Anglophone audiences first encountered the Kuwaiti novelist, publisher, and bookseller Bothanya Al-Essa through excerpts of her 2004 novel A Soundless Collision (trans. Chris Bredin), published in a special issue of Banipal magazine in 2013. In these passages, a young Kuwaiti biology student on a week-long visit to Sweden meets a Bedouin man employed at the embassy, and the two compatriots debate the conditions of their world, broaching questions of self-determination and freedom of expression. Similar questions unfold in the three novels published in English since then: All That I Want to Forget (trans. Michele Henjum, Hoopoe, 2019); Lost in Mecca (trans. Nada Faris, Dar Arab for Publishing & Translation, 2024); and The Book Censor’s Library (trans. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, Restless Books, 2024). I spoke with Bothayna by video on June 5, 2024.
Early in your novel All That I Want to Forget, the protagonist Fatima Abdel-Rahim is looking at herself in the mirror. She says, “Shout out, Archimedes, shout out your brilliant discovery. Wake the whole world up.” What’s happening to the character in this scene?
It’s an “a-ha moment” for her. She realizes something. I like to think of the naked truth coming out. The truth has to be naked and unbearable, something that confuses you. Sometimes it’s shocking or even traumatizing. This is one of those moments for the character. And because she’s a poet, she has her own way of looking at the world, and she lives by creating metaphors that help her cope with reality. She’s also super-sensitive. Everyone seems to think of her sensitivity as a flaw, a problem. So, this moment is consistent with the character and the way her mind functions.
Fatima has a half-brother named Saqr, who sees the world through an ideological lens. Saqr has repressive designs upon Fatima. He’s very controlling.
But Saqr doesn’t treat his daughter the same way. There’s something personal about it. It’s always a mixture of both. That’s very common. He’s using the religion of Islam as an ideology. But it’s a spectrum, where people disagree on everything except the belief that there is no God but Allah. Everything else, people disagree on. And it’s been this way throughout history. Some people reject the spectrum, and some people insist that it’s our heritage, we get to be different, it’s okay. Fatima had a spiritual side. She always finds a way to touch these spiritual teachings of the religion and find the beauty in them, instead of making them a way to oppress others.
The Book Censor has a daughter. His daughter gets sick, and her illness is called Imagination. In the nightmare society of the future where they live, this is a very serious condition. I had the feeling that Fatima from All That I Want to Forget is the daughter of the Book Censor in The Book Censor’s Library.
I didn’t make that connection before, but there is a thread connecting my work. It’s always about oppression, fascism, systems working against what’s human. What’s a person’s creativity, sensitivity, imagination, capacity for self-expression, the quality of being who they are? Each of my books is a variation on a theme that interests me, which is the drama of Person Versus System. I care about this theme on a personal level, but it also makes for the best stories.
There’s a bookseller in The Book Censor’s Library, the owner and founder of a bookstore. Then it turns out that the Book Censor’s entire life comes from a manuscript that the bookseller is writing. The Book Censor recovers the manuscript, and reads his life story, right up to that very moment in the text.
Yeah, being a bookseller, I’m always confronting inspectors as they try to check my bookstore for illegal books, so it’s obvious that The Book Censor’s Library was inspired by those actual inspectors in my actual bookstore. But they make me curious, because I’ve met them. I’ve had long talks with many of them. Some of them are really good readers. Some of them organize book clubs within the Ministry to read banned books. But at the same time, they’re required, or so they think, to ban certain books, because this word appears here or that idea appears there. Since I launched my bookstore, we’ve had so many confrontations with the inspectors, with the Ministry of Information, which definitely inspired the world of The Book Censor’s Library. But I didn’t want this book to be some sort of revenge against the book censors, the inspectors, or the system. It had to be more than that, because I wanted this book to clearly say that literature is supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s its role. And this is where its beauty resides. Therefore, I had to push further, and ask the childish question: What is real and what is not? What did I imagine and what did I experience? How do you draw the line between your imagination and your reality? They tend to mix all the time, of course. I took it to a metaphorical level, with the way it was handled in the book, but the book was more interested in speaking up for the nature of literature itself than to be an angry statement against censorship.
Zorba the Greek is the book that blows the protagonist’s mind. Why Zorba?
Well, two reasons actually. One is personal. The other is related to writing. The personal story is that the book was banned in Kuwait. But somehow, I persuaded the officials and the ministry that this book is no problem. It’s old, it never caused any trouble, it was translated decades ago, everyone read it. Please just give me the approval, so I can put it on the shelf and feel safe, without being sued or something. And it worked. They gave me a piece of paper that said I could sell this book in my bookstore. But a few days later, they changed their minds and decided the book should be banned. And then the book fair took place here in Kuwait, and every time the inspectors came to my booth, they took the copies of Zorba the Greek away, and put them in storage. And then I went with the piece of paper that said the book was not banned and reclaimed those copies and put them back in my booth. And this happened two or three times a day. It was like Tom and Jerry, you know, really funny. In the end, of course, they took the piece of paper away from me, and banned Zorba. But I thought, “This is so Zorba!” The man is confusing. He says mean, even racist things, but he has a pure heart. He’s mean to women, but he adores them. He cares about people, but he also keeps jumping around and confusing the other characters. We love him one moment, we hate him the next, and that’s what I love about this character. He’s vital, he’s wild. You cannot tame a character like that. He’s complex, he’s rich, and most importantly, he hates books.
Do they give you a reason why they ban certain books in Kuwait?
It’s exactly how I described it in The Book Censor’s Library. They scan the surface of language and look for disturbing words. It doesn’t matter to them what the book is saying. Interpretation is a sin. In the future we don’t interpret, we just skim the surface of the language. If there’s an improper word, we’ll ban the book. And I guess sometimes a part of me agrees with them that those books are offensive. But we disagree about the rest. It’s important that some books be offensive. It’s important to make us uncomfortable, to make us question everything we know about ourselves and about life. I mean, if we’re not willing to be uncomfortable, I don’t think we can believe in democracy. Because they go together, you know.
What’s the status of democracy?
In Kuwait? Well, the parliament has been suspended for maybe four years now. We don’t really know what’s going on. I think it’s still too soon to judge what’s happening. There is a lot happening in the region that’s affecting the stability and the security of the country. And Kuwait is very small. It’s a neighbor to Iran, it’s a neighbor to Saudi Arabia, it’s a neighbor to Iraq. So I don’t like to jump to conclusions. I’m just watching right now.
In The Book Censor’s Library, the system is pushing a story of its own. The system appeals to people’s ability to dream, their capacity for imagination. Near the end, the Book Censor realizes this. “Time and again, he found himself pondering the government’s ability to create allegories and act as if they were real, and when his thoughts went this far astray, he began to wonder if the government believes even more than the opposition in the power of imagination.”
If you really think about it, I mean really analyze it, break it down, look at it, spend some time staring at what’s really happening, you see the subtext is that we all agree the imagination is very powerful. But we’re divided when it comes to being powerful in a good way, or powerful in a bad way. In the end, whoever has the power, whoever has the authority, gets to decide, gets to dictate the ideology of others. But we all agree. Otherwise, why would they censor those books?
Is there a list of banned words?
I don’t have a list, but I know some tricks. You can write God, but not Allah. They say if you use the word Allah, this places things an Islamic context, and that’s not acceptable. But if you use God, they’re willing to let it go. So that’s the logic, normally. Things of that sort. As a writer you have a wide range of vocabulary. If they block a word, there are neighboring words you can use, and maybe this will even make your sentences fresher.
I love the section of All That I Want to Forget that contains the emails that Fatima exchanges with Isam, the poet. There’s something innocent and beautiful about their love. She’s crying out for connection, and along comes this boy, who has a good relationship with his mother. He’s nice, and he’s curious about her and interested in her world. Their love blossoms on the page.
Thank you. I enjoyed that part. They remind me of Layla and Majnun. There are so many barriers keeping them from being together, but they keep longing for each other, and they express it with poetry. I think there is a consistency with that sort of love in Arabic. Virtuous love. There are so many stories in Arabic literature about lovers who can’t be together, and they write these agonizing poems. They’re just crushingly beautiful.
All That I Want to Forget starts like a prose poem. You must write poetry.
Not anymore. I guess I wrote that novel to get rid of the poet in me.
Lost in Mecca is a crime novel. After the family has made the Hajj, and the Kaaba is right there in front of them, their child disappears, and they’re plunged into panic. Faisal, his brother Saud, and his wife Suraya, the kidnapped boy’s mother, see “the other face of Mecca … a face without hope.”
I chose Mecca as a setting for that book because I wanted to see what would happen to our relationship to God if something of that sort happened in a sacred place. So through the lines you can see how the father and the mother take different paths according to their relationship with God. Because it happened in Mecca, I needed to raise a question about reality. How do we believe? How do we disbelieve? What makes people believe, and what doesn’t? Sometimes I say I write books because I have questions, and I try to answer them, but I rarely answer them. It always gets more complex. But I think I reach a deeper understanding of what a person is, the human soul. I guess that’s the reward for me.
Do you find some books more difficult to write than others?
Yes. I wrote All That I Want to Forget in six months. It was right there in front of me. All I needed to do was find the language, and when I found the language, voilà, I wrote it easily. A couple of months of revision, and that was it. But Lost in Mecca took me two years, with a lot of research, because it’s set outside of Kuwait, my comfort zone, and I needed to learn about people in different regions. The story goes from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Palestine. I needed to investigate characters that I know nothing about. It was a very uncomfortable book, not just because of the story, in which a child gets lost in Mecca, but also because it’s happening in a place I don’t know at all. I needed to educate myself. It took me hours of writing and researching every day. For The Book Censor’s Library, the difficult part was what I had expected would be the easiest: imagining a world. You can’t be wrong about what you imagine. No one can tell you that’s not how this street is, the dates are wrong, or any of the other sorts of errors I find devastating. I can handle people not liking my book, but I don’t tolerate mistakes. The Book Censor’s Library should have been easy, but it wasn’t. Coming up with a whole world that sometimes seemed one-dimensional because I’m not referring to anything I know, there is a limited presence of nature—the things that give me, as a writer, a sense of solid ground. It was hard, but it gets easier as you go on with it, and then you go back and rewrite, revise, edit. But it took me a really long time to believe that this world, this dystopia, exists at some level.
In Lost in Mecca, “the geography of black hunger” creates conditions under which “discrimination existed even in hell, which segregated its inhabitants based on their skin color.” What kind of research did you do? What’s an example?
I did a lot of research about the other side, the people who kidnapped the boy. Where are they coming from, and why is this happening? Why are they doing that? I did a lot of research into organ trafficking, human trafficking. Things I had no idea existed, not very far from me in Kuwait. I did research on plants, cuisine, music, pop culture, and movies from different countries. This book is like Mecca. It’s a place where many groups of people mix together. Indians, Africans, Filipinos, Arabs. All sorts of Arabs. And they all come from different cultures, and they’re soaked in their cultures, they exist within their cultural frames of reference. I had to investigate all that, which was a lot of work. I set chapters in Sinai, Egypt, and Al-ʿArīsh, close to the Rafah border, where all the problems are happening now. When I was writing the book, no one could get there, because of Daesh. There were some terrorist attacks there, so I couldn’t do my homework. I didn’t know anyone there, because all my Egyptian friends are in Cairo. They speak a different dialect. They literally live in a different country from Sinai. So I started looking for people from Al-ʿArīsh on Facebook, and I begged each one of them to be my eyes and ears. I spent so much time, so many nights, on these long phone calls. I asked, “How much time will it take me to get from Al-ʿArīsh to the hospital?” And he says, “So many minutes.” And I say, “What do I see there?” He says, “You see this building and that building, there are some plants here,” and so on. I record all these details, and I thank him, and then I call another person to verify everything the first person just told me.
You have a journalistic instinct, conducting interviews, then confirming what you’ve learned, to find out the truth. The black-market organ trade that you describe in Lost in Mecca exports to the United States, and local corruption means that in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as in the US, “our authorities have never truly deterred immigrants or smugglers.”
Yes. The parts related to organ trafficking weren’t fictional. I read a lot of reports and watched a lot of documentaries about people who are buried in the desert, and no one knows about them. When the bodies are discovered, their organs are missing. That was also a lot of homework I had to do. I also contacted one of the human rights activists working in that area. Eventually he fled to Germany, and I think he passed away a couple of years ago, so there’s a lot that I don’t know. When I started, I didn’t know anything, except the parts about Mecca. The rest was just me exploring. What I love about Lost in Mecca is that I grew, as a person and as a writer, by accepting that challenge, writing that sort of story. I wrote a chapter, and then I stopped for a month, and did all the research I needed to do for the following chapter. And then I wrote the following chapter for another month and then researched for a month. The ending revealed itself when I was almost done with the book. I had no idea what was going to happen.
How do you bring out what’s unsaid in writing?
I think in Arabic cultures there’s a lot that’s left unsaid. And I think art in general, and this includes literature, manifests itself as a dance around silence, an attempt to get closer to what we are not saying. I also think when it comes to writing techniques, I love the effect of the unsaid in a book, because it increases tension. It makes your characters want to explode—also the reader, if you’re lucky. So it’s part of how things are in reality. When I write a story, I’d like to capture that reality. But I also like to dance around it. I don’t change it, because I want to write something that’s real, something people can relate to. But I like to leave hints, winks, sometimes, for the reader: look here, pause here, think about this. Sometimes it helps you as a writer not to be aggressively vocal, not to turn your art into a statement, a manifesto, sentimental, angry, because the truth pulls you down. You’re always writing about a culture that appreciates silence, and you want to take this and work with it as an artist.
These three books come from different parts of your career. Sometimes authors read their books in other languages, and don’t recognize their own work. What’s it like to hear your voice in another language?
I don’t mind when something minor is changed, as long as it sounds better. I only have these three experiences. This is the first time I’ve received any face-to-face feedback about All That I Want to Forget. I’ve always thought that this was an Arabic book. It’s saturated with Arabic rhymes and music and poetry and references. And I don’t know how it’s going to be received. I read some reviews. I guess you should tell me. In Arabic the book is very musical. It’s a matter of how many times a letter is repeated in a sentence. I can see how Michele, the translator, changed some phrases to make them make more sense, and I love Ranya and Sawad’s work on The Book Censor’s Library. I wrote the original book so that it would feel as if it had been translated into Arabic. It feels like Orwell translated into Arabic. It’s all about Kafka, Zorba, Ray Bradbury, and all these books coming together and blending. So I thought, yeah, this book can be translated easily. Actually, maybe it will sound better in English.
Each book of yours is different from the others in its form, and that’s unusual, probably in any literature, certainly in literature written in English. It’s more like a Modernist body of work in English. Each book is clearly from a different period in the author’s life. You never do things the same way twice.
I don’t think I should. It’s fun not just to have different forms, but also to have different languages, in a sense. The way they sound, the way they whisper in your ear, is like a different language speaking to you every time, customized to that particular world. It’s supposed to be an adventure for me and for the reader. I like it to be different every time.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novella. Hopefully it will be published by the end of the year.
Do you have a regular publisher, or do you publish in different places?
Neither. Now I publish with my own publishing house.
The Book Censor’s Library is now available from Restless Books
Bothayna Al-Essa is the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional children’s books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. Her most recent novel, The Book Censor’s Library, won the Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category in 2021 and is her third novel to appear in English, after Lost in Mecca and All That I Want to Forget. Al-Essa was author-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation for the summer of 2023, and the recipient of Kuwait’s Nation Encouragement Award for her fiction in 2003 and 2012. She has written books on writing and led writing workshops throughout the Arab world.
Erik Noonan is the author of the poetry collections Stances and Haiku d’Etat. His poems appear in the anthology Cross Strokes and he is the recipient of a 2024 South Asian Literature in Translation travel grant. He is Managing Director at JackLeg Press and Assistant Dean at the San Francisco Film School.
minor literature[s] 