Interview with longlisted Author Mohamed Samir Nada

When did you begin writing The Prayer of Anxiety and where did the inspiration for it come from?

The idea for the novel came to me at the end of 2017. It began as a poem, before becoming a short novel (novella), and then a weighty novel which I returned to and shaved off passages until it finally took its published form. The anxiety pervading its characters was also present in the author and the text itself, as it shifted between genres (poetry/story/novel) and expressive forms (music/writing). So, my journey with the novel was in essence a learning curve, which I began with poetry, reminding myself of the saying of Al-Jahiz: “There is no good in speech which does not express your meaning”. Then I discovered that meanings are not “churning in people’s souls”, as Abu ‘Uthman (Al-Jahiz) said, so I went looking for them in stories of life found everywhere around us, but still didn’t find them. I began to understand that meaning, or its phantom, resides in the private part of the self we do not reveal, which is also open to the outer world, and that I would have to painstakingly construct meaning for myself rather than pass on second-hand versions of it. I made my slogan the words of Maurice Blanchot: “My words surprise me and teach me my ideas”, with apologies to Al-Jahiz. How could I convey an Arab reality riddled with anxiety and fear of the unknown? Is there a clear, transparent truth, or is truth itself a product of imagination which has become established as reality? Isn’t truth what is forcibly imposed upon collective consciousness? How does the Naksa (“Setback”) of 1967 become a victory? How does the [national] resistance become Utopia? What is the writer’s responsibility towards this heavy burden?

At this point, I had two choices: to confront accepted truths with their opposites, a thorny, difficult path which I wouldn’t be able to endure; or to go along with those truths and make fun of them. The second option seemed more artistic, so I tried to give the story a frame of fantasy, blending factual, documented history and pure imagination. From this mixture, this dystopic novel came into being. It is dystopic despite being set in the past, at the time of the Naksa. Through this process, I concluded that writing, like truth, is built through play, but it is playing at the edge of the abyss.  

Did the novel take long to write, and where were you when you finished it?

I spent four years in pursuit of this text. Every time I thought that it had settled into one form and began to be malleable, it began to rebel and slipped out of my hands, so that I ended up with seven or eight drafts. Maybe subconsciously I was revising it on purpose because of the pleasure I derived from doing so. This pleasure is the core of creativity for me, like a game played with writing and a rubber. Maybe I was just selfish, keeping the pleasure all to myself, or perhaps I was afraid of communicating it to others, like extracting a part of myself and placing it in a museum for people to look at. So, when I reached the final draft, I sent it to some trustworthy friends and began to observe it from afar, noticing its effect on them by the look in their eyes and in their positive and negative feedback. That distance was very useful to me when I went back to the text later, seeing it from different points of view. In the end, I gathered my courage and sent it to several publishers, whose response was either silence or forgetting to give me an answer. Did I feel pain? I don’t remember. Maybe I enjoyed the fact they forgot, reminding myself of the saying of the Tunisian writer Mahmoud Massadi, on the lips of his hero Ghaylan in the play The Dam: “If you complete the work, you kill it”. The irony here is that the answer which killed the work and ended its journey came from Tunis. One Spring morning, a strange letter arrived from Chaouki Al-Aneezi , director of Dar Masciliana, asking for a picture of my passport. Astonished, I read to the end, where the last sentence revealed the reason for the request, which was to prepare a publishing contract. The phrase “agreement to publish the work” was absent from that letter, as though he too had joined in my playful game. So, another year of editing and pruning was added to the manuscript’s life, beginning and ending in the Spring. In a similar circular pattern, I began writing the novel and finished it in Cairo.      

Do you have writing rituals?

I love silence. As I listen to fingers tapping notes on a keyboard, I think that art is the only thing we do which has the right to break silence, whether it is music or writing. Writing demands calm. The biggest challenge is to grab a few moments of calm each day in the midst of the busyness of life, which doesn’t allow a pause to order one’s thoughts or enjoy some peace and tranquillity. Just like reading. I consider myself essentially a reader who writes as a hobby, so writing (and reading) rituals for me are basically linked with how much isolation and quiet I can get. So, I try my best to find short periods of quiet in the bustle of everyday life, even if it is just ten minutes. These are what I need.

What is your next literary project after this novel?

The attention given to my novel after its longlisting this year still makes me feel dazed and perplexed. I am writing another novel which deals with the period from 1914 to 2013 and is set between Turkey, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Alongside this, I have another project set in a dystopian future, in 2152, but the drawer containing postponed work has several books I finished in the last ten years but haven’t published, either because there hasn’t been a publisher bold enough to accept the work as it is, or because I haven’t had the personal conviction that the text is ready. There are novels and novellas, and a book of prose I am writing for my two children to get closer to them, or maybe I’m writing it so they would get closer to me and one day understand what was going on in the mind of their silent father. In summary, I have many unfinished projects and haven’t yet decided the fate of any of them. The only thing I know for sure is that I enjoy writing, and that publication will always be the last thing I think about.