7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song (RB)

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Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a novelist, Omar was a journalist, and his experiencing reporting on (among other subjects) the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement profoundly shapes his fiction. His first novel, American War, follows the protagonist’s radicalization against the backdrop of a fossil fuel-motivated civil war. His second, What Strange Paradise, is a haunting retelling of Peter Pan focused on a young Syrian refugee. But as Omar and Min’s dialogue reveals, literary criticism doesn’t always get the politics of political fiction right. Their conversation moves from the preoccupation with “literal prophecy” which plagues the reception of speculative fiction in general and climate fiction in particular to the multifaceted appeal of the fantastical in writing migration stories. They discuss Omar’s interest not in extrapolation, but in inversion. And they take up the imaginative challenges posed by climate change: the way it fails to fit zero-sum colonial ideologies; the way it relies upon the continued development of “the muscle of forgetting, the muscle of looking away.” Finally, Omar’s answer to the signature question is a case study in the inversion that characterizes his work: Little Women readers, prepare yourselves!

Mentioned in this episode:

Paolo Bacigalupi
Kim Stanley Robinson
Barbara Kingsolver
Jenny Offill
Richard Powers, The Overstory
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Barack Obama, “A New Beginning: Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09”
Stephen Markley, The Deluge
Alan Kurdi (photographed by Nilüfer Demir)
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

Listen and Read:

Audio: Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song (RB)

Transcript: 7.4 Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song (RB)

10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT) – Novel Dialogue

“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event. As Sinan observes in a discussion of the Arabic term nisyān—“forgetting” or “forgetfulness,” although its nuances in Arabic are not easily rendered in English—even memory itself is not static. And yet, shared histories of empire and imperialism make it possible to draw connections between far-flung locations, as Sinan does in Of Loss and Lavender by drawing together Iraq and Puerto Rico. From here, the conversation turns to the pleasures and challenges of translation, including some of Sinan’s choices when translating his own work into English. This includes the effort to make legible the nuances of race, class, and other forms of difference across contexts; although, as Sinan notes, much of his younger readership in the Arab world today is often well-versed in US culture. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Sinan’s frequent use of poems and songs in the novel, a device that points back to the multi-genre experiments of the premodern Arabic tradition, and a moving portrait of a teacher who transmitted to his students ideas about justice and equality despite the dictatorship under which he worked. Mentioned in this episode: About Baghdad The Baghdad Eucharist Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness” (on nisyān) The Book of Collateral Damage Elias Khoury and the use of dialect in contemporary Arabic fiction Quebecois literature Breaking Bad Um Kulthoum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  1. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  2. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
  3. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
  4. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
  5. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
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