The Resisting Power of Living–and Writing–Ordinary Lives: An Interview with Ibtisam Azem on THE SLEEP THIEF

My first impression of Booker-longlisted Ibtisam Azem’s novel, The Sleep Thief, is that it is a love letter–or perhaps, at times, a grief letter, so to speak–to language. Propulsive, haunting, written in dream logic prose, The Sleep Thief tells the story of, and is periodically told by, a young Palestinian named Gharib (“the sleep thief,” named such for the small moments he falls asleep during an interrogation), who comes of age between the Naksa and the Intifadas. Witnessing Gharib’s common, everyday moments–sharpening school pencils, attending a party, dreaming about a girl, traversing an airport–readers encounter the complexities of language, desire, trauma, displacement, the non-linearity of political resistance, and much more.

Ibtisam Azem is interviewed by E Ce Miller and Moby Yang.

Four Way Review (FWR): Gharib, the narrator of The Sleep Thief, is deeply attentive to naming, words, and their definitions. His own name is prophetic, invoking, among other meanings, “estrangement.” In a line that captures one of the novel’s tensions–the conflict between imposed identity and lived experience–Gharib says, “I don’t like remembering street names, because each street has two: the one that is written, and the one warring with memory. Their names and ours…” What role does naming play in the novel? Were you thinking of language and names as a space where memory, power, identity, and belonging are constantly being negotiated?

Ibtisam Azem (IA): When we think about Palestine today, language becomes a trap, not because the Palestinian, as a colonized subject, has a problematic relationship with the place itself, but because there has been a sustained attempt, since the beginning of the Zionist colonial movement in Palestine, to construct a distinctly colonial narrative: to change existing names, take what is already there out of its context, and impose a new, fabricated narrative.

The colonizer initially seeks to control the land, partially or completely, but there remains a space that it has not been able to control easily, or perhaps has not yet fully controlled, despite its control over the land.

Language and narrative are part of this space that has not been completely colonized. There is a relentless desire to control the Palestinian mind, including consciousness itself, to tame and domesticate its narrative, and to make Palestinians accept the colonizer’s story about them. Naming is one of the means through which this is done. This is something that the novel attempts to grapple with in different ways, and it is also central to my writing more broadly.

In my writing, I approach language not merely as a means of literary and aesthetic expression, but as a world in its own right, one that refuses to submit and opens up a new horizon, including a space that can be carved out within.

FWR: Reading The Sleep Thief, I learned that “pessoptimist” is a Palestinian word; it’s used throughout the novel to describe Gharib’s oscillation between excessive optimism and pessimism. I’m curious whether there is an Arabic counterpart to “pessoptimism,” and how closely it aligns (linguistically and in meaning) with its English-language, Palestinian-coined portmanteau. What is your own relationship to language? Are there ways language impacts process or informs craft for you as a writer?

IA: “Al-Mutasha’il” is a word coined by the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi by combining the Arabic words for “optimist” and “pessimist,” and it became the title of one of the most important modern Arabic novels. His creative writing undoubtedly influenced me, which is evident in the early pages of The Sleep Thief. But later, I managed to free myself from that influence, or, in literary terms, to ‘kill the father,’ or one of my literary fathers or mothers.

I speak four fluently, as fluently as anyone can claim to speak a language. Arabic, my mother tongue, Hebrew, English, and German. When it comes to creative writing, I write exclusively in Arabic. This is a choice I made for many reasons. Arabic is the language of my heart and mind, but in the Palestinian context, particularly for Palestinians inside Israel, it is also a language that Israelis have sought to distort and marginalize in different ways. For example, we see poorly written Arabic and numerous mistakes on road signs, as well as linguistic errors in school textbooks intended for Palestinian students. Speaking Arabic can even expose one to racist attacks. This happened to me personally on more than one occasion when I lived in Jerusalem. Arabic is a suppressed language within the Israeli public sphere, and when it is used, it is often used as an instrument of oppression.

FWR: Of the many striking scenes in this novel, one is when Gharib is buying pencils from his classmate Shahin; he pictures himself buying all the pencils, and then he imagines making furniture for himself and all his friends with the excess of pencils. Something about this struck me as almost playful, while also capturing what I think is a critical element of Gharib’s character: his imagination. What role does imagination play in this novel? What about dreams (literally sleeping, but also aspirational) versus Gharib’s waking life?

IA: Literarily, imagination is the foundation of everything I write. I know that my characters are rooted in reality, but my pen is dipped in imagination, and I love that very much. Ultimately, a writer is not merely a witness, but an active participant.

When I was writing the novel, I was deeply fascinated by Greek mythology and read it extensively. I have always loved myths in general. But the reality around me, the Palestinian reality, sometimes seemed like a nightmare and a dream at the same time, an endless cycle in which one flowed into the other. There was a kind of “schizophrenia” to the place, if I may put it that way. I felt it [as a child] when I listened to what we were taught at school. We were following an Israeli curriculum, which meant that we were taught Zionist literature that spoke about us and our homeland as though it had been empty of people, along with other colonial myths.

Yet at home, and even from some of our teachers, we were taught something entirely different: our own history and the stories that were absent from our schoolbooks. All of this left me with a persistent feeling that the reality we lived in was itself a dream, a beautiful dream in which we could live in our own homeland, laugh, get married, love and hate, and continually try to build and rebuild our relationship with the place, as our grandparents had done; and, at the same time, an endless colonial nightmare.

There was something profoundly surreal about this reality, and that is what I tried to explore and express in the novel.

FWR: In an interview with Arablit about your novel The Book of Disappearance–written two years after The Sleep Thief, but your first novel published in English–you said that “There is a power in the sudden act of disappearance.” In the novel, disappearance “gives the Palestinians control over space,” so that “their bodies are beyond the Israeli colonial space and its control.” Is there a connection between the power of physical disappearance in The Book of Disappearance and the ending of The Sleep Thief?

IA: In a way, and on a subconscious level, yes. By subconscious, I mean that when I wrote The Sleep Thief, I had no idea that, two years later, the idea for The Book of Disappearance would emerge. But the seed of those ideas developed and took on other dimensions in The Book of Disappearance, where they enter into a more direct confrontation on several levels.

At the end of The Sleep Thief, Gharib, the main character, reaches a point where he realizes that he does not need to prove himself or his existence. He simply exists, and his connection to the land is natural, the connection of the indigenous. What happens is that the colonizer, in this case Israel, places the colonized, the Palestinian, in a position where they are constantly required to justify their right to belong to the place. The nature of these changes according to the degree and duration of colonial control. It can begin with claims about the colonizer’s own right to the land, or about developing and improving it, along with other colonial myths, and eventually shift toward questioning the colonized person’s right to be there.

After taking control of the land through different means, the colonizer begins, and sometimes this happens simultaneously, to appropriate symbols and culture. Throughout all these attempts, there is always an effort to ‘convince’ the colonized that the colonizer has a legitimate claim to the place.

So when Gharib says at the end of the novel that he rejects the I.D card imposed on him by the state, and that he does not need to prove his existence because he simply exists, he is, in other words, asserting something that the colonizer has failed to control. He recognizes that political power has given the colonizer physical control over the land and his body, at least for the time being, but it cannot give the colonizer control over his mind.

When Gharib chooses the name of a woman for himself, Nada, meaning ‘dew’ in English, he is also, in a sense, rejecting and challenging the conventional gender divide.

FWR: Does this novel consider sleep–while a profoundly vulnerable state–also a form of controlled (or empowered?) disappearance? Does Gharib?

IA: There is a contradictory, or perhaps parallel, relationship with sleep in the novel. On the one hand, it becomes a means of liberation: the prisoner “steals” sleep despite the interrogator’s attempts to prevent him, allowing him to endure the interrogation because sleep gives him strength, as well as access to dreams, which represent a form of holding on to hope.

But the dream also has a nightmarish dimension. Within it is a recurring nightmare in which he must steal another person’s life in order to reclaim his own past. In this way, the novel expresses the internal struggle he undergoes on different levels throughout his journey toward liberation, a struggle in which he refuses to sacrifice his moral integrity.

FWR: In The Sleep Thief, the identities of people, place, and situation blur. War is personified; place is written as character. Gharib’s love interest, Hamsa is sometimes written as a place, or a destination he travels to.

IA: The Palestinian relationship with place and land is intimate and goes far beyond seeing them simply as a “place to live.” In Palestinian poetry, literature, folklore, and popular songs, we often find metaphors that portray Palestinians as an extension of their surroundings. Trees, birds, and other elements of the landscape are frequently personified and addressed as if they were part of the human world.

The place, with all its elements, is not viewed as something separate from the Palestinian being, but as something deeply intertwined with it. The land is not an enemy or an object to be controlled by force; rather, there is a sense of harmony between the person and the place, each existing in relation to the other.

But what happens to a person when a part of them is taken away? What happens when the homeland, with its trees, birds, and everything that makes it home, is taken over while you are still living in it or becomes an exile? The relationship becomes complicated, and the person is forced to renegotiate their relationship with the place and with other people. People themselves can become places of refuge, places where we seek safety and a sense of belonging, whether through a lover like Hamsa or a sister or a friend or through something else.

“It was not strange that war had roamed the country. That was perfectly normal. The war was merely resting. Even wars tire. But it was strange for a war to have been so short. It left just as people were getting used to it. Some malicious folk jibed that the people of Haifa and nearby villages came out with placards to protest the end of a war to which they’d become so happily accustomed.”

The Sleep Thief, Ibtisam Azem

FWR: The chapter that finds Gharib in the airport is a sort of dizzying experience, navigating borders and identity and status quo and exhaustion and endurance and surrender. At one point, Gharib notes: “There were barely any scholarships for Arabs and a prerequisite for all of them was serving in the Israeli army. Very few Palestinians do. I had to work hard to pay for my tuition, so one year took two. I felt bitter whenever I returned home after a long day of work and study to hear speeches on the radio or TV that called on us to persevere, as if perseverance consisted of slogans alone. Could perseverance itself persevere?” Does Gharib answer his own question of perseverance by the end of the novel? What are your thoughts on the perseverance of perseverance?

IA: When Gharib speaks about supporting his resilience, there is a certain bitterness in the way he directs his words toward Arabs and others around the world. He recognizes that colonialism maintains its grip partly by securing the support of other governments, and he is, in a sense, saying that people in those countries have a moral responsibility to challenge their governments’ ties with the colonizer, and by doing so, to support him as well as themselves. The occupation could not have continued for so long without external support.

There is also a sense of reproach in these lines, as well as an attempt to break the aura of sanctification surrounding the Palestinian, to move away from the stereotypical and idealized image of the Palestinian, an image he never asked for in the first place.

“The place itself was the angel of death clutching my neck, but he would neither take me with him nor let me go. I headed to the door to leave. Dany saw and stopped me, as if sensing what was going through my mind. ‘…it’s not like the other houses in this area. Its owners were not displaced. Do you understand that, Gharib?’ Gharib left in a hurry without saying a word. He still felt like he was bleeding internally. He was afraid to open his mouth and spit blood. He opened the door and, as he was going down the steps, he tripped and fell. The ground, why couldn’t it carry him? He was fidgeting. He rose up and tried to keep his head proud.”

The Sleep Thief, Ibtisam Azem

FWR: There are several instances in the novel of foreigners living in occupied Palestine demonstrating their connection to Israel. In a childhood memory, a Russian kid calls Gharib and his father “dirty Arabs”; the character Nina, who is from South Africa, spouts off absurdly racist suspicions and accusations about Arabs to Gharib. Non-Arab foreigners who immigrate to occupied Palestine are quick to observe and replicate the behaviors sustaining Israeli colonization. As an outsider reader myself from the United States, these characters and their behavior struck me. I’m curious about whether you have expectations for how global readers might relate to this novel. We are witnesses to Gharib’s words, memories, and dreams; what positions do you see readers living outside occupied Palestine taking on?

IA: Readers, both inside and outside Palestine, are diverse. I have to admit that I have some reservations about this at the moment, particularly with the translation, and I worry that the novel may not always be fully understood. It is a very local novel. It does not present stereotypical, heroic images of Palestinians, rather, it portrays them in all their complexity and contradictions, while maintaining that they are not the perfect victims—and that, despite this, they do not deserve what is happening to them.

The novel is also fragmented and experimental, with surreal elements, references to Greek mythology, inner voices, the grotesque, and satire. Some of these elements may not sit easily with some readers, not because they are unfamiliar with this kind of literature, but perhaps because they do not expect to encounter them in Palestinian literature, because there are often preconceived ideas about Palestinians and their culture, held by both their enemies and their friends.

I sometimes wish readers would simply engage with the text on its own terms, with its aesthetics, its plot, and its language. Sinan Antoon’s translation has done an astonishing job of preserving many of the original text’s particularities, and I hope readers can appreciate them and approach Palestinian literature as literature, rather than as an anthropological document.

FWR: When interrogated by the Shin Bet, Gharib narrates, “I sat naked with the black hood covering my head like an idiot. How did my naked body look as I sat on the cold chair?” Later, Gharib is in the airport traveling to Cyprus, surprised he is not questioned more or taken into a side room to be undressed, because “Being searched, humiliated and deemed suspicious had become such fundamental parts of [him]”. Yet, there is also another very different nakedness within this novel, when Gharib is with Hamsa, and we see her “undressing and touching my body as if seeding a pomegranate. Making sure to kiss and touch every single seed”. I am curious about how you balanced the vastly different kinds of nakedness, vulnerability, and intimacy Gharib experiences. Under Israeli occupation, what does the Palestinian body and autonomy look like?

IA: This is a complicated question, and my answer here will not do it justice. In the details of life under colonialism, Palestinians do not resist only through direct confrontation.

The novel also tries to portray the internal struggles that many people go through, rather than turning the Palestinian into a mythical hero. Gharib, ultimately, has many failures and social contradictions. At times, consciously or unconsciously, he behaves in patriarchal ways, despite his feminist inclinations. He fails, for example, to stand by his sister over her inheritance, even though he believes she has a right to it. He also fails to pursue a relationship with Hamsa because he is afraid of confronting his father. He is hesitant at times and strong at others.

The novel also insists that social liberation must go hand in hand with political liberation. Here, the idea of exposure goes beyond intimacy with a lover despite the expectations of society and the occupier, or physical nakedness used to humiliate Palestinians. It becomes a symbolic stripping away of the layers of political and social repression, as well as Western double standards.

For example, at the party, Gharib leaves Dany’s house because it reminds him of the homes from which Palestinians were expelled. The memory becomes so physically painful that he feels as though it is consuming him from within. When he leaves the house and collapses on the ground, he suddenly begins hallucinating, seeing the Palestinians displaced in 1948 running all around him, as memory and trauma take over. Yet one of the foreign guests who sees him collapse simply assumes that he is a Palestinian who cannot hold his liquor and has fallen because he is drunk. There is a deep irony here, particularly in the way the novel critiques western and especially liberal western perspectives.