Omar El Akkad on the 'casual cruelty' that inspired his novel What Strange Paradise
Tareq Hadhad will defend What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad on Canada Reads 2022
Like a lot of writers, Omar El Akkad has a habit of archiving bits of conversation for future use. It has served him well: both of his novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, were selected for Canada Reads.
The most recent of the two, What Strange Paradise, also won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
In chapters that alternate between before and after a shipwreck, What Strange Paradise follows a 9 year-old Syrian boy and his unexpected journey to hostile shores. The opening scene finds Amir unconscious on a foreign beach, surrounded by death and debris. When Amir wakes up, he sees soldiers and instinctively makes a run for it.
Tareq Hadhad, CEO of Peace by Chocolate and former refugee, will defend What Strange Paradise on Canada Reads 2022. Hosted by Ali Hassan, the debates take place March 28-31.
Omar El Akkad sat down with CBC Books to talk about the novel, the conversations that inspired it and his second Canada Reads.
How are you feeling about being on Canada Reads again?
I'm equal parts deeply grateful and deeply anxious. My very limited experience with Canada Reads for my one previous rodeo is that you're subjected to this kind of very communal form of feedback that exists not only in the panellists's conversations, but also the folks that pop up on Twitter and take this very seriously. It's kind of a mechanism of attention and spotlight that I'm not used to at all.
I'm deeply grateful to be in this kind of company and deeply anxious about how this thing's going to play out.
Is there anything you'd like to say to Twitter this year, something to keep in mind as they watch the show?
Feel free to yell at me as much as you like. I have no issues with that whatsoever. This thing gets pretty intense sometimes, but the fact that people are passionate enough to get intense about books offsets any of the mentions that show up in my Twitter notifications. The fact that people are passionate about this is really heartening.
And, the fact that our public broadcaster dedicates a week of programming to have people talk about books — that's such a miraculous and rare thing. I talk a lot about this notion of how anxious this makes me, but that's just because I'm a naturally anxious person. This whole thing is so unique and it's just an incredible privilege. For all of my insecurities about having celebrities talk about my book in public, I'm a huge fan of the whole endeavour.
How was meeting your champion, Tareq Hadhad?
It was incredibly humbling. This person has taken time out of his life to enter into a very public setting to talk about my book. It's difficult to say how grateful I am to him for taking this on, for choosing my book.
And, he's had this incredible life. He's had a series of experiences that would be enough to break most people, and it was just a pleasure to talk to him.
If the book does well on the other end of Canada Reads, it will be entirely his doing. And if it doesn't, it will be entirely the fault of my own book.
I just hope he enjoys the experience because it's really unlike anything else.
What is the paradise of What Strange Paradise?
I suppose I think of it as delusions. The paradise in What Strange Paradise is a delusion of safety, a delusion of home, a delusion of what it means to have arrived.
The book takes place at the collision of two duelling fantasies. There's one pointed toward the part of the world I was raised in, which says the people coming over here are barbarians at the gate, we need to do anything we can to stop them. And then, there's the fantasy pointed at the other direction that says, if I can just make it to the West, everything will be OK.
Most of the book takes place at the collision point of these two fantasies where their power and their influence is such that it renders reality subservient. What the world is really like becomes secondary to what these various characters believe the world to be.
So that, for me, is the paradise in What Strange Paradise — it's the delusion of what the world is, instead of what it actually is.
One of the things that struck me was how empathy is such a finite resource on the island and on the boat. Do we have a delusion of humanity that our empathy is infinite?
I think one of the reasons that empathy gets a bad rap a lot of the time in this part of the world is because the concept itself is so closely tied to Western threads of individualism. This notion that understanding other people's experience is important, and if I understand it hard enough, I will make everything better. This notion of individual agency and individualism that runs through so much of the society we've created here, I think tends to muddy up what empathy can be.
But we also live in a time where I genuinely could not tell you what I was outraged about this time two years ago, or three years ago. We went through this period of cascading scandals and outrages and indignities. I think, almost as a psychological self-defence mechanism, a lot of us put up this wall whereby we could only be empathetic for a certain amount of time, relative to a certain situation, and then, it was time to move on and be empathetic about something else.
I think the book, in particular, is an attempt to do the opposite. This novel is an attempt to dwell. Just sit with this. Just sit with this experience and its consequences, as opposed to becoming sufficiently outraged about a particular injustice one day and then moving on to the next one the next day.
I think empathy is vital, I don't know that empathy is enough. I don't think empathy on an individual level does very much to offset injustice at an institutional level. I think that's one of the delusions addressed in the book — individually, by being good enough, we can't offset institutional injustice.
Do you remember what the catalyst for writing this book was?
The closest thing I have to a genesis moment was in 2012. I was still working with the Globe and Mail as a journalist and I had flown down to Egypt, where I was born, to cover the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I was driving around with an old high school buddy who was complaining about rent.
At one point I asked him, "What's the price for an apartment in your building?" And he said, "Well, do you mean the local's price or the Syrian's price?"
I said, "What the hell's the Syrian price?" He said, "Well, we've had these people come into the country recently, and you can charge them three times as much. They don't have any choice. What are they going to do? Go somewhere else?"
The casualness of that cruelty I think was the instigating moment where I started to think about the things that would congeal into this narrative and thematic arc of What Strange Paradise.
I don't steal in whole characters, but I do steal in slivers of people.- Omar El Akkad
This came in the context of all of these Arab leaders in the country of my birth, the countries I grew up in, talking about how we have to help our Syrian brothers and sisters. And, it was all rhetorical posturing that had nothing to do with what was happening on the ground.
On the ground, there was a population that was fit to be exploited, and so they were going to be exploited because that's how we've set up our society. I had seen this over the years — the rhetoric of this kind of unity that a lot of the time doesn't exist. It's a fantasy. It's a fabrication.
Is that part of what inspired some of the scenes on the boat?
Yeah, absolutely, a lot of the things that happen on the boat are based on slivers of conversation and characteristics of the people I grew up around. I don't steal in whole characters, but I do steal in slivers of people. A lot of that stuff works its way onto the boat.
These are conversations that represent certain kinds of mindsets. Anyone who grew up in the Arab world will recognize some of these positions, we've all heard them. Not even just on the boat, but for example, early on in the story there is a scene where Amir's family has moved into their rich relative's house for a while. And this relative is basically trying to explain to Amir's mother that the things that happened to her didn't really happen, that her house wasn't really bombed. She says something like, "Oh no, they just make all that stuff up on a sound-stage somewhere in Qatar."
I've heard that conversation. I've heard people say that, and it's the most infuriating thing when someone has the privilege of essentially ignoring reality without any consequence. A lot of these things work their way into the story. In some cases there's verbatim dialogue of conversations I've heard growing up, and in other cases, it's slivers of the kind of people that shaped my view of the world for a very long time.
It sounds like you've always been paying attention.
I do archive things for future use in a very insidious kind of way, so this stuff spills out years, sometimes decades later.
I heard in a couple of interviews that you talked about being surprised by some of the reader reaction to your debut novel, American War. Have you had any similar experiences with this book?
Weirdly enough, it was worse with What Strange Paradise. I thought the opposite would be true because American War is a kitchen sink book — there's a lot going on in there. It's sprawling. There's world-building. It's set in America, which already guarantees that you'll have a million different opinions of what's going on in the book.
I thought the thing I was doing in What Strange Paradise was relatively straightforward. And then, the first four people who read the manuscript — it was about the fifth draft, I think, when I started showing it to people — had four entirely different interpretations of what was going on in this book. I wasn't ready for that at all.
It's hard to talk about the specific interpretations without spoiling the book, but I will tell you that in the time since the novel came out, I've gotten emails, notes, DMs and tweets from readers who, not only have had an entire spectrum of opinions about what was happening in this book, but many of them, once I started thinking about them, felt so much more profound that what I had in mind, which is a really weird place to be as an author. I wasn't ready for any of that because I thought it was a very straightforward narrative trick that I was trying to pull.
How does that make you feel?
It used to be really frustrating. When American War first came out, I remember an indie bookseller in Texas wrote a note about it, saying "American War shows why a second Civil War would be brutal and bloody, and why it is necessary." I thought, "Really? This isn't a pro-war book." When I was younger, it really upset me.
Even now, a few days ago someone was posting on Twitter what an awful book American War is because it's such a pro-Trump book. Their theory was that, in the book, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia formed the basis of the new Confederacy. I'm not going to reach out to every person on Twitter and say, "Hey, I wrote this book before Trump ran for president." You can't do that.
The older I get, the more comfort I take in the fact that these books are going to outlive me, even if they are just collecting dust on a library shelf out there. If they're going to outlive me, I take great comfort that they are going to live as many different lives as possible. It used to be very frustrating and now it's one of my favourite things.
Was there a difference for you when you were writing about the boat versus when you were writing about the island?
Yes, there was. This book went through eight drafts. For the first half of those, there was no "before and after" structure. There was a chronological narrative, running from the start of the opening chapter through the island chapters. I was hitting so many points where I knew the narrative couldn't continue without telling the reader something about the backstory. I would go into these long and jarring off-shoots into backstory, and I didn't like how it was flowing.
I write these sort of giant plotting documents. When I was putting this together, I realized the book steals from a lot of places, such as The Odyssey, Paradise Lost and Peter Pan. But I realized it was also stealing a lot from Biblical structure, the Old Testament and New Testament. I thought, "What if you try to codify this? What if you make it a formal structural element?" And then, everything sort of fell into place because suddenly I had a very Old Testament set of chapters and a New Testament set of chapters.
I had a set of chapters that were concerned with an exodus from Egypt, and a set of chapters that were concerned with a miraculous rebirth. Once I did that, I got rid of some of the narrative pacing issues. But then, I had to figure out a bunch of technical stuff because you can't have alternating "before" and "after" chapters and then have 15 "after" chapters and 7 "before" chapters. It just doesn't work, right? I had to figure out a way for them to converge.
The work in the later drafts was making sure they converged in a way that makes sense. But once "before and after" came into place, it was a real watershed moment for the book.
What is your definition of success, as a writer?
When I was younger, I thought of it in terms of the impact that the books would have, and how they would change people's minds.
The older I get, the more I realize that I'm only really, truly happy when I've written. Not when I am writing, because that's when all my insecurities come forward. But there's this famous quote, John Cage wasn't the first to say it, but he was one of them, "When the painter goes into the studio, everyone they know walks in with them — their critics, their audience, their relatives, their friends, their enemies. As they start to do the work, one by one, these people begin to walk out of the room. And then, if you're very lucky, even you walk out of the room."
The older I get, the more I realize that I'm only really, truly happy when I've written.- Omar El Akkad
I think for me, I don't know about success, but happiness as a writer is when you step away from the page, and you realize that in that moment, that even you walked out of the room. Something was happening that was outside your control. Something serendipitous. Something honest. Whenever I have those fleeting moments, and I literally had that moment once writing What Strange Paradise, where I stopped writing and a few minutes later I thought, "Oh, I was in the place. I don't know how to get to the place, I can't figure it out, I can't recreate it, but I was in the place. That, to me, is the lasting success of writing.
I've seen a lot of the spectrum of overt success. I've done bookstore events where literally three people showed up, and one of them was there by accident and was too embarrassed to get up and leave. Obviously, I've recently had some success with awards. All of that is important, it's important to experience all of that, but when I think about success, it's really when the world walks away from you and you just put something down on paper. That's what I'll be chasing after for the rest of my career I think.
Did it feel natural to go from writing, as you mentioned, a "kitchen sink book" when there was a lot of action to a "quieter" novel that you dwell inside a bit more?
It felt natural for me, but it was also scary as hell. American War was a bit of an odd book in the sense that, by my standards, it was incredibly successful because I didn't think it would get published in the first place. The fact that it did, and that it didn't cost the publisher money, all of that for me meant that it was a raging success.
But it also didn't sell millions of copies. It wasn't successful in any absolute sense. I was in this odd spot where I was this novelist with one book under my belt. It had done well, but not so well that I could get away with anything. And the natural business-savvy decision would have been to write something very similar to American War.
Whatever readership I built up through speculative fiction, the savvy thing to do would be to capitalize on that and instead I went in this very different direction. You could almost put a sticker on What Strange Paradise that said, "If you loved American War, you're going to hate this thing." I was scared, I was really scared. But it was one of those things where I felt this was the book I needed to write so I sat down and wrote it, and I thought it wouldn't be published. A lot of the foreign publishers had no interest in it. To them, it was the story about something that maybe would've been relevant six or seven years ago. But for them, the moment had passed. The migration across the Mediterranean was old news.
For a while, I thought the book would wreck my career. I didn't think it would go out into the world. I was terrified.
How do you cope with the fear and anxiety of being a writer?
I'm fortunate that I'm not important or popular enough to have to worry about my individual writing decisions having massive repercussions beyond my own career. I don't sell millions of copies. I have these moments where it feels like I'm never going to write a decent sentence again and I've come up with a few tricks to try and side-step those insecurities, one if which is to acknowledge that however talented or untalented I may be, this is the only thing I know how to do. I can't do much else, but I can write. It's one of the few things in my life that I come back to, even when it kicks my ass.
I tried taking up guitar lessons a few years back. It was difficult. I quit immediately. The fact that I keep coming back to this place, no matter how difficult the actual process is, leads me to believe this is what I should be doing with my life.
That's not enough of a justification to keep inflicting these books on the general readership, but it is enough of a justification to keep writing and that's all I need day-to-day to deal with the anxieties and insecurities of being involved in this kind of work.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
