Ahdaf Soueif: How to write at a time of revolution
The author of The Map of Love on the importance of “writers of the imagination”
Ahdaf Soueif is one of the most important authors writing in English today. Best known for her 1999 novel The Map of Love, her most recent book is about Cairo, the city — her city — and its revolution.
In the short film of an interview with Soueif, we talked about the revolution and the dangerous point that Egypt is now passing through. “If the country is not changed radically,” she said, “then nobody knows what will happen.”
But as with a recent interview with Raja Shehadeh, there was more in our conversation than made it into the final film. In particular how — and why — Soueif writes.
Faisal Al Yafai: “In reading Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, I was struck by how you were both describing the revolution and actively participating in it. You were both a chronicler of the revolution and also an activist. What do you think is the importance of a writer at these moments of revolution?”
If you’re somebody that people have decided that they already trust because of what you’ve written before, then to be very visibly part of the revolution and on its side is important. You’re flying the flag.
Chronicling is really important. Someone once said, in the context of the Egyptian revolution, that what writers of the imagination — poets or fiction writers — bring is the odd moment when they perceive things in a certain way, which is new and which crystalises what they are witnessing for other people.
You’re building when you write. You’re building the ideas of the revolution. You’re building the discourse, you’re building the community, and the writer has a part in this.
“I wonder what you think the value of writing is at a period of such immense change? Egypt faces such enormous challenges that, set against that, writing feels like a weak response to the very real troubles. Is that a pessimistic view?”
I think it’s a valid view and I think we all maybe feel a bit like that sometimes, and I know that a lot of the time I felt my place was out on the streets, with the protests — perhaps feeling that maybe just your prescence might protect some of the younger people.
But the thing is, the people on the ground themselves want you to write. And that is really what sends you back to your desk. Because you’re out there in the thick of the action and someone will say, “When’s the next book?” And you try to answer and they say, “No, but we need you to do this.”
And so I guess that everybody has their role. And it’s important to be actively out there and part of things, but it’s also important to do what people think of as your job, and to do it as well as you can.
