Charlie and Susan Muaddi Darraj (Behind You Is The Sea) discuss the Palestinian Christian community, her immigrant characters and their children, how she used the current conflict in her stories, and the segregation and working class in Baltimore, Maryland.

Please note this episode mentions domestic violence.

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Lawrence T Brown: The Black Butterfly
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Farah Rocks Fifth Grade
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Farah Rocks Summer Break
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Farah Rocks New Beginnings
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Farah Rocks Florida
Susan Muaddi Darraj: Behind You Is The Sea

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 25th June 2024; published 11th November 2024

Where to find Susan online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:49 The initial inspiration for Behind You Is The Sea – Susan’s character, Marcus Salameh
05:01 How poetry runs in Susan’s family
07:21 The focus on women and women’s worth
09:15 Susan’s choices in making most of her characters people from one family
10:36 The story Hashtag – including stories of domestic violence and murder – and how the West would see it
16:13 How Susan doesn’t want to be ‘nice’ to her characters
18:37 The different generations and how they relate to one another, and then we move on to discuss a spin-off novel that Susan is writing
23:55 Where the title, Behind You Is The Sea, came from
26:16 How Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians live peacefully together in Palestine
31:13 Segregation in Baltimore
35:53 The way Susan included the current Arab-Israeli conflict in the book
37:35 What’s next – Susan’s current works in progress, including her work for children

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

[Recorded later] Charlie: Hello listeners, thank you for your feedback, the decision has been made! From January, this podcast will be known as Author’s Afterword. Same content, just a different name. I’ve been told there shouldn’t be any changes in regards to the RSS feed and your subscriptions, but knowing what I do about technology, if by the middle of January an episode hasn’t shown up in your feed, you may need to search for Author’s Afterword in your podcast app and resubscribe.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 109. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail, and if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Susan Muaddi Darraj. Susan has won the Arab American Book Awards twice, and has won an American Book Award. She has written a couple of short story collections and is the author of a series of books for children about a Palestinian American girl called Farah – I think we’ll probably be talking about that later on. We will be talking today about her latest novel/short story collection – I think the term ‘fractured narrative’ works here. It’s called Behind You Is The Sea and follows different people from various generations of a Palestinian American Christian family living in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello Susan!

Susan: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Charlie: You are very, very welcome, I have enjoyed your book as I know I said before we pressed record! So tell us about the initial inspiration for this book – I know it took you six years to write, and some of the stories, I think, were published separately?

Susan: Yes, it took six years to write. That’s mostly because I have children and I work full time, I teach full time. So I write in the cracks of the day, as many of us do. This book began with one character, Marcus Salameh, who is, in my opinion, my protagonist in this novel. And he just sort of arrived in my mind as a result of different news items and things like that. And this interesting character just wouldn’t leave my mind and I just kept sketching him out and trying to investigate him as a character to see what he was trying to tell me [chuckles]. And so what he was trying to tell me is there’s a story to be told about Palestinian immigrants and their children and what happens when the children stray away from their parents’ dreams and their parents’ vision for a successful life. And so this began the whole book, and I began writing the entire book from Marcus’s point of view but then I felt that Marcus wasn’t the right person to tell everyone else’s stories and so I handed over chapters to different characters. And that’s how it became – I love what you called it, a ‘fractured narrative’, I like that. I call it a ‘mosaic novel’, but I think it all works.

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, I want to know more about Marcus, if that’s all right [Susan: sure], because I think maybe you very possibly designed it that way – you’ve got Marcus having a story, the second story, I believe it is [Susan: yes], and then you have him in the last story. So, yeah, can you tell us more about Marcus? Because he’s definitely a very important character.

Susan: Sure, and he appears in most of the stories. I mean, you actually meet him in the first chapter, which is Reema’s chapter, that’s when you meet him. And already you know that he has a problem in the family, he’s the mediator between his father and his sister. And we go on from there, where the second chapter, I give it over to him. And you see him appear in other parts of the book, sometimes he’s causing trouble [laughs], sometimes he’s just trying to get by. But then he also, again, as you said, he has the last chapter, which is the culminating chapter, where everything comes together in that book. He’s a very interesting character; he’s a police officer, and I find it very interesting to have a person of colour in the United States who’s part of the policing system, because we have a lot of, obviously, problems with racism, deeply entrenched in our policing system. So what happens when a man, a person of colour, becomes part of that system? That’s something I investigate with Marcus; he’s a flawed character for sure. And then he has a lot of struggles – he’s defending his sister, he’s trying to maintain peace in the family. He’s always solving other people’s problems and never attending to his own life. Really.

Charlie: You got me straight away with that first story, Reema’s story.

Susan: Oh, thank you.

Charlie: Yeah. And I mean, your prose, it’s… Have I heard right, you have poets in your family, but you will never be a poet?

Susan: Yes, my uncle was a poet. My late uncle wrote beautiful poetry in Arabic. My father writes poetry. There are many people in my family, including my father, who have vast tracts of poems committed to memory, they can just recite them in a heartbeat. And I love poetry, but I cannot write poetry [laughs], I’m not very good. I’m too greedy, like I want more words to say what I want to say. So poets are very economical in their writing, they can just make everything very succinct and powerful. I feel like I need more space.

Charlie: Okay. All right. I’m understanding your writing more because that’s the thing, I mean, the subject matter of Reema’s story, which I believe is A Child Of Air. I think that’s that one.

Susan: Yes.

Charlie: Yes.

Susan: Yeah. That’s Reema’s chapter.

Charlie: The subject matter is very hard hitting [Susan: yeah], so obviously that grabs you, but also the prose in that; and I did find that you definitely do vary your prose in the different stories, it’s lovely, but it was just so poetic. [Susan: Thank you.] So I was thinking, ‘has she written poetry?’ And then I hear that you’re never gonna write poetry [both chuckle]. So it’s interesting to find out.

Susan: I mean, I’ve tried, but believe me, you don’t wanna read my poetry [Charlie chuckles]. But Reema, I love Reema as a character because I’m always – as a writer – very curious about people who live on the periphery of societies, I don’t really care about people at the centre [laughs] I mean, they’re privileged in lots of different ways. I care about the people who are on the periphery. And Reema is a young woman who has been shunned by parts of the Palestinian community, parts of the church community, parts of the American society. So she’s really on that periphery, and she’s living at this intersection of gender and class and sex, and she’s really lost, but she digs down and finds her strength. So I find her to be a very deeply resilient character – and later you’ll see her as a grown woman and you’ll see how she’s turned out. And yeah, I love Reema. I’m so glad that you liked that opening bit.

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, yeah, you say she has got everything against her and she does manage to get to a place where she’s happy. I mean, it’s interesting – I’m going completely away from any of the questions I’ve thought of asking you at the moment [Susan laughs] – you have… I believe it’s… yes, her cousin? Amal? [Susan: yeah] who has had a very different experience, and you’ve showed that experience as well, which I believe… yeah, it gets brought up again in the last story, which I think my favourite is the last story just because of everything you do with it, it’s just something else entirely [Susan: thank you]. And, yeah, you just have various different subjects throughout the book, but you’ve just got this kind of, what do we call it? Pregnancy, topics of pregnancy, I suppose and the different ways it can affect people and with the culture in it and the religion in it, and then wider culture and this, that and the other. Yeah, I just found it fascinating.

Susan: I consider this to be a feminist novel, and I’m really interested in the way every community, not just the Palestinian community, but every community, manages to tie a woman’s worth to whether or not she can conceive children and how she conceives and with whom she conceives, and all of these kinds rules about procreation. And Samira cannot have children, and she’s shunned. And then Reema and Amal – Amal is Marcus’s sister – they have very different experiences of pregnancy. And, I mean, every single culture is like this – we want women to have children, but we want to prescribe how they have children. I mean, we have the blessed mother, who’s the mother, but also a virgin somehow [laughs] we have all of these bizarre parameters around women’s bodies and how they give life. And so I just wanted to offer a wide range of those experiences to make a feminist commentary on that topic. But I think this is not unique to Palestinians – this is something every culture can understand.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been throughout history as well, hasn’t it, it’s everywhere and it’s still around.

Susan: Absolutely.

Charlie: You talk about Samira, and I do want to ask you, you’ve chosen to focus on one family, and it’s extended family, because you’ve got the cousins and you’ve got the different generations; but then you do have Samira, the lawyer, which was quite a surprise. Can you just tell us about your choices in terms of family and the characters in this way?

Susan: I imagine that these were all people who were part of a larger community, who lived in different parts of the same city, and they immigrated at different times and had different experiences. Now, Samira, I was not going to give Samira a chapter, but I wrote the hashtag chapter with Rania, and that chapter was very hard to write, extremely difficult to write – I kept changing it, I couldn’t even get through writing it at some point. But I finally finished that chapter. It’s true when writers tell you that characters live in their minds, it’s really true. We’re not exaggerating or trying to be cute. Samira just stuck with me, and I kept wondering about her, like, ‘why is this woman so tough? Why is this woman so angry? Why is she so blunt? Why is she such a fierce advocate for children?’ Like what is her background?’ And then I just started to sketch out her character, and that’s what I came up with. And so I said, ‘she needs to have her own chapter, I can’t contain her in someone else’s chapter, I need to give her her own chapter’.

Charlie: You’ve mentioned Hashtag.

Susan: Yeah.

Charlie: You’re saying you found it difficult to write – I can absolutely see why, anyone who’s read the book will see why. Has that been difficult in terms of current context? I know obviously, you’ve written this book a little bit before the current war is going on, but was that a difficult thing for you to contemplate including, given what you were trying to do in general, with stereotypes and stuff, and kind of show how stereotypes are wrong, effectively?

Susan: Yeah, I definitely wrote this well before the genocide of Gaza, and I was not, obviously, planning to launch it in this time. The book was actually sold in the fall of 2022 so it’s been in the works for a long time. But when I write, I’m not setting out deliberately to educate or to dismantle stereotypes – I feel like that’s not the job of a creative writer. I write to present characters in all of their complexity, I write to show nuance, I write to show the diversity. And I hope people can see, just in this book, the vast diversity among Palestinian Americans. And the Hashtag story was one that was based on a true story of domestic violence in the West Bank. There was a young woman several years ago named Israa Ghrayeb, and she was murdered by her family. And it was a huge social justice movement in Palestine, the Palestinian people in her community. It wasn’t like the West had discovered this murder that took place and uncovered it, it was people in her own community who heard about it and demanded an investigation. And what fascinated me about her story is that her community brought attention to it through social media – so they started a hashtag around her name and slowly built up a demand for her body to be exhumed and for the murder to be investigated. And I couldn’t write about it directly, it was just really too difficult. And all domestic violence issues are difficult, like Marcus investigates domestic violence in an earlier chapter. Domestic violence exists in every society. The West loves to call these things ‘honour killings’. They’re domestic violence. I mean, most women in North America who are murdered are murdered by a husband or a boyfriend, so this is not anything different. It just has a sort of orientalist, exotic, catch to it when the West writes about it in the media. But I want to always be truthful with my readers, and so I wanted to write about this young woman’s story, but I didn’t feel I had the right to write about her directly. So instead, I kind of, as writers say, ‘I wrote it slant’. So I took a different perspective. And I was inspired to take that perspective by the fact that in the real life case of Israa Ghrayeb, the family apparently called a cousin or a brother who was living in Canada at the time and called him to come home and help them do the deed, and he did. He went back, he helped them do it, and then he flew back to Canada. And so I took that perspective, like, what happens to a man? Who is this man that gets on a plane and goes to commit a murder because somebody told him that his female relative did something unthinkable and he goes home to do it and then goes back to his life? Like, what is his life? That’s where I creatively took over the story at that point. Yeah, it was really difficult to write. I never want to contribute to stereotypes that exist, but I feel that if I’m writing my own truth or writing authentic stories, I think that that’s my job, right. And anyone that reads this book, I’ve seen some – a couple people – who wrote that, they felt that the book actually reinforced stereotypes. I would say they’re not reading closely enough because there are plenty of men in this book who are wonderful, authentic, loving men. So I think that what I’m trying to do is portray a wide range of Palestinian characters for the reader to observe and to learn about.

Charlie: Yeah.

Susan: That’s a long winded answer to your question, I’m sorry!

Charlie: No, that’s great. No, long answers are fine. Yeah, I mean, so many people can just write about murder easily and that’s all right, isn’t it? That’s fine for them. You can almost see your thinking where you’ve got what is a very, very bold decision – I definitely think it is a bold decision, what you’ve done – but you can see with what you’ve shown that you are showing us, well, what you’ve just told us – the context itself, that you shouldn’t view it on the surface level, you need to go deeper. Yes.

Susan: I mean, nobody would ever read a murder mystery about white Americans or white Europeans and think, ‘oh, wow, she’s really writing about how all white men are’ – nobody would ever do that. So I think the problem is actually that there’s not very much Palestinian literature in English that’s being published, and so those of us who are publishing, people are looking to us almost as if we are offering them a lesson in sociology or something, as opposed to literature. So, yeah.

Charlie: Yeah, you’re kind of expected to represent everybody, and that’s not gonna happen., yeah.

Susan: Yeah, I always say I’m only representing the characters in my head. That’s what I’m doing [Charlie: yes, and both laugh].

Charlie: Jumping off from this subject onto another one – I’ve heard you said you didn’t want to be nice to your characters – which I love [Susan laughs], before we got to any of the stories, that was a good thing – but why was this important?

Susan: You know, because then they’re boring [Charlie laughs]. I mean, like, why make things easy for them, right? Like, who wants to read about somebody whose life is going swimmingly? [Laughs.] Everything is perfect. I don’t like those people. I don’t like people where everything falls into their laps. So, I’m joking, but, I mean, the way that I write is I come up with a character and I try to get to the heart of the character, and I do a lot of sketching and I write a lot of scenes where I play around with their character and their personality, like, who is this person? And, you really don’t know somebody until you see them in a crisis or a difficult situation. So I put them in a situation and I turn up the temperature on them and I just keep turning it up and I just see what happens. And then I feel like at some point they tell me who they are. Mr Ammar’s chapter is an example of that. He’s very angry about his son’s wedding so I put him right in the wedding. I open up in the wedding, he’s there at the reception, he’s angry, he’s frustrated, he’s disappointed, he’s taking out his anger on everybody in sight. Except his wife, he watches his step with his wife. But when I kept making things more and more difficult for him, there’s all sorts of things that aggravate him at the wedding. What I started to understand is there’s a deeper reason why he’s upset, and the reason, of course, is he feels that his son has not respected his mother’s memory, he’s not waited the culturally prescribed 40 days until her passing. In our culture, we wait 40 days after someone’s passed before we hold any happy celebrations. And you’ll see in the last story, after Marcus goes to Palestine, there’s a family that’s supposed to have a wedding and they come and ask Marcus’s permission to have the wedding before the 40 days – this is how we are as a society, we respect people’s grief. And so Mr Ammar is very angry that his mother’s memory has been, in his opinion, disrespected by his own son. This is the biggest trespass of all. So, yeah, I had to keep turning up the temperature on him before I understood that that’s actually the reason why he’s upset.

Charlie: It was a very good story, that one. I like that one.

Susan: Thank you.

Charlie: So, in part, we’re probably going to cover things we might have covered before, I’m not sure, but you’ve got these different generations of the characters, and the way you move it, you do move it forward in time as well. So you’ve got the generations and then we move forward, characters from other stories that die in the process and things. You’ve almost got a very small mini saga going on as well [Susan laughs], which is interesting in itself, in a literary way. Yeah, just tell us about including these different generations, your choices here, importance, that sort of thing?

Susan: Sure. You mentioned earlier that my style changes with all the stories – it’s because I’m playing around with different voices and all the stories. So Hiba, who’s a teenager, and Layla, who’s also a teenager, they’re going to speak very differently than Mr Amal is going to speak. Yeah, I initially was going to write just about Marcus and his father; again, it was going to go back and forth between Marcus and his father, but then, like Mr Ammar, when I wrote that story, from Marcus’s perspective, Mr Ammar sounded like a buffoon, which in some ways he is a buffoon, but he’s deeper than that! So I felt like I couldn’t get to that unless he was telling his own story. So that was one thing. But I also felt like you cannot understand Marcus and his father and where they’re coming from unless you understand other people around them in the community; and so I thought that was a good choice, because most people, if they even know a Palestinian, this is like a rare thing. Like a lot of times in my own life, people who know me, I’m the only Palestinian person that they know, and I’m not even a person who immigrated from Palestine, right. I grew up in the United States. My parents are immigrants. So I felt like since most people don’t really get Palestinian perspectives, I’m going to give them a lot of Palestinian perspectives. And I didn’t stop at the immigrant generation and that next generation, I went on to the third generation. Those are people like Hiba and Layla and people who are growing up in the United States to parents who are the children of immigrants. And, what happens to the culture? Being Palestinian is so difficult in western countries because we’re so vilified in the media. Even the coverage of the genocide right now, it’s atrocious how one sided it is. And so I found it very difficult growing up in this country as a Palestinian American, and so I’m trying to show that for these younger generations, the question of their identity is very important to them – it does root them in something important. Like, for Hiba her grandparents are her connection to Palestine, and she’s really lost. And her grandparents and their love, and their unconditional love, is something that is going to root her, and it’s going to give her a foundation that she needs. So, yeah, I just kept going with those characters. For example, Maysoon’s story, which is the title chapter, and I thought to myself, how would a daughter of Dalia Ammar turn out anyway? [Laughs.] How would she even turn out? And that was Hiba. That turned out to be Hiba.

Charlie: Were there any characters that you considered, including that you didn’t, like you didn’t give their own narrative to or anything?

Susan: Raed, who is Marcus’s cousin, I wrote something with Raed and Ellen, his wife. I wrote something in their marriage a few years forward, and I just don’t think I got Ellen quite right. I feel like I was maybe making Ellen into something quite silly. I couldn’t get the depth of her character yet. I’m still working on that piece, actually, but I decided not to include it because I didn’t really feel good about Ellen’s character.

Charlie: I get that. Okay, what you’ve just said there, so you are writing some more about the people in this book, a spin off as such, or…?

Susan: I’m actually writing a novel right now, taking Marcus and Rita’s story further. It’s a novel, it’s just told between Marcus and Rita, and it goes back and forth between their perspectives. It’s the story of their marriage. Because now she’s an immigrant, right? Rita’s now an immigrant to the US, and Marcus doesn’t really know her. That’s the thing about their marriage, it’s a marriage that was made to help her and help him. He admires her and he loves her, but he doesn’t really know her, and she doesn’t know him, and she has some trauma that he doesn’t quite understand. So I’m writing a novel about the two of them.

Charlie: I’m really, really happy to hear that!

Susan: [Laughs.] Thank you! Thank you!

Charlie: Yeah, please, please get it finished, get it published.

Susan: [Laughs.] I’ll do my best. I hope it doesn’t take six years, but I have a good flow with it so far. It’s hard to write these days because the news is… it’s just absolutely so devastating. I’m actually really having a hard time writing anything, but I’m making some progress with it.

Charlie: I mean, you’ve got important things in Rita’s life anyway, that I think are important to know about now.

Susan: Yes.

Charlie: And obviously going forward as well. But I mean, certainly, yeah, some of the things that you’ve included with Rita’s backstory, people will appreciate hearing about, I think [Susan: I hope so] also things that we don’t know so much about that aren’t covered on the news.

Susan: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Charlie: And you said there about the title story, can you tell us about where the title came from?

Susan: So there’s a very famous story of the Muslim conquest of Spain, southern Spain, and the Muslim general Tariq ibn Ziyad, when he was invading Spain, his soldiers landed on the southern coast. I suppose they showed some reticence about going forward and invading, and he – to rally his troops, I suppose – he burned their ships on the harbour behind them, effectively cutting off their way to get home. And he told them, ‘behind you is the sea, before you is the enemy’. And I find that to be a very fitting metaphor for immigration, especially immigrants like Palestinian immigrants or in the US, immigrants who are coming from South and Central America, because people don’t leave their home because they want to – they leave their home because they don’t have a choice. And I don’t understand why people have such hostile attitudes toward immigrants because these people are not coming here because they want to ruin your party [chuckles], they’re coming here because their own countries have been torn apart, usually by colonialism, usually by western actions that have caused turmoil in their countries. So it’s very difficult, I think, when people come to the United States, for example, and they cannot go home again, that puts them in a very tricky situation, because you don’t really have a choice – you have to make it in this country. You have to go forward, you have to survive, you have to be successful. And by successful, I mean survive and raise your family. And that is quite a task, especially to raise your family in a society and a culture that you don’t even understand. When we raise our children, we raise them in situations that we are familiar with, the parents have lived this life, and so we can guide our children through this life, but if you’ve not lived this life, how are you going to guide your children? What can you do? And so that’s really difficult, and I just don’t think we give immigrants enough credit for what they do and how much they have to adjust and change and flex. And in many ways, immigrants are learning to be American alongside their children. That’s a very different experience than it is to grow up in this country. So that’s where that title comes from.

Charlie: Well, what you’re saying, you’re making me think of, again, something you said, you’ve got Palestinian Christians, you are a Palestinian American Christian yourself. The existence of Palestinian Christians and Palestinians being Christians is not something that’s widely known about.

Susan: Right.

Charlie: And I know that you said about it being maybe inconvenient for that sort of thing to be known. I mean, certainly, we hear all about, ‘oh, they’re all Muslims’ and the stereotypes that, you know, you’re working towards trying to get rid of in your book, you know, saying, ‘normal people’, in quotes. So I suppose I want to move on to that and just ask more about, like, so has the Palestinian Christian focus surprised people at all?

Susan: I think it has surprised people because, like you said, there’s been such a stereotyping of Palestinian society, of Arab society in general, that people assume all Palestinians are Muslims, and that’s just not true. There are many religions in Palestine, there’s Islam, there’s Christianity, there’s the Druze religions or Zoroastrians, there’s Jews. So this is a place where a lot of religions have lived side by side very successfully until the last century. So I think that it’s been very important to western nations to demonise the Arab world. They always seem to be invading the Arab world. It’s easier to invade a country if you’ve already demonised those people. And how do you demonise people? First of all, you flatten them, right. You flatten all their diversity into one picture and then you make that picture look so evil and so horrific, and then that makes it easier for you to do whatever you want. I mean, that’s how dehumanisation works. And every genocide in world history has happened that way – look at the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, there’s tonnes of examples of how this works. So, first of all, you flatten people into one monolithic image and then you demonise that image, then the path is set for you. So I think that the existence of Palestinian Christians – and, by the way the long and successful existence of Palestinian Christians in Palestine – like our existence and our peaceful coexistence side by side with Muslims, is a very inconvenient fact for anybody that wants to demonise Palestinians. For example, in Gaza, people were talking about how there are churches in Gaza that have been bombed and these churches are they’re hundreds and hundreds of years old and they’re still an active parish in those churches. People were talking about how these churches were bombed and it struck me as curious that everybody was surprised that there are churches in Gaza. Everybody’s surprised that Palestinians live side by side with Muslims. But that’s been a fact of life for centuries. And so if you understand that this is the case, then you must then turn to what you understand about Islam and understand that what you’ve been taught is actually incorrect, right. When Palestine is brought up in western media, it’s always brought up with this Islamophobic bent and Christians are always removed from the discussion about Palestine because they don’t want to even deal with our existence. So, you know, I’m making them deal with our existence [laughs] in this book. And by the way, I’m not trying to represent Palestinian Christians and who they are, these are not stories about things that happened in my life or other people’s lives. I actually am very careful when I depict anyone’s life in my work because I think it’s unethical of me to just tell their stories. These are characters in my mind and this is a work of fiction but I’m writing about people who culturally are similar to me because that’s what I know. I hope that people read it and I hope that the first lesson they take away from it, if they take away any lessons at all, is that Palestinians are much more diverse than they ever imagined us to be.

Charlie: Yeah, you said it, I mean, just so many ideas and concepts that aren’t great would be broken down as soon as you start thinking, how you said, Palestinian Christians living together with Muslims, etcetera, etcetera, yeah, it would just… house of cards kind of thing coming down.

Susan: Yeah, it all comes apart when you start to realise that these communities lived together for centuries. And, again, the churches in Gaza that have been around since like, the 6th century, they’ve been preserved since the 6th century in a predominantly Muslim area. That tells you something about the Muslims there, that they respect their neighbours and they respect the other communities with which they live. So you cannot believe in the demonisation, if you understand that fact. I mean, there are convents – they were showing pictures of the nuns who live in the convents next to the church and that’s only possible because there is a community that exists peacefully.

Charlie: Very important information. I do want to talk more about, I suppose, ‘segregation’, going to use the word. You’ve got your book set in Baltimore, and I know that there’s segregation in Baltimore, and I was wondering if I could ask you about that in terms of the effect of it on your writing, how you used the city in this way, like why you decided to set it in there? Because I believe you live in Baltimore yourself now, but you weren’t from there, effectively, you’re from Philadelphia?… [Susan: yes.] Just asking that, if that all makes sense?

Susan: Yeah, I grew up in Philadelphia and I’ve lived in Baltimore for about 24, 25 years now. And Baltimore is very much like a lot of American cities in that it has not confronted its racial history. And so when you first come to Baltimore, it feels like a very segregated city. So, for example, Baltimore is, I believe, 70% African American, but if you learn about the demographics and how the demographics are dispersed in the city, you see that most of the African American residents are living in different pockets of the city. And there is a very clear, distinct, academic-financial district, and the way that the trains run and the way that the subways run effectively cut off entire populations from that district. This is very true of many American cities in the north and in the south, this is not like something exclusive to mid-Atlantic or southern cities. And if anyone wants to know more about that, there’s a wonderful book called The Black Butterfly by Doctor Lawrence Brown. It’s about the way that Baltimore’s demographics are managed, deliberately managed. Anyway, so, to me, the West Bank and Gaza are also segregated. Like, if you live in the West Bank and you’re Palestinian, you are living in what is a system of segregation. And many people have gone to the West Bank, for example, and observed that it looks like a Jim Crow system where the Palestinian populations are managed, they’re given different ID cards, different licence plates, they have to move through checkpoints, their movements are controlled, and that affects everything. There are women, Palestinian women, who have literally delivered babies on the side of the road at military checkpoints because they’ve not been allowed in to reach the hospitals. There are Palestinian students who cannot reach the university on final exam day because a checkpoint has not permitted them to go through. This happens all the time. So to me, it was interesting to set the book in Baltimore because I’m dealing with a population that understand segregation, and now they’re moving to a city where this is still the case. I try to make subtle reference to that, for example, in Maysoon’s story, I make a big deal about Maysoon and her family live in one part of Baltimore, but the wealthy families live in another part of Baltimore, and I try to reference how even the grocery stores look different. You can’t find a fast food place in certain parts of Baltimore, but they’re all over other parts of the city. So class is a very big issue with me and my writing, as is feminism. So I try to show the different class systems and how that’s a consequence of things like segregation and other things.

Charlie: You have a particular interest in writing about the working class?

Susan: I do, absolutely. I don’t think there are enough books written in which we see working class people living their lives in all of their dignity. Like a lot of people, I think, use working class or poor characters to make a point, or they use them as secondary characters, but I don’t think they really understand their lives. I grew up working class, and I’m very proud of that background, and I teach at a college – here in the States the community colleges are open access colleges, and anybody can come here to these colleges and study. And we have a lot of working class students who take advantage of that and they work very hard and they don’t have the same privilege other people do to pay thousands of dollars and go to university. And I just really respect them very much. I respect their work ethic and I respect their lives and their dignity. And so, yeah. I think you can probably see I have a bias towards the working class in my book [chuckles].

Charlie: No, no, I liked it, very much.

Susan: Thank you.

Charlie: I would like to touch on your… inclusion, employment? of the conflict in general in your book. And you’ve mentioned checkpoints a minute ago, and you’ve got Marcus at the airport who’s just trying to bury his father. You’ve got other places where it’s an indirect look at the conflict. I’m guessing this was a conscious choice – you wanted to look more at the indirect and the things that have happened, rather than what’s actually happening at that moment, if that makes sense?

Susan: Yeah. This might be a difficult point to make, but I’m a Palestinian who has grown up in the United States, and I recognise that I have my own kind of privilege because I could have ended up a refugee in Gaza just like other Palestinians have been. Most Palestinians in Gaza are not original inhabitants of Gaza. They’re refugees from 1948/1947. I recognise that I’ve been sheltered from some of the daily violence that a lot of Palestinians encounter, and so I guess I just don’t feel like I can write about those things authentically. I think we have to read Palestinian voices from Palestine to understand those things. And there are certainly many Palestinians living in Palestine who’ve written gorgeous books, beautiful, important books, that deal with that experience. So I’m just trying to be very clear about what I feel I can authentically represent. So, yes, I’m not dealing with the violence directly because I’ve not experienced it, but I’m dealing with its ripple effect on different generations, for sure.

Charlie: Sure. Sure. So what’s next? I’m going to ask you a couple of these… or maybe three.

Susan: Okay.

Charlie: Do you have, or are you writing something set in the 1920s’ New York?

Susan: Yes, I have a manuscript where I’m playing with a character right now. It’s something that’s set in 1920s New York in a neighbourhood of Manhattan called Little Syria. And yes, I don’t have much more to say than that, except I’m still playing [chuckles].

Charlie: Okay, so that might be the book after this next one, maybe.

Susan: Yeah, maybe.

Charlie: So you’ve told us about Rita and Marcus’s story; very interesting possibilities there. How far along with this are you? Can we expect a publication in the next couple of years, do you think?

Susan: Yeah, I hope in the next couple of years – I would say I’m a third of the way through a good draft.

Charlie: Okay. Alright.

Susan: Yeah. A good draft is one where I can envision the ending [chuckles]. So I’m a third of the way through a good draft.

Charlie: Do you know your endings before you write?

Susan: No, I absolutely do not. I don’t and I really envy writers who are outliners and who methodically outline everything. I would say that I start writing and I’m just getting a feel for what’s going on, for the characters. But then at some point after writing, maybe, I don’t know, sometimes it’s like 10,000 words or 20,000 words, then I kind of pause and then I step back and I look at what I have and then I might start to put together future moments or a timeline for what’s going to happen. So I’m at that point now, I’m writing out the future timeline.

Charlie: That’s interesting, okay, to think about your book in that context. And so, yes, I mentioned Farah in the introduction and it looks like you’ve got an ongoing series. Are you still writing more books in that series? Farah Rocks.

Susan: Yeah, I’ve taken a little break from Farah Rocks, but that was a wonderful project to work on, and it was my first time writing for that age group, which was very… children are such magnificent readers, and they’re such a wonderful audience. I visit lots of schools and talk to children about writing, and they’re just fantastic. They make me so happy – when I see children reading, like nothing makes me happier than seeing a child read a book. But I’ve taken a break from Farah, and I’m writing, I’m trying to write, about another character, a little boy named Jamil, who’s a big baseball fan, and he’s a third grader, and he is living in my head at the moment, and I’m seeing where he goes.

Charlie: Awesome. Okay, well, I will have links to all the books that have been mentioned in the show notes for you listeners, all of Susan’s work and stuff. Go and head over and explore and buy. That’s important – go buy the books. Susan, this has been lovely having you here today. Thank you very much for being here and I’m so looking forward to the next one, yeah.

Susan: Thank you so much for having me on your programme. I appreciate it. It was lovely talking to you.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time, and if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Podcast Addict. Thank you! The Worm Hole Podcast episode 109 was recorded on the 25th June and published on the 11th November 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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