By Katherine Jin
It’s not wrong to say that Saeed Teebi’s story collection Her First Palestinian is about Palestinians. But it might not be sufficient. In my view, it is what surrounds each character’s Palestinianness— their personality, motivations, and morals— that bring color to Teebi’s vivid portraits of diasporic life. The protagonists in Her First Palestinian may be united in that they exist in a world that tries to erase them, but they respond to these trials and tribulations in surprising, human, and sometimes conflicting ways.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Saeed about the inspirations behind his debut collection Her First Palestinian, craft, and the responsibilities of a writer. Our email interview is reproduced below.
Katherine Jin: You’ve said that you’ve wanted to write from a young age, and while you didn’t actually get to writing until a few years ago, you accumulated life experiences that shaped your debut collection Her First Palestinian. Did you always know that diasporic Palestinians would be the subject of your writing? And within a subject that expansive, which smaller questions were at the forefront of your inquiry?
Saeed Teebi: In its earliest forms, my desire to write was not necessarily borne of a need to tell Palestinian stories, or center Palestinian characters. I was drawn to other things in writing: a beautiful style, an innovative way of telling a story, insoluble questions, the element of surprise, chasing the impossible ideal of originality. All the things that make you think that a piece of writing can come closer to being art, or artful.
Partly, this is due to my personal temperament. But probably also due to having grown up in an epoch that was— and continues to be— quite inhospitable to Palestinians. The reality of being Palestinian was so fraught that I did not feel a burning desire to reproduce it in my fiction. Why should I have to talk about justice and cruelty and oppression if all I’m writing is a little love story?
It’s with age that I realized that avoiding these stories was sidestepping important responsibilities as a writer. Especially: the responsibility to tell the truth, and the responsibility to unrestrained self-expression. In light of that understanding, centring Palestinian characters became a non-negotiable aspect of my writing. If my personal experience has been coloured so hugely by being Palestinian, why would I write stories that run away from that aspect, or marginalize it? In fact, if anything, creating Palestinian characters has enriched my writing to a great degree.
As far as which questions were at the forefront of my inquiry, I think there really is only one main one that I consider repeatedly, in different ways: how do you live in a world that tries its best to deny your legitimacy? How do you find ways to persist, and do you break?
“How do you live in a world that tries its best to deny your legitimacy? How do you find ways to persist, and do you break?”
Saeed Teebi
KJ: As an immigrant and avid reader of immigrant literature, I love seeing the different ways writers talk about their characters’ culture. Sometimes, there’s an impulse to explain, to offer bite-sized spoonfuls for people outside the culture. I didn’t sense much explaining in your collection, and I liked that. The fact that references to food and certain aspects of Palestine remained opaque to me felt like an authentic experience of the stories as a non-Palestinian reader. How did you navigate writing about Palestinian culture in a book for the Canadian market?
ST: I didn’t think of the Canadian market. To be honest, I was largely ignorant of the Canadian book market when I started writing. Most of my reading at the time was from elsewhere.
But I think your point is well taken in the sense that I was aware that the majority of my readership is likely to be people who don’t share my background. I can’t say that influenced me as much though. Something I realized early on in drafting these stories is that if I were to sit and explain every particle of context that an average North American person might require in order to fully understand the stories, then I would never actually get to the stories themselves. So I just didn’t bother with the context. I fought against the whisper in my ear that kept saying: “you’ll have to explain that.”
That’s why, for example, in the title story of the book, I contracted some 70+ years of Palestinian history into a single parenthetical remark: “(the British Mandate, the Nakba, the 1967 war, et cetera)”. This modus operandi was quite liberating. It allowed me to repossess the story for myself as author, which was essential to writing it well.
There is a deeper question there about audience and who I’m writing for, but I would be lying if I said that my primary concern wasn’t writing things that didn’t bore or exhaust me, in the first instance.
Another way of looking at it is that I refuse to condescend to my readers by explaining to them things that they can look up on their smartphone if they so desire. If you google “bamia,” for example, it will tell you that it’s a Middle Eastern okra stew. Why, then, would I need to explain it in my stories?
KJ: Her First Palestinian is full of moral questions. One thorny question “Enjoy Your Life, Capo” asks is: How much backlash can I tolerate for speaking out about Palestine and how much kickback should I demand for staying quiet? Should I just relax and enjoy life in this wealthy Western land? Seen one way, the story is about an unemployed parent negotiating the price at which he’d sell out his people and a child whose strong sense of justice is unencumbered by the demands of adulthood. What excites you about exploring these moral quandaries?
ST: One of the best parts of being human is how few clear-cut “correct” paths there are. There is no manual (the self-help section of the bookstore aside), and if there were a manual, most of us would not bother reading it. And it would probably not be helpful anyway. That’s what makes humans endlessly fascinating in their choices and journeys.
And then you overlay the natural messiness of humans with external geopolitical pressures, and with the desire many of us have to be or do “good”— watching that kind of mixture simmer and pop is irresistible to me purely from the perspective of narrative and storytelling.
Taking a step back, the entire question of Palestine today can be seen as a moral one. Are we, as a society and individuals, willing to make the correct choice when it comes to Palestine — the very obviously morally right choice, as demonstrated to us ad nauseam — in the face of pressures surrounding us that make the wrong choice more palatable and easy? That’s a question for Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. I can’t think of a reason why I as a writer would not want to take it on.
KJ: I’m intrigued by your story “Woodland”. Unlike other stories in the collection, this piece revolves around a character, Noor, who leaves her country of origin Algeria of her own volition, and not simply to avoid persecution or pursue economic opportunity. She wonders: “Was I the first to pine for the freedom, the tingling uncertainty, of being alone in a new world? Why can’t a woman just leave?” Why was it important to showcase Noor’s perspective in your collection?
ST: That’s an astute observation. You’re right that Noor, unlike other characters, is a wilful entrant into the diasporic experience. Not only has she not been forced into it, but she clearly loved many aspects of her home country and frequently yearns for it.
But to me the trials of diaspora are not lessened just because someone chose them. There are costs that are intrinsic to being away from home, whether it was a hostile occupying army that drove you away (at one end of the spectrum), or simply your whims (at the other end). Many people in diaspora are not edge cases like that. But Noor is an edge case: she seemingly had nothing that compelled her to leave, but left anyway. That made her very interesting to me because it allowed me to pry deeper into her psyche. I wanted to understand why she would want to be elsewhere from home without giving myself an easy, cliched answer (i.e. answers like “well, she was a downtrodden, persecuted woman so she had to escape”). It goes to the heart of what it means to escape, why that’s such an attractive concept to us, and why we often dream of it regardless of circumstances.
On top of that, the experience of a single woman in the diaspora was particularly intriguing to me, especially a woman who counts among her intersectionalities being of colour and indigenous. One of the running themes in the book is the various solidarities that Palestinians seek— the identifications they have with other peoples in struggle, and vice versa. A character like Noor allowed me to ventilate the commonalities and better understand the differences. She’s one of my favourite characters in the book for this reason.
KJ: It was interesting to see how the Palestinian characters in your stories clash on certain issues. Dasha’s grandfather in “Ushanka” is fine with Dasha dating outside the religion but the rest of the family is not. Sam in “The Body” hesitates to leverage his personal relationships to secure a favor, whereas Janna is ready and willing. A person’s attitude is informed by their generation and upbringing, but there’s so much more to it than that. What interested you in exploring diverging perspectives among your characters?
ST: One of the common themes that I’ve seen in the reception of this book is the tendency by commentators to describe it as “complex.” At first I was a little surprised by this. I didn’t think I was writing particularly “complex” work— in fact sometimes I worried that I was too facile. But slowly, as this word kept being repeated by reviewers and readers, I realized that, for some, this book was shattering certain preconceptions. In particular, when it comes to a people as widely misunderstood and misrepresented in the West as the Palestinians, there is a propensity to flatten them— to think of them as a homogenous block with more or less uniform views and tendencies. The reality is plainly quite different for any group of people, no matter how aligned they are, ethnically or geopolitically or otherwise.
But I didn’t think of my characters as “Palestinian,” in that flattening sense, as I was writing them. They’re just people, who of course have many different aspects of life impinge on them, not just their Palestinianness. In “Ushanka” for example, Dasha as you said is interested in someone outside her culture, which her mother vehemently disagrees with, but which somehow her grandfather is receptive to. If it’s just a generational aspect affecting the mother’s stance, how does one explain the grandfather’s? Clearly, there are other factors at play.
For me, the recognition that characters are multifarious organisms that are sometimes the sum of all their various experiences, but also, sometimes, inexplicably, not— that’s a key to the magic of storytelling and reading.
KJ: I appreciate the way some of your protagonists act in opposition to what you’d expect from a “good refugee” or “good Palestinian”. Kasir in “At the Benefit” could be seen as a “bad refugee” for stealing from his employer, and Salah in “Enjoy Your Life, Capo” could be seen as a “bad Palestinian” for selling his technology to the occupier. Did you consciously choose to write characters that are not “good” or did they emerge more organically? What do you think of society’s impulse to classify refugees and Palestinians as “good” or “bad”?
ST: I think Western society (the specificity about the society is important) has a vested interest in setting out what makes a “good” refugee or a “good” immigrant. This is because these “good” people reflect well on their adopted society, and assist in the narrative of benevolence this society is trying to promulgate about itself. Before so-and-so arrived here, his life was terrible, but now it is much better, because our society created the environment for it to be better.
Sometimes this narrative contains some truth. Most times it is either reductive or a complete fabrication. For me it was important to tell the stories without that kind of reductionism. I don’t view Kasir from “At the Benefit” as a “bad” person necessarily. I view him as a product of his circumstances, but even when his circumstances appeared to have improved via immigration, the transition was not seamless. He is not now suddenly without flaws because he is in Canada.
In many ways, our immigration system, with its many, many barriers to entry, already acknowledges that reality on the ground. Canada (and the US, and many other countries) requires prospective immigrants or refugees to prove many things about themselves before they are allowed in, including how “good” they are (as filtered through various criteria).
As to whether I consciously chose “bad” characters— of course I did! They are far more interesting to write and read about. And there are strands of them in even the best of us.
KJ: I love the stories in Her First Palestinian that explore identity among Palestinians in Canada. Nader in “Cynthia” feels pressure to act more Canadian to fit in with his roommates, whereas Abed in “Her First Palestinian” feels pressure to act more Palestinian to meet his lover’s expectations. I laughed at the unlikely predicament Abed ushers into his life and Nader’s hilarious pantomime of Canadian masculinity. Throughout your life, have you felt more pressure to act Canadian or more pressure to act Palestinian?
ST: I can’t give an overarching answer to that. At different stages of my life, and in different contexts, I’ve alternately felt pressure to act more Canadian and more Palestinian. I would say that at this late stage of my immigration (now 30+ years since I’ve been displaced) I no longer have any insecurities about being Canadian, and so I do not seek to actively perform Canadianness. I don’t like skating, so I’m not going to skate. That’s that. No more ice in the teeth.
But certainly when I’m among other Palestinians I wish I could make my Palestinian accent less anonymous, less stonewashed from years of being used primarily within the confines of my family. I wish other Palestinians could tell where I’m from just from how I speak, or from the way I make our food, as they do with Palestinians in Palestine or freshly removed. The wistfulness for a deeper Palestinianness is real, whether or not such a thing exists.
KJ: You’ve said elsewhere that working as a lawyer made you realize that the law is ineffective in fighting oppression, and that “as a form, fiction does not lend itself to advocacy.” Nevertheless, do you feel writers have a role or responsibility in bringing change?
No. Writers of fiction have a responsibility to create good art. If positive change follows from good art, that’s a welcome bonus. But art that seeks to change minds always feels disingenuous to me, and I abandon it quickly. I don’t want it, and I won’t create it.
This doesn’t mean that writers can’t do other things that bring about change. They can be activists, they can be journalists, they can be lobbyists, whatever. I just don’t think they should do those things in their art. But to each their own.
Her First Palestinian is available from Belmont Books, Bookshop, Kinokuniya, Magers & Quinn Bookseller, Secret Garden Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Katherine Jin is a short fiction writer currently based in New York. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story prize, and has work forthcoming in The Margins by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.