What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (9 page)

EA:
What you call a silent majority.

LT:
[laughs] They are taught by Sitt Mary Rose, they don’t speak; she is the only one who is kind to them. The four male characters, who represent various factions of the Christians, speak; they are all anti-Muslim. Sitt Mary Rose is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

EA:
Which was why she was killed.

LT:
The deaf children are presented “speaking” in the first person. Throughout all the formal changes, I was able to understand where I was, who was speaking; you included politics but didn’t re-create politics per se. You reimagined everything. Desire, impressions, feelings.

EA:
And the description of the state of war in a specific place. Politics is such an important part of our lives, whether we like it or not. Why shouldn’t it enter novels? In poetry, people mostly avoid politics. They think it’s not poetic. But the Iliad is a political work. I became an American poet by writing against the Vietnam war, I joined the movement by writing against the war, spontaneously. I feel the first thing is to be true to oneself. Now you will say what if you are a monster and are true to yourself? [laughing] If you’re a monster, you’re going to be true to that self anyway. But a movement of poets against the war didn’t happen about Iraq, which is as monstrous a war and as long. Why? We are in a period when there is, funnily enough, more poetry being written in proportion to the population than during Vietnam. Poets have followed the general apathy of the Bush and Reagan years.

LT:
Maybe that speaks about where poetry is in terms of its relationship to society. Some writers may feel themselves at a great distance.

EA:
It’s because of the kind of poetry they are writing—a very abstract poetry. They are discovering new forms, by complicating form and by avoiding anything that would smack of a message. And, like all great writing, it can defend itself beautifully.

LT:
In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” she observes a day moth, which lives 24 hours, and watches it die. By looking at it, she understands the struggle to live, the finality of death.

EA:
You’re right, one can express anything, in the most unexpected way.

LT:
What I want to claim is that fiction and poetry need not be specific to a political event to embrace the effects and depredations to life because of war, violence, injustice.

EA:
No. I went to Iraq twice, and, in spite of Saddam’s dark side, there was great vitality, artistic vitality—it had the biggest readership of contemporary Arab literature. Iraq had great painters, musicians. It was the most dynamic Arab country for some 30 years, with an excellent medical system, the best in the Arab world. So the destruction of it . . . Simultaneously, Saddam was an excessive character. You were for him or against him, no in between. In that sense, he was a total dictator. Still, something was happening there. There was the same oppressive rule in Syria, but without the counterpart in culture Iraq had. When America attacked Iraq, each time they moved, they destroyed it. I didn’t feel
my best friends, poets or non-intellectuals, really cared. Though when you think about it, there is so much going on in the world, and Americans cannot care for everything. But this is something that America started and did.

LT:
There’s a passage from
Sitt Mary Rose
, which, though it came out here in 1982, could have been written now. \

In this society where the only freedom of choice, when there is any, is between different brands of automobiles, can any notion of justice exist and can genocide not become an instable consequence
.

It articulates the horrible sense of possibility of genocide.

EA:
Hatred can lead to genocide. You don’t win, so you will tomorrow, or after tomorrow, but you’ll keep going; there is no real rationale to it. The U.S. is not immune, but prosperity made America relax. If this financial crisis goes on, ten people will fight for one job, and race or religion might lead to: “how come the Chinese and the Latinos have a job and I don’t?” To a degree American prosperity created a certain benevolence. America is interesting, everything is true about it, and its opposite is true. There can be an atmosphere of benevolence, but the word “socialism” is taboo. In one way we have a people’s country, there’s no aristocracy. We have a democracy in many ways, really. But people are horrified by universal health care, which Europe and Canada have as a matter of course.

LT:
I believe that Existentialism is an important philosophy to you.

EA:
Yes, I went to Paris as a student in 1950, Sartre was the great thing, and I had not heard of him in Beirut. It was like a miracle. I had come from a culture where we lived on a more basic level. My father was highly educated for those days, my mother was not. We had no books at home. My mother had the Gospels, she was a Greek from Smyrna—Greek Orthodox. My father was a Muslim from Damascus in the Ottoman empire. He had the Koran, he knew it by heart. Amazingly, the books existed on a shelf next to each other. So I have no problem with coexistence. I grew up with it. People finished their education, if they were lawyers they went to law, but that generation didn’t have books in the home. In Paris, everything was new, astonishing, until I was 30. I was in a stage of discovery for 13 years, until I started teaching, which gave me a distance from reality. I was immersed in reality until I was 30.

LT:
How do you mean “reality”?

EA:
In the present, that type of reality. When I read Sartre, I was floored because I’d attended French Catholic schools, they were the only ones you could go to, and they hammered us with religion: you’re moral because you follow religion. Sartre said you could be moral without being religious.

LT:
Did you hear Sartre speak?

EA:
No, but his philosophy changed my life. Its second idea was
about responsibility, and that is empowerment. I didn’t have the word or concept then, but it’s what existentialism offered people. Coming from a Catholic school, I know firsthand that you are meant to follow the church, the priest, then you are a good person. You go to confession. By saying you are responsible, you are your decisions. I think that’s liberation. It’s not “Obey and shut up.”

LT:
I’m curious how your parents met. A Muslim from Syria, a Greek Catholic from Smyrna.

EA:
They met during WWI, in Symrna, in the street. He followed her. They got married. He already had a wife and three children in Damascus, but he didn’t tell her. She was so poor that, for her, it was a fairy tale. He was governor of Smyrna, a top officer; he’d been Ataturk’s classmate, because though my father had been stationed in Damascus, the sole military school was in Istanbul. Then the war was lost, and my parents went to Beirut. From there it was downhill.

LT:
They were poor, but you were well educated.

EA:
I was educated because I went to a French school. But about my social class: I didn’t identify with the rich or the poor, though my father’s family in Damascus were among the top families. My mother was extremely poor when she grew up. She used to say there were only two jobs in Smyrna for women. To pick up grapes for raisins or be a prostitute.

LT:
You often write about prostitutes.

EA:
If mother hadn’t married my father, she may have been one. She was 16 when he met her. Then the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps. Not like the German ones, more like the Japanese camps during WWII here.

LT:
How did they let you go to Paris?

EA:
My father was dead by that time. It broke my mother’s heart. I was 24 when I went. I had a French government scholarship for three years.

LT:
How did that happen?

EA:
I worked from the age of 16. I was the only child. We needed money. I cut school for a year, and one day I was crying in the office, and my boss, a Frenchman, asked, “Why are you crying?”
Because everybody goes to school and I don’t
. He said, “Why not? I’ll help you.” But I said,
I work all day, there are no night classes. But I could take morning classes
. He let me come to the office at 10am instead of 8, I made it up at night. I finished the whole program in two months instead of eight and received a baccalaureate, which allowed me to go into the third year of a French school that specialized in literature. I quit the first job and found one doing almost nothing, for a man who wanted to write a novel. He thought if I just sat there, he would write it. He didn’t, for two years, but I was paid every month. I read books in his library. [laughing] In the
French school, Gabriel Bounoure taught us Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine. He wanted literature to be free from the Jesuits, and he taught poetry. Thanks to him we got an enlightened education. He’s the one who encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to Paris. I told him my mother didn’t want me to. When I told her, she went crazy. I was her only child, and I’d be in a foreign place. But I went.

LT:
You were very brave.

EA:
Brave in many ways, but also brave with no sense of the future. It was day to day bravery.

LT:
It raises the question of developing character, your character, and how you respond to others, and fashioning characters in fiction.

EA:
Some people have hardships which kill them; others are made so bitter they have no hope. But hardships can also, in some cases, become experiences one can grow from.

LT:
Often in your writing, there are questions of liberty and madness. In
Of Cities and Women
, set in Barcelona, in the Ramblas, a woman walks down the street completely naked.

After she passed me I saw her from behind, and was wondering if she was really naked. She was. She continued down the avenue probably heading for the red light district. . . . Was this a scene of absolute liberty or of insanity
?

I don’t know sometimes what I’m seeing.

EA:
That’s interesting to say you don’t know what’s happening.

LT:
I’m wary of making judgments, generational ones, in our day this or that. Nonetheless, what is being free or insane—crazy—what’s possibility or breakdown.

EA:
They’re both such flexible notions. We don’t know completely what we mean by freedom, especially when freedom is used as a nuisance to others. We also don’t know really what insanity is.

LT:
We don’t know what the benefits or disadvantages of certain behavior are or will be.

EA:
Insanity, as a category, has mostly disappeared. But how do you run a society between these two notions, both boundaries, which in effect include disorder. To implement law, what do you do when you have power? How do you use it? Stop? How to integrate contradictory rights?

LT:
In your poetics, you are very free. In writing about women and femininity, in
Of Cities
, you employ the epistolary form.

EA:
Because it gives one freedom. I wrote it, because my friend Fawwaz wanted me to write a paper on feminism.

LT:
You mention cities, experiences in them, think about politics
and philosophy, love, aesthetics, painting, how women are depicted compared with men.

Several questions come forward at the same time, pushing each other. Calling us or escaping us. Should we wish for the acceleration of this process, which is that women become more like men, or should we rather hope for the metaphysical distinctions what man and woman to be maintained without the maintenance of the immemorial inequalities that we know? Always and still present
.

You›re so succinct, discussing a complex issue very much with us. I’m not an essentialist, but how do we maintain difference(s) and reduce inequality?

EA:
I have no answer, but it is a genuine question.

LT:
It’s also similar in regard to varieties of cultures and societies, religions: can we respect differences with, for lack of a better word, globalization?

EA:
The trend is toward uniformity. Obviously women have been acculturated to use their femininity, men their masculinity. I don’t think that we want to keep everything we have called “the feminine.” We need societies to maintain what I’d call a metaphysical balance, the different qualities of masculine and feminine. Aggression is part of life, but we also need a counter-aggression. We need men who are against war, as much as women, though there are more and more women for war. We need diversity and balance in the sexes.

LT:
It’s in your writing, though I don’t know if I’ve read the word as such: forgiveness.

EA:
Goodness of the heart. That is the core of Christ and Christianity. Everything else is an invention of his followers. When Jesus said “I am the son of God,” he didn’t mean it the way it’s interpreted. In Semitic languages, in Arabic, to be a “son” is an everyday expression. For example, a man might say, “Young man,” take him by the hand, then say, “My son, do you know what time it is?” To be the son is to be accepted. It’s a friendly word. When Jesus said “I am the Son, Father,” he meant I am accepted, and what I say is agreeable to the Father, to God. He spoke in Aramaic, older even than Arabic.

LT:
In
The Arab Apocalypse
, an extraordinary epic poem, I noticed the word “sun” throughout it. I’d never read “sun” presented in so many ways.