I first knew Yumna Kassab as my year nine science teacher in 2017, so you can imagine my excitement when I saw her name on the Sydney Writers Festival line-up. Though she has a degree in neuroscience, Yumna is the Parramatta Laureate of Literature and the author of 'The House of Youssef', 'Australiana', and 'The Lovers'. Her books have been listed for many awards, including the Miles Franklin Award, Stella Prize, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, Prime Minister's Literary Award, Queensland Literary Awards, and NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
We sat down to discuss her latest book, 'Politica', a formally ambitious project that has been described as a mosaic of different lives affected by an unspecified conflict in the Middle East. In a world where the personal is political, our discussion migrates from our families’ home countries to Western Sydney.
Date- Saturday, May 25, 2024
Location- Carriageworks
Yumna, thank you so much for being generous with your time. To start off, who is your favorite author? Do you have a favorite book?
Oh, that’s a killer. I really love Joan Didion just because I think she's got very clear sentences, but my favorite book is Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Her background is as a psychoanalyst and so she interprets fairy tales and looks at the symbols in fairy tales, so that's probably my favorite book. I really love Ursula Le Guin because I think she's a very deep thinker.
I can definitely see the sharp sentences in Politica. Speaking of which, do you have a favorite section of the book?
The piece ‘Propaganda’ I really like because if we're talking about colonization and imperialism, propaganda is such a key aspect of that. I also like the one very early in the book, where Jamal has that incident with a bully on the playground and he thinks later about all the various bullies he's met in his life. Also, with what's happening in Gaza, there are other ones which take on a very different resonance. There's a piece in there called ‘An Ode to Reason’ where it was upsetting to write. I've read it out loud in public a few times. It's a very difficult one to read and it's not because of my words, but it's because of what's happening in the world.
It's an interesting choice that you made to have this unnamed conflict but also be so specific in the imagery. Can you explain your intention behind this choice?
Where I imagine this book being set is somewhere in the Middle East, but not exactly a real place. I didn't really want to name countries or regions. All the names are Arab and so obviously people are going to pin it there. But I think sometimes that if things are set in a realistic place, we stop being able to see them in a symbolic way.
That’s why I really love fables and fairy tales that allow you to interpret things. A lot of things to do with conflict and war, and even if anyone has migrated to Australia—a lot of them have actually moved here because of conflict overseas or trouble or war or whatever it is. There is a similarity and so that's the reason why the setting of Politica is not named.
And for me Latin America is a very big influence. I've been a number of times to various countries, and my interest in that region helped give me perspective on the Arab world, to see parallels. That was one of the main reasons I didn't name things, because I do think Politica has a resonance elsewhere. Lebanon's history, and also surrounding countries, is a very important part of the book. But I also didn't want to tie it exactly to Lebanon's history because I think it becomes very easy for it to be about our side versus their side. Whatever is universal about this would be lost.
The book is divided into five sections, and further divided into small vignettes. One of the sections is called “Politica”. Can you explain your thinking behind “Politica” as the title that captures the whole book?
Titles are so important to me in terms of how I put together a project, because I tend to write quite continuously. But what actually unifies this book is that it's about people's lives, with a backdrop of revolution and conflict. It's very much about how politics affects people's lives. The actual title itself, Politica, is a Spanish word. I did also consider the English equivalent or the Arabic equivalent, but I went with the Spanish word because it's a feminine noun and people say that women often focus their stories on relationships. When we're talking about conflict or community, or looking at how things interact, that's actually where you can see the impact of things; it's in terms of people's relationships to each other and their relationships to place. The title is also a reference to Latin America, which I love.
In the chapter called ‘The Sellout’, Salma reflects on how overtime, she has lost the energy to engage in protests and rebellions because her quality of life begins to suffer. For example, she can’t attend to her garden. Where do you sit on this; is Salma a sellout?
No, I don't see her necessarily as a sellout. I see her as someone who's trying to have a life and whatever plans that she had—they're almost like ghost plans. These plans never eventuated and this does happen with conflict.
When people are talking about politics, it's very easy to just try and see things as two options and not have nuance. And one of the things that was really important to me is, even though I see it as a political book, to not actually have slogans, not have preaching, and not have any direct causes. I wanted that to completely put to one side and for people to be able to interpret it. So, I don't know, maybe she's a sellout, maybe she's not; it depends who you're asking. I'm pretty sure she doesn't see herself as a sellout. I think she sees herself as someone who's trying to live her life. Obviously, her brother does see her as a sellout. But yeah, it's a very polarised way to look at things. Good literature is not hitting someone over the head with an idea and pushing it on people. Readers come to their own conclusions.
That's what I found interesting, because generally with fables, they tend to be more didactic. But you've taken that fable form and taken the didacticism out of it as well. In this way, Salma really interested me as a character. There's this chapter where she's preoccupied about her trip overseas and how her sister was coming from overseas. There are a few chapters where these women feel stagnant in their home, and they're preoccupied with going elsewhere. Can you tell me a bit about your interest in these kinds of women?
There is a quote about the sense that people believe that, wherever they are, there's something more interesting or more exciting elsewhere. I really love to travel. Being somewhere else—you do have this distance and ability to reflect on your life that you don't have if you just stay there.
One of the things that interests me also is that the possibility for people to move in the world is very dependent on what kind of passport they have, where they're from, their money. That it is not something that is freely available to everyone. The other thing is that my family is from Lebanon, and I do know that if my parents hadn't left Lebanon, my possibilities and my opportunities in life would have been quite different. And I do also have a lot of family still there, and just based on where they were born and what kind of passport they have, their possibilities are so different.
Leïla Slimani, the Moroccan writer, says that a person can only really have a home and feel free in that home if they can leave it. And if you can't leave it, then you're just trapped. I also think if someone is hypothetically, just to make it very exaggerated, a billionaire and they go from this country to that country—that is one experience. But a person who's displaced, or if you think about Gaza, these people…I was reading today, some people have moved 14 times and it's like, well, what kind of migration? It is a mini little migration in this very small space. That's a very different experience. Not all migrations are the same.
Did you migrate? Did your parents migrate?
Yes, my parents migrated from Vietnam. It's interesting because we talk in my family about our home country. And sometimes people tend to romanticise ‘the motherland’. In ‘The Scattering' you talked about the “nostalgic paradise”, and my parents have a lot of nostalgia for Vietnam, but realistically, when my Mum goes back to Vietnam, she doesn't like the humidity. She doesn't like this and that about it. So, I really appreciated how you went beyond that romanticisation.
I get into that though. I do, because I've been to Lebanon a number of times and lived there when I was younger. But I sometimes feel like I don't really know Lebanon and I also sometimes feel like that about Australia. It's almost like this mythic landscape that doesn't really exist except in my head. But especially with Lebanon, because so much of what I know is based on people's stories and I don’t have a factual relationship with the place.
The reason I asked about your parents is because my dad, when he moved here, said, “I'm gone for a year. I'm gonna set up some money, I'm gonna go,” and he was going to build this little house, and it never happened. So many people in the 90s, relatives or family friends, went back to Lebanon for a year, 10 years, but most of them came back to Australia.
Is there a reason your dad stayed in Australia?
In Lebanon in 2019 there were these massive protests by a lot of young people who wanted a future in the country, and there is no future; you can study and you're not necessarily going to get a job.
Also, inflation. I don't even know what the latest number is, but people's money, whatever it is worth, is almost meaningless. There is a reality where people's lives are quite difficult. I'd really like to actually go visit Lebanon, but it's in a really bad state. People get two hours of electricity. Most people before the pandemic may have gone for a few months, but most people now go for two weeks and that's it, because it's not fun. The last trip I went on, it was six hours of electricity on, then they turned it off for six hours. That was manageable, but two hours in an entire day—it's difficult.
You ended ‘The Scattering’ hoping that God would give us eternity so that “in the migration we are not lost.” What does being “lost” in the migration mean to you?
I noticed that travelling brings out a different aspect of my personality or my life compared to how I might feel in my routine world. But I do think that there are a lot of things that are lost when people forcibly migrate. It could be their ideas, it could be their dreams, it could be their illusions, it could be their hopes. There is going to be something that is lost.
I went to the session with Celeste Ng, who's the author of Our Missing Hearts. She was reading a passage from one of her books and she was saying how various migrants to the US went and settled, but a lot of Chinese-Americans all went to one city and they stayed in one city. And it is the same with a lot of Arab-Australians.
Again, it comes back to this idea, potentially, of how people actually migrate. If they migrate and it's due to conflict, they might say, “Okay, we found this place. It's safe, it's good and we’ll set up our life.” But if a person has a lot more possibilities, or comes from a lot of possibilities, maybe it's not such a big deal to them to move around a lot.
I want to return back to something you said: how the places that we're in can still feel mythic. You were talking about Lebanon, but what about here in Sydney? Does Parramatta feel mythic to you?
It doesn't. I was hanging out with family members and they tell stories, and the minute they start telling a story it feels like they're telling a once-upon-a-time story. It becomes like a fairy tale. It's so entertaining but it doesn't really have a concept of time or place. It's completely unhooked from the ground. But then with me, the minute I start writing about Australia it's so realistic. It just becomes about very material things.
Is it because you grew up here?
No, I don't think so. I actually think it's something to do with the landscape, because I would find it really hard to set a fairytale site in Sydney. It's such an urban environment. I think the actual place affects it. I've been thinking about it and I'm not entirely sure why it is, but it's definitely there.
I saw in an interview with ABC last year that you were working on a “Dictionary of Parramatta”. How's that going?
The dictionary is underway. It's not going to be a guidebook or a tour guide or anything like that. It's not going to be a historical thing of our time. I think it's going to be a very personal dictionary about stuff that is important to me or to do with memory. I try to write it when I'm in Parramatta. It's also an opportunity for me to reflect on my own life and connection with the place, but also to think about where Parramatta is going in the future.
Is it taking a similar form to Politica?
I've got a few stories which are not fragments or vignettes or short stories, but I generally like small things. With Politica, someone called it a mosaic and I actually quite like that because all together it makes up a bigger picture. But the dictionary is going to be alphabetical. For example, I have an obsession with the Western Sydney Wanderers. That would be under ‘W’, so it will be alphabetical but it's not going to be defined. It’s capturing memory and place.
What advice would you give to a young writer writing politics?
Do you write?
Yeah, I've always wanted to do something similar to what you're doing with Parramatta for Bankstown, where I grew up.
To be honest, to try and write about massive things could be a bit daunting. It could be better to find a personal or immediate angle that really interests a writer. I know with my first book, House of Youssef, I thought, I'll write things that are set in the community I come from. At the end of the day, that you know, it's quite important to write about the things that are personally interesting and to just kind of follow something all the way through. That would be very cool if you wrote about Bankstown. And I do think that also, the poetry slam being based in Bankstown, in terms of the writers and the poets coming through in the community, it's going to be incredible.
It's all happening in Western Sydney.
Yeah, but it didn't used to be. It also helps that there's, you know, the university there, and Giramondo Publishing based there, and then Sydney Reviewer of Books is based at the university and there are a number of literary organisations. There's the Bankstown slam. All this stuff has been ticking away and building for many years. Maybe now it's reached a critical mass.
I've heard a lot of writers, especially if they're coming from refugee families, have a sense of duty to represent their country or their family. Do you ever feel that?
When The House of Youssef came out in 2019, I just told myself that no one reads books anymore and everyone is on Netflix. I don't know if that's actually true, but what I found is that what I take from a story is very different to what someone else takes from a story. We do need writers who just write the things that interest them and to kind of be honest about it. To be thinking about how the book is going to be made, who's going to condemn it or who's not going to like it, it's probably not a good thing. Just push it out of the mind and write whatever needs to be written.
In Politica, it seems like the number of people that we meet could be infinite, so when and how did you decide to call it finished?
In terms of the ordering of the book, I started in 2019, and I finished in 2022. The first section that was written was the ‘Politica’ section and the ‘Jamal’ section. ‘1973’ was definitely written in lockdown in 2021. I was thinking about the civil war in Lebanon and then other things, and I thought, the pandemic is going to create this ‘before and after’, but I don't want to write about that. So, I wrote about the backdrop of war. Because the political section was so early I was always thinking about how I could have a project that is based on politics affecting people's lives, and so when it came to actually grouping the book, I noticed that there were all these stories and around the same theme and setting, and to put them together that way.
But also, setting is so important to me, so the minute I started to imagine stories set elsewhere, I thought, okay, I'll just cut these here. It's a sort of blurry line. With ‘The Lovers’, it was very clear for me because I was writing about these two characters for about eight or nine months, and then it's literally like they stepped out of the building, and they’re gone. There are characters in Politica like Salma and Abdullah who I'd really like to write about more, but they're completely gone.
I definitely feel that united sense of setting, especially with ‘The Well’. All these different stories were centred on this one well.
Did you take inspiration from a well in real life?
The actual well doesn't exist. My granddad, when I was young in Lebanon, used to have a well where you draw up water. But I think even though the one in Politica doesn't exist, it's such a central image that I feel like it could be a real place.
It's not real, but it is definitely realistic. And I feel like every suburb would have their own version of ‘the well’ where the community all gather but they all have their different relationships to it. Is there an equivalent in Parramatta?
I think the square is a pretty good equivalent. There's a lot of benches. They've got like a table tennis table, they've got chess. They often have live events. It's a cool place just to kind of hang out.
And just to finish up, is there one takeaway from Politica that you want your readers to have?
When I think about Gaza, I often ask myself okay, let's say today there's a ceasefire and the violence stops. What is this going to look like for the next 20, 30, 50, 100 years? The legacy of whatever we've seen so far is going to be so long, and I think that's hopefully what Politica does; it looks at the sort of long-term effect. When we talk about colonisation it's not a historical thing that happened. It's ongoing.
Thank you so much for that, Yumna. I look forward to reading your next project.
