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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Speaking of complicated reactions, did you choose the book's title?
I did choose it. Under duress. [Laughs]
How did that happen?
Originally, it was called "Welcome to the Moral Universe." Daddy has a speech where he tells Jasira something about the moral universe, and I liked the speech. Probably, I also really loved the movie "Welcome to the Dollhouse." [Laughs] My editor, who's a very sharp woman, didn't say anything until I completed the manuscript, and then she was like, "OK, time for a new title!" So I was flipping through the book -- when I find titles, I try to find them in the text first -- and there's only one word that's coming up repeatedly. And I passed it over a million times and I thought, you know, you cannot call a book that. That is horrifying. And so I go all over the book, and it's the only thing you can call it. A lot turns on the use of this word. And then I started thinking, you know, this is what a title is supposed to be: a little rough, ideally one word, and something that will get people's attention. And it didn't feel like a cheat because it really is of the book. So I wrote to my agent and said, What do you think of this? And he said yep, and I wrote to my editor, and she said, yep, and then we had this bizarre discussion about whether it should be "Raghead" or "Towelhead." [Laughs] I talked to my [now ex-]husband and he said, "Tell them it has to be 'Towelhead,' because 'Towelhead' is funny. 'Raghead's' not funny. There's whimsy in 'Towelhead.'" [Laughs] It's the stupidest slur! There are better slurs. If you really want a powerful slur, that's not the one you want.
The title is likely to set off alarm bells for a casual reader who doesn't know anything about the book. Did you worry about that?
Sure. It's offensive. I hope the fact I'm half Arab allows me to use that title. Which I assume it does. It's not like I'm some white person who's calling the book "Towelhead." I think that would cause a lot more trouble.
Did you encounter slurs like that growing up?
My brother did. For some reason I didn't. But he was on the crew team in high school and they called him everything. We used to laugh about "sand nigger." We thought that was hilarious, and kind of creative. [Laughs] I don't think he was really disliked, but he did get called these things.
Do you feel any pressure to represent Arabs in a certain way, whether it comes from Arabs or others?
You mean to behave myself more? [Laughs] I should behave, I really should behave. But I clearly can't. When I first started writing the stories for "Brutal," that was when I first started heavily getting into the sexual material. I would write it, and it would be so gratifying. And then I would say, OK, that's enough. You need to shape up and stop writing this smut and write a real, respectable story. So I would try, and it would just degenerate. It got worse and worse, and I thought, well, this is what engages me. What engages me generally is my own shame; I always write from shame. It's the hardest thing that I manage in my life. Part of the way I have attempted to cure it is to write about it. The characters I like to write about are perpetually rejected by men or accepted by men in unacceptable ways, and they have to make do. I guess that I'll always write from that place, and it'll never be pretty. Therefore I will never be able to properly represent any kind of Arab culture because it's the culture that I both appreciate and in some ways [has] brought me all my shame. Just because it is a very specific culture, it's not a sexually open culture.
Having written about politics and anti-Middle Eastern sentiment through the filter of Jasira, do you plan to write about them in a more direct way?
[I'm working on] a second novel, "Hutch," and it's about this guy named Reed Hutchinson. He's an ex-Marine, back from the second Gulf. He has a lot of ideas about Arabs, and has a half-Arab niece who he's extremely protective of. But he's also a violent guy and I don't know what exactly is going to happen with him. But I like writing about Americans' feelings about Arabs. We're so tangled up with the Arabs -- we have always been, but increasingly in the last 15 years, it's astonishing how tied up we are. The thing that fascinates me is that it's becoming more and more difficult for Americans to hate the Arabs because we have proposed to save them. And if you're going to save someone, you're not really allowed to hate who you're saving. It doesn't make sense. I think that Americans culturally would like to feel that we're going to help these people, but also think, "These fuckers are killing our servicemen." "Towelhead" is very much a private thought that Americans could have and feel conflicted about having, whereas on the surface, they say, no, of course they should have democracy, just like us.
