and then he’s haunted by a ghost.’ He didn’t seem enthusiastic about my description at all! But he said, ‘Send me three chapters.’ So I did, and he said, ‘Can you send us the whole thing?’ Then he said, ‘We love it and we want to publish it.’ Best e-mail ever.

  ‘‘The ESL teaching experience is definitely in the book, and so is my experience of learning Arabic – learning a different script. Studying a different script is confusing and hard and it doesn’t make sense. The marks on the page don’t have meaning. It’s painful, because if I look at something in English, I can’t look at the letters and not read it. If I look at a word, I’ve also read that word. There’s no sounding out, it’s not in pieces. With a different script you don’t have that ability, and it’s really difficult, until finally there’s a moment when it clarifies, and you’re like, ‘I’m reading!’ Like when your parents let go of you on your bike, and you just go – you don’t think about what you’re doing, because then you’ll crash. That experience is also in the book – the experience of learning to read something very different.

  ‘‘Sometimes I worry about not having had someone sit me down and teach me craft. I’m now writing short stories and going to conventions and meeting people who have MFAs, or have gone to workshops. These people did something I didn’t, so clearly I missed something they didn’t. Sometimes I think, maybe that thing was an important thing, and I will never get it, and they will see that I don’t have it and it’ll be embarrassing! Still, I do believe you can be completely untaught and write a good book. In fact, I had a lot of ambivalence about the whole idea of craft at one point, though I’ve sort of talked myself out of it. At first, ‘craft’ suggested something that was too deliberate. It didn’t account for the part of writing that is just me in a different headspace, doing something that is not deliberate at all. When I’m writing I often don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where it’s going. For me it was the difference between taking a tree, carefully chopping it down, and making a chair out of it, which would be ‘craft,’ and running around the woods screaming – which more describes my writing process. But then I thought, that’s not fair. Because you’re still working with language. If you’re making a chair, you’re still using wood, there’s still a tree, which was an organic thing. It’s not like there aren’t going to be surprises, or you’re always going to know what’s happening next, working with wood or working with language. There’s a great quote by Gabriel García Márquez: ‘Literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.’

  ‘‘I read constantly. I discovered Proust while I was in Sudan. That was incredible, and possibly not the best thing for a young writer – it may be the reason the first draft was so overwritten! I was reading the poetry of Rilke, too. The whole idea of the angel as ghostliness and terror and beauty and pursuit, something that’s in pursuit of you, which is so important in A Stranger in Olondria, actually comes from Stephen Mitchell’s critical introduction to his translations of Rilke’s poetry. I wasn’t reading much genre fiction at all, though I’ve always loved Mervyn Peake, and Tolkien is an influence definitely in terms of maps and language and those epic fantasy things, and Ursula Le Guin, especially The Tombs of Atuan – I’ve loved it since I was a kid. Those were all there. But I read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time twice when I was in Sudan. The first volume, I don’t know how many times I read it. I also read the Brontë sisters, and I read Dracula for the first time when I was in Sudan. There’s Carol Maso, I adore her and her book AVA, it’s almost like a narrative poem. She’s a big influence. Cormac McCarthy. Michael Ondaatje. These are the people I was reading over and over while writing the book. I was also influenced by my favorites from high school: Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, all of those.

  ‘‘I was in Sudan with no Internet, so I didn’t have any way of knowing what was happening in the SF and fantasy field. I had lost faith in genre fiction when I was in high school. I look at SF and fantasy now, though, and it’s one amazing writer after another. Did something happen in the late 1990s? All kinds of stuff became really good all of a sudden. I stopped reading genre fiction in the 1980s and then I didn’t read much of it for going on 20 years, and I came back and thought – it’s amazing now.

  ‘‘Once we were in Egypt and had Internet, we found out about Catherynne M. Valente, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Link – all these people came across our radar. We couldn’t get the books, but we’d write the titles down, and when we came back to the US every two years for a visit, we’d bring our book list and buy them, and they were amazing. It’s been four years since I came back to live in the US, and I’ve been like a wild reading machine. I have access to this big university library. My latest find is Rikki Ducornet. Holy shit! Why did I never know about this woman? She’s been there my wh
ole life. She’s blowing me away.

  ‘‘My dissertation is on fantasy. It looks at the uses of fantasy in the works of Tayeb Salih from Sudan, Ibrahim al-Koni from Libya, Ben Okri from Nigeria, and Bessie Head, who was from South Africa and then made her new home in Botswana. Salih, who died in 2009, is a great writer. His work is taught a lot in the US. Season of Migration to the North, his most famous novel, has been translated into 30 languages, it’s a really big deal. He was an influence on me and on A Stranger in Olondria. I wrote my MA thesis on him, on that novel. None of the writers I treat in my dissertation would be described as genre fantasy, and I don’t claim they are in any way, but I look at what those fantasy elements are doing in these novels, and what they allow the writers to do that they can’t do in any other way.

  ‘‘I love poetry. Poetry and novels are the two forms that I really understand. I don’t understand the short story very well. Maybe I should do an MFA so I can learn how to write short stories! I keep writing them, though, because they keep occurring to me, and because they’re not getting worse. The last one I’ve written is always my favorite, so maybe there’s progress! But in general, I do sort of hate my short stories. Poetry I like. I didn’t know there was such a thing as speculative poetry when I was living abroad, so when I discovered that, online stuff like Goblin Fruit and Stone Telling, I was like, ‘Hey, that’s what I do!’ Then I started sending them things. That’s been really great. Poetry and short fiction have kept me going while I’m doing my PhD. My big project is my dissertation, and I can’t write a novel while that’s going.

  ‘‘Each chapter of my dissertation gave me something to use in my fiction. I have a chapter that looks at Sufism, and I wrote a story called ‘A Brief History of Nonduality Studies’, which is at Expanded Horizons online, and that came directly out of that Sufism chapter. I have a chapter on the uncanny, so I wrote an uncanny story called ‘Olimpia’s Ghost’. I have a chapter on the epic, especially the still-living folk epics of north Africa – that’s a big piece of the sequel to Olondria that I’m working on right now, and also a short story I’ve just completed. There’s definitely a back and forth between the academic work and the creative stuff.

  ‘‘I’m starting a job in the fall at California State University Channel Islands, which is in Camarillo, north of LA. They want somebody who can do world lit, and I can do African Lit, and teach Arabic for them as well, and Arabic literature in translation. It’s interesting because when I went on the job market, I asked people, does the novel go on the CV? They said, ‘No, no, no, don’t let anybody know you write. Hide, hide, hide. Strange Horizons, who are you kidding? These are research universities, they don’t want to hear that!’ But with this particular school, they’re really into the interdisciplinary thing, and I thought they wouldn’t mind some crossover between academic and creative work. So I mentioned the creative writing stuff when I applied, and obviously it didn’t put them off, because they hired me. I’m happy I’m not starting a job and having to hide a huge part of my life. I was really excited to take this job – this is the one I want.

  ‘‘Teaching feeds writing. I’m quite extroverted. I love to write and I need my time to write, I’d read and write all day if I could. But I’ve always known that I’ll never be a full-time writer. I need to go out and see people every day.

  ‘‘Before A Stranger in Olondria was published, I tried to get an agent and failed. I still don’t have one. Every time, this is what I heard: ‘The writing is lovely, but I can’t sell this, because where would it go? It has a ghost, but it doesn’t have magic spells. It’s got no dragons. There are rumors of war, but the main character is never in a battle. This is epic fantasy, but it’s not.’ Toni Morrison said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ That’s what A Stranger in Olondria is: all the stuff I want from epic fantasy, and none of the parts I skip through, which is often the dragons and the battles. In my book I just wanted to get to the language, and the different people interacting. It’s complete self-indulgence, really.

  ‘‘There are stories from oral traditions that are very long. Academics call this type of genre in north Africa ‘folk epic.’ Which is a bit weird – why isn’t it just ‘epic’? It could have to do with the way it’s viewed in the communities where those stories are told. Folk epics do not have the status of high literature. They’re oral, in colloquial language, not classical Arabic. But there are lots of them, and there’s usually a hero, and a conflict between different groups of people. The one I look at particularly in my dissertation is called ‘Sirat Bani Hilal’, which is the saga of the Banu Hilal tribe or clan. It’s based on a migration from Arabia into north Africa, but all kinds of magical stuff happens in the story. Big battles and great sorrow and lost loves being pursued from place to place and never managing to meet up.

  ‘‘There are places in sub-Saharan Africa that have these epics too. Usually, the story isn’t told all in one piece – at least until an ethnographer comes and wants to hear the whole thing. Then it takes a month or more, the storyteller sitting there every night saying, ‘Okay, here’s what happened next.’ There’s a great one called the Mwindo Epic, from central Africa. Because it’s in an oral tradition and has a performance aspect, there are always shout-outs, the storyteller will refer to people in the audience. One guy was telling the story for 12 days or so, from what I remember. The performance is very physical, there’s movement, there’s dancing. He’d say things like, ‘Why is this white man doing this to me? Why do I have to do this? I need water! This is rough! Nobody tells this all in one stretch!’ Not until somebody wants to write it down.

  ‘‘I’m reading a book right now in Arabic. It’s by a young Egyptian writer called Mohammed Rabie, it came out in 2010. It’s called Amber Planet, but it’s not exactly SF. It’s a weird story set in Cairo. I’m loving it. So I wrote to a friend who’s connected to the book world in Cairo, and said, ‘Is there a translation of this coming, because I want to tell people about it.’ Two days later she writes back and says, ‘They would be happy to have you translate it.’ I was like, ‘That’s not what I said!’ It is something I would love to do, though. Who knows, maybe it’ll be this book. I have to finish reading it and see if I love it all the way through. Because translation is a labor of love. You have to love a book to translate it.

  ‘‘Translators tend to receive little capital of any kind, whether hard currency or cultural capital. There’s no fame, and it doesn’t help your academic career much. It’s a side thing you do. I hope that’s changing. Maybe it’s starting to shift a little bit. I look at academic institutions, and I’m like, don’t you people want good translations? What is the matter with you? Why aren’t you encouraging people who know how to translate to give you good translations? Maybe it’s because people don’t understand what an incredibly demanding thing translation is, and how much theoretical thinking goes into translation and word choice. They think you’re like a machine, that it’s like Google Translate.

  ‘‘Some of my favorite writers are beautifully translated into English. Tayeb Salih. Elias Khoury, from Lebanon. His book Little Mountain was a big influence on Olondria. I loved that book. And Miral ah-Tahawy, from Egypt, is a young writer, her book The Tent is very fantastical and interesting. It’s an Egyptian Bedouin setting, with strange figures that appear out of the desert. Weird stuff, very cool.

  ‘‘A lot of what goes into the Olondria books, both the one that’s coming out and the one I’m working on, is the fact that I taught English abroad. There’s a lot of moral and ethical trickiness about doing that. On the one hand it looks simple – people want English and I will give it to them, yay. On the other hand, there’s a lot in the books about non-literate cultures and literate cultures, and what you gain and lose when you move between them. When I was in Sudan, I was conscious that I was living in a place that was mostly in an oral mode, and here I was, saying, ‘Let’s bring in literacy so everybody can get into
the modern world and be successful – in English.’ I found it really hard after a while. I was asking myself difficult questions about my role. Reading is my favorite thing. There’s nothing I love more. I think of reading as pure goodness on our planet. But writing is a tool of empire. So what does that mean?

  ‘‘I love ghost stories. For Olondrians, there is no such thing as a ghost. If it’s a living spirit of a dead person, it’s an angel. That idea really captured my imagination. My main character Jevick is going to this other country, and he’s so excited about that. He’s going to the land of books, and he feels it’s the place where he belongs. That happens when you leave home and travel to another country, and it’s totally different – you think, ‘Home sucks. I hate the way we do things there. This is the really the place for me.’ But all Jevick knows about Olondria he learned from one teacher, and from a bunch of books! Reading about a place does not make you know that place. Reading is not life. It’s the part of my life I like best, but it’s not everything.

  ‘‘My husband’s first book is The Book of Flying. Our writing has a lot in common. You have to remember, we were two young people in a house in South Sudan, and we had the same library, we were reading all the same books. We were taking in the same stuff exactly, so there’s a lot of similarity in our work in terms of language. We felt like we were alone in saying, ‘This is going to be fantasy but the language is going to be important. The language is going to count. It’s not just going to be story, it’s going to be language as well.’’’ It’s great to realize now that we weren’t as alone as we thought.

  –Sofia Samatar

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