Interview with Joumana Haddad

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon. A version also appeared at The Aspen Institute]

To the annoyance of her many critics, Joumana Haddad is fast becoming one of Lebanon’s most recognized authors on the international circuit. Two years after the release of I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, Haddad is set to release her second book – Superman is an Arab: On God, marriage, macho men and other disastrous inventions – this September. NOW Lebanon met with the polemicist, poet and publisher at her office in downtown Beirut’s An-Nahar building.

Apart from writing the new book, what have you been up to since Scheherazade?

Joumana Haddad: I published a children’s book in Italian, and I’ve been working on the new issue of the magazine Jasad [“Body”], which I’m publishing this summer. And mainly I’ve been travelling to talk about Scheherazade because working on the book doesn’t finish with the writing; there’s a whole new life to it, which is meeting people and getting feedback, and I love doing that. I enjoy this interaction with the readers.

I understand that Jasad has run into advertising difficulties.

Haddad: Can you believe it? I worked with three advertising agencies and none has managed to find me clients. All of them said it’s too daring, and I thought, “What the hell? We’re in Beirut!” Walk down the street and tell me what’s daring in Jasad that isn’t out there. It’s continued mainly because of the sales, but after two years you can’t go on without ads. I don’t want to make money out of it, but it deserves to survive.

So, Superman is an Arab. Explain.

Haddad: I thought there was a need to tackle manhood, not only womanhood, because, as you might know I’m a third-wave feminist, which means I don’t believe in women’s solidarity; I believe in human solidarity. I believe in partnership between men and women, and if our suffering is going to change it won’t be by women alone.

And it hit me that in the Superman story I always preferred Clark Kent, because he’s real. And I think many of our leaders and religious representatives here in the Middle East think of themselves as invincible supermen.

But why an Arab? I expect this will offend some people.

Haddad: That’s the least of my worries! I hope they get offended because even though I’m not writing to offend, I don’t mind provoking when it can push people to do something about it.

I’m sure that when it comes out, people will tell me, “He’s Italian too because we have such people in Italy,” and so on. But to me he’s an Arab because I belong to the Arab world, and I’m seeing so many supermen around, whether they’re people next door or people I work with. And what can you say about someone like [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah? He thinks of himself as Superman – at a minimum.

And God is a superman – that’s my first enemy, the monotheist God. That’s the first Superman we need to get rid of.

As in Scheherazade, religion gets a lot of attention in Superman. Why?

Haddad: I’m a person who believes in human rights, in equality between men and women, in a non-discriminatory world. That alone means I can’t believe in a monotheistic religion. Because if you go back to the texts and practices of Christianity, Islam and Judaism you find misogyny, very patriarchal systems and values, terror and blood, all in the name of a God who lectures about mercy and love but has nothing to do with either of them.

One chapter is called “The disastrous invention of marriage.” This is new.

Haddad: No it’s not! [Laughs] The way it’s practiced now I think this institution cannot survive. In countries where divorce is easy, the number of divorces is increasing. In countries where it’s difficult, the number of affairs is increasing. So this needs to be re-thought, and again, the influence that religion wields over this and the amount of money and power it gets from it is also something for us to ponder.

Why do you think you provoke such a hostile reaction from women?

Haddad: I think you should ask them! At first it used to sadden me, to tell you the truth. But now I’ve stopped measuring myself by the approval of others. What’s important for me is that I’m convinced about what I’m doing. It’s very liberating, because though approval feels good, it can also be poisoning.

And like I said in Scheherazade, women are often their own worst enemies. My fiercest critics are women.

Another chapter is called “The disastrous invention of getting old.”

Haddad: Well I’m 41. I wanted to talk about this misinformed quest for youth and beauty we have. It’s about facing my grey hairs, which I like. People should be happy with themselves, though I know it’s not easy.

Is this especially true in Lebanon?

Haddad: I think so, because of this culture of the image. People here only pretend to live. If you see them and think they look happy and rich and cool, you’ve made their day. They don’t care whether they’re really happy inside. It’s the culture of seeming good rather than feeling good, which is a very suicidal way to live.

Why is Lebanon so different from, say, Syria or Jordan in this respect?

Haddad: Lebanon has always been freer in some ways. But all these women who think they’re liberated don’t have their rights respected at the level of laws. It’s terrible how much women are discriminated against here; they’re second-class citizens. So they are pushed toward these cheap liberties – you can wear what you want! You can dance till four in the morning! – to distract from the real struggle: the laws on violence, marital rape and numberless others.

Some critics accuse you of writing for a Western audience.

Haddad: This is horrible, because I try to defend human rights, secularism, women’s rights, sexuality, and these people say these are “Western” values, which means Arabs don’t believe in these things. I say these are universal things; I don’t think we should give the West the monopoly on them.

Do you take an interest in Lebanese politics? Are you March 14, March 8, etc.?

Haddad: I’m against the herd syndrome. Nobody represents me but myself. I am definitely against March 8, but I’m very critical of March 14, too. I think we have lost a big momentum. I was one of those [on March 14, 2005] who marched to Beirut – from Jounieh – and that was the first time in my life I did anything like that. Now I don’t regret that because I believed in that moment, but there’s been an inability to deal with such a historic moment.

So I’m an independent. I don’t want to have to choose between a terrorist Iranian regime and a backward Wahhabi one, either with Hezbollah or the Salafists, with one stupid, corrupt criminal against another. This is against being a responsible, thinking human being.

Do you support any Lebanese activist movements?

Haddad: Yes, but for example when I support the secularists, or a women’s march, I’m more interested in the civil laws aspect. There should be one law of personal affairs for every citizen. We can’t call ourselves a republic or a democracy until this is the case. Some secularists prefer to start on the political front – i.e. changing the balance of power – but we can’t do that until people stop thinking of themselves as Christians, Sunnis, Shia, etc.

Superman Is An Arab will be published in English by Westbourne Press on September 1.

Candide, or Realism: A review of 'I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions Of An Angry Arab Woman', by Joumana Haddad

“The first reason for my immunity [to threats of violence] was that I’m the sort of person who refuses to be bullied. This might seem self-congratulatory […]”, writes Joumana Haddad, the author of this peculiar and protean (part polemic; part memoir; part poem) exploration of the Arab woman identity. As it happens, I didn’t find this particular claim to be self-congratulatory at all – that this book could have been written in the first place is evidence enough of a certain resilience of character, to say the least – but the compound word had found its way into my marginal scribblings from literally the first page, and in fact the very first paragraph:

Dear Westerner,

Allow me to warn you right from the start: I am not known for making lives any easier.

Well, neither was Edward Said in 1978, when he distilled and engraved the “Orientalist views” that Haddad scorns in the next sentence and throughout the ensuing pages, but leafing through my copy of that well-known text I don’t find him congratulating himself quite so warmly for it at the time. Thus begins the protracted throat-clearing of Scheherazade’s opening pages, which set about to break the shocking news to the “Occidental” reader that there exist some Arab women whose literacy exceeds that of a five-day-old bat; whose brothers do on occasion spare them the daily group sodomy routine and whose husbands have been known to take breaks from the fist-and-jackboot regime from time to time. It’s unfortunate that Haddad chooses to begin by insulting her reader (a crime for which she does apologise later on, saying perhaps too generously that “we Arabs generalise about Westerners even more than they generalise about us”), and I found myself forgiving her for this and other further discourtesies only on the grounds that she cannot possibly mean some of the things she says (such as, for example, alluding to the writing of The Satanic Verses, a Booker-shortlisted work of fiction, as a “violent provocation of Islam”. A what provocation of Islam? A violent what of Islam?).

Similarly, I find myself disbelieving that Haddad in reality can be as solipsistic as she sometimes reads on the page. We are told in the first chapter that the book is a “modest” reflection on the question of the Arab woman. If this claim survives scrutiny, it is not without strain. The young Haddad, in her own words, was a “precocious” and “unstoppably curious” girl whose “whirlwind of mental activity” could only be sated by the “devouring” of “thick books that were inappropriate for my age”. She saw through the inanity of John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Woman are from Venus “despite being in my early twenties at the time”. The first editions of her magazine, JASAD, were the product of “sitting tirelessly for hours and hours in front of my laptop” (as opposed to, say, in front of her fax machine, or her microwave). She isn’t even sure, apparently, that she isn’t “crazy”, a question that she “often” asks herself. Understatement, in other words, is not her trade.

Stylistic shortcomings of this sort can be overlooked only on the grounds of content. Haddad is able to rescue Scheherazade by the strength of her actual analysis, the fortitude of which derives from the candour and mercilessness with which she turns her critical eye, and pen, on her own, contemporary Arab society:

Being an Arab today means you need to be a hypocrite. It means you cannot live and think what you really want to live and think honestly, spontaneously and candidly. It means you are split in two, forbidden from speaking the blunt truth (and the truth IS blunt; such is its role, and this is its power), because the Arab majority depends upon a web of comforting lies and illusions. It means that your life and your stories must be repressed, clamped-down and encoded; rewritten to suit the vestal guardians of Arab chastity, so the latter can rest assured that the Arab ‘hymen’ has been protected from sin, shame, dishonour or flaw.

(Jasad, the name of her magazine, means ‘body’ in Arabic, and that ‘hymen’ above is an instance of her talent for deploying the body as a metaphor: the same trope, of course, which is the hallmark of her poetry.)

To her city of residence, Beirut, she is especially callous:

I grew up in a country that hates me, and that expressed this hatred in so many ugly ways. I do not want to belong to a place like that. No, I definitely do not belong to Beirut: I just live in it. The thought of belonging to such a monstrous, murderous womb terrifies me.

Her description of the city that was once dubbed ‘the Paris of the Orient’ as a place “where you can’t help but feel you are ‘sleeping with the enemy’ every time you go to bed. And that this enemy is you” calls to mind Azar Nafisi’s description of living in Tehran being like “sleeping with someone you loathe”. I must admit, as a long-term resident of Dubai with a good number of Lebanese friends, to great surprise at Haddad’s sangfroid. The Lebanese are a tremendously and enviably heterogeneous and diverse people but the one point upon which I thought they were all unanimously agreed was that not even the most concerted and ingenious efforts of human civilisation could in a million years produce a city that was the equal of Beirut. But then, none of my Lebanese friends is in the business of writing erotic poetry.

And Scheherazade is in large part a book about writing, or better say literature in general. At age twelve Haddad read the Marquis de Sade’s Justine “in a mixture of panic and disbelief, both hypnotized and in a numb fright, like someone who is afraid, yet fatally attracted to the object of her fear”, an experience to which she refers as her “baptism by subversion”. Then came Nabokov (the Nafisi connection again); Dostoevsky; Flaubert; and all the other aforementioned “thick books”, and a literature junkie was born. An underlying, - perhaps the underlying – theme of Scheherazade is the connection between literature and freedom, not only in the personal sense (on being a loner: “Amidst all those wonderful things to read, dream and write about, I profoundly enjoyed my own company, deeply convinced that each person is a crowd by him/herself”) but also in the political (“And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit”). She is contemptuous of the “young [Lebanese] women” who would rather “shop” or “waste a whole day tanning in the sun” than “devote one hour to reading a few pages of a good book (while they could do both perfectly easily)”. (I would argue that this criticism applies at least as well to Westerners, and at least as well to young men.) And she cites statistics of reading in the Arab world that could sober a hardened dipsomaniac:

According to [The First Arab Report on Cultural Development, published by the Arab Thought Foundation in 2008], I live in a region where fewer than 0.1% of its 270 million people read; where merely 40% of that depressing 0.1% read books; and where 9% of the 40% of that initial 0.1% actually read poetry.

That puts the total number of Arab poetry readers at 9,720, or 0.0036% of the total of 270 million. With such a microscopic readership, some might ask, why bother becoming a poet at all? “We write poetry to be free”, is Haddad’s simple answer. Fittingly, her first poem, written at age twelve, was entitled ‘Ma liberté’.

Literature; erotica; censorship; and the liberation of Middle Eastern women… well, we know where this is heading. Haddad at one point describes herself as an “Epicurean poet”. It has always been a pleasant irony, for those of us who take pleasure from ironies, that the Orthodox Jewish term for ‘apostate’ is ‘apikoros’, which translates simply as ‘Epicurean’. And since at least the burning of the books of the Jews and Greeks of Ephesus in Acts 19, there have been no greater foes of literature than the benighted and barbarous parties of god. The subtitle of Scheherazade promises us an ‘angry’ Arab woman, and Haddad does not disappoint in her most polemical (and estimable) chapter, ‘A Woman Unafraid of Provoking Allah’. I could have given you more or less any paragraph, but the following is perhaps the tersest summary of Haddad’s position:

This is how I have come to think of it: with all due respect to people who believe in fairy tales (and need them), what could paradise be other than a wonderful illusion invented by a few geniuses […] in order to control the masses, promising them in return a reward that they will never be able to grant? Or, at least, a reward with no guarantee of delivery? Can you imagine an easier, yet more Machiavellian trick pulled on millions and millions of minds, eager to be comforted in their fears and doubts and day-to-day challenges and cries? Do you really want to bet your life, and principles, and behaviour, and choices, on THAT? [Italics mine.]

Deftly anticipating the Christian chauvinist reader who assumes that by “paradise” she alludes only to the grotesque Islamic saturnalia, Haddad is scrupulous in her equal condemnation of Christianity, citing the misogyny of St Paul; the doctrines of eternal damnation and original sin; and the proscription of abortion, divorce and birth control (to which one could add the craven and contemptible commandment to love one’s enemy; the moral bankruptcy of vicarious redemption; the absurdity of ‘taking no thought for the morrow’; Christ’s Talmudic racism against Gentiles in general and Canaanites in particular; and the utter totalitarianism of his forbidding even the thought of adultery; inter alia) to argue that there is no “authentic, significant, definitive difference between the situation of the Muslim and the Christian Arab woman”: that “the injustice, double standards and prejudices are just more obvious and visible with the first one”.

Now might be the time to mention the courage of Joumana Haddad. It is controversial enough being an outspoken atheist in the West, even (or especially) in the most secular republic on earth, the United States. But to print the above words in Lebanon - a country where, according to the CIA World Factbook, 99% of the population is either Muslim or Christian; where law and order are maintained only at the permission of a theocratic Shia militia literally named the ‘Party of God’; and where a state visit to the capital city by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can draw crowds of thousands of jubilant supporters - is to risk something rather worse than ignominy or alienation. Haddad’s ferocious defence of the Enlightenment principles, in the face of the unimaginable horror of threats of acid throwing, puts to shame the tepid and fatuous notion of the ‘militant’ or ‘fundamentalist’ secularist propagated by Western critics of atheism (who, it goes without saying, have never had to spend a day of their lives worrying about freedom of conscience or expression), just as it annihilates the even more foolish argument that secularism has led to a ‘spiritual vacuum’ in the West, the filling of which can only be accomplished by ‘faith’. Haddad ennobles the rejection of religion in her life, as much as in her work. After all, dear reader, ask yourself which of the following poses the greater threat to our civilisation: Arab poets for atheism, or American politicians for Jesus?

An ‘angry’ Arab woman indeed then, and not without reason. Yet it would be in error to describe Scheherazade as a diatribe. Haddad’s is by no means a cold heart, and her prose glows with arresting tendresse as often as it sizzles with belligerence. Even if she does stray too far into saccharine and sentimental territory at times, in her vacillations between the two extremes she sketches for us a tantalising chiaroscuro:

I do not want to live my present life thinking of the afterlife. This is it for me, folks. This is all there is, these forty or fifty or maybe ninety years on this earth, with all the small joys and disappointments that come with them.

As for the errors I make, the only punishment I acknowledge for having made them is my awareness of those errors, and having to live with it: there is, there should be, no heavier penalty on a person’s soul, mind and heart.

And the only reward I want for my ‘good deeds’, if and when I do any, is to know that I’ve done them without expecting anything in return: no pat on the back, no bravos, no Saint Peter handing me the keys of the blessed kingdom. I am convinced that no recompense is sweeter.

Quietly beautiful passages such as these are worth more than all the ‘holy’ texts put together. This is the morality that cannot be found in religion: the morality that comes only from taking a long, cold stare into the abyss, and confronting the fear and loneliness that come with doing so. In short, it is the morality of an adult. 

As with the anatomical imagery, this facility for the moral is of course consanguineous with her gift for poetry, but I suspect it might also have something to do with her femininity. Femininity, indeed, is ever audible in Haddad’s prose. (Scheherazade is not an erotic book, but when Haddad writes of the “power” of her breasts “under a tight shirt”, or of her incessant teenage masturbation, or of “the little pieces of flesh torn from men’s backs”, she knows the male – and, I suppose, the female - reader is feeling a frisson of sorts.) Above all else, Scheherazade is an unapologetic assertion of womanhood. If any chapter outshines ‘An Arab Woman Unafraid of Provoking Allah’, it is the one that precedes it, ‘An Arab Woman Redefining Her Womanhood’.

Not so much a feminist as a post-feminist, Haddad reassuringly has no time for the “oily hair, messy clothes and hairy armpits” breed of man-hater, dismissing as “insulting” the presumption that she would support the presidential campaigns of Ségolène Royal and Hillary Clinton “just because all three of us wear bras before leaving the house in the morning”. Similarly, she decries the intellectual indolence of women “who rush to blame men for all their problems” without conceding that “the oppression and hardship a woman faces are sometimes her own responsibility as well”:

Plus, who said that men are women’s worst enemy? I’ve met women who hate women, ally against them and fight them harder than any man would – mothers who remain silent in front of a rapist father; who are eager to find husbands for their thirteen year-old daughters; who leave them without a proper education because ‘they are predestined for marriage anyway, so why bother?’; who raise their sons to be even more discriminative and disrespectful towards women than their fathers.

Of course, it would be disastrous to make too much of this point (and Haddad doesn’t). In a region in which the vast majority of the population practices an openly misogynistic religion – a religion whose penal code is in most cases enforced by the state – the hypothesis that women’s suffering is self-imposed is problematic at best. Nevertheless, it’s a further testament to Haddad’s refreshing intellectual candour that she refuses to pull punches or shy from criticism, even when that criticism may play into the hands of her real worst enemy.

And therein lies the strength of Scheherazade. For though at times Haddad may, as I have said, be slightly too quick to award herself a pat on the back, she is never at any moment self-pitying. Despite her clumsy “Dear Westerner” opener, the bulk of the ‘anger’ in the book is directed inwardly, at her fellow Arabs (astonishingly, for a writer whose childhood and adolescence were so blackened by the wars in Lebanon, she makes not a single mention of Israel). By obstinately sticking to her scruples, even at the risk of alienating the friends she may need most, Haddad sets an example to intellectuals the world over, and produces a work that warrants attention from non-Arabs at least as much as from their Arab counterparts.