Q&A with Omar Sabbagh

2023-06-29 | Q&A

Omar Sabbagh Northside House

The main thing I’d say about you as a writer is you’re quite incredibly productive. Books, poems, stories, essays, seem to flow from you more or less all day long. Has it always come easy?

The first thing to say is that I write too much, which means, from a different angle of approach, that I can be quite erratic as a writer. I write from a deep psychological need as far as I can gauge, and it tends to be a narcissistic exercise in the main, whether the work ends up being good failsafe work or rot. Some part of me, a fissure in me I’d imagine, needs the shoring up that self-expression provides, mirrored as we writers are by the objective artefacts we’ve produced, now facing us. I remember, decades ago, reading Peter Ackroyd’s rather fun biography of Dickens, and he logs there the sense of ‘power’ Dickens received commanding an audience, whether live at one of his public readings or over his readership more generally, I can’t now recall. My feeling is something like that (not being ‘Dickens’ of course!) When I write a poem or a short story, or even a critical article, the power of language I possess (my first and most labile gift, I’d suppose – because writing for me is first of all language, deploying, marshalling language to make a desired impact, produce an intended effect) gives me the truest satisfaction I know in this life, barring the love-relationships I’m fortunate to have in this same life. I began reading voraciously at an extremely early age and I’d guess was born with or developed a very acute ear for the English language, its possible rhythms and the plasticity of constructing chunks of meaning that aim to resound. I started writing seriously, or at least with serious intent around 2002 or 2003 and my first short story was published in 2004 in a Saqi Books anthology. Poetry, I started writing with any serious intent in 2006. Any good critical work I may have done only started in 2012 or thereabouts. Yes, to a certain extent, writing has always come easy, at least since these pertaining dates mentioned above. The English language, in a hyperbole I often use, pompously, is like a part of my body. When I write, with any serious intent or engagement, I can almost feel words reverberate through me, down into my bowels. But because of that very facility, to conclude, I often write too much, complacently; any gift I may have can also often be a kind of Trojan horse. The bold confidence I have in my writing can be at times the source of many a pitfall. But one thing that has changed or developed over the last twenty years or so, is that I now know more often than not, and swiftly, when I’m writing well and when I’m not. At least in some respects, then, I’ve grown from the twelve-year-old asking him mummy to admire his keen literacy!

Is literature what you’ve always wanted to do, then?

Well, in a way, yes. My mother, who’d always a passion for English literature, passed it onto me at a young age. She gave me Austen and Dickens to read at around eleven or twelve and I devoured them. In my adolescence politics and philosophy fascinated me as much as literary books. I read loads and loads of Marx and Marxism (quite deeply and systematically for a teenager), Chomsky, and so on. And then one evening my maternal uncle (a magical, worldly man) spotted Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on a bookshelf in our living room in Wimbledon and recommended it to me. I was sixteen I think, but it proved a deeply enchanting read. In fact, I’d read most of Tolstoy by then, skipping school to come home to read another chunk of chapters in a Centenary edition of Tolstoy’s works I’d bought from one of the second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road I used to haunt in my teens. (I don’t think as readers we’ll ever regain the magical feel of our earlier reading experiences). But back to Durrell: it was I suppose the first book that set me hunting through the dictionary, and I learnt many words as a matter of fact at that time. The richness and aestheticism of his style beguiled me, but part of me regrets being exposed to that high style so early on, because for a few years any ‘literary’ book that wasn’t as byzantine or baroque seemed bland, threadbare to me, which shouldn’t have been the case. The reason I mention Durrell though, of many young challenges and conquests, was because I think it was reading that quartet of novels that first planted any real ambition to be a writer. It would take me many years before I began to write well and in my own way. Though I did PPE at Oxford (only doing an MA, my first of three, in English Literature, a few years later at KCL), I spent most of my time, when not devouring western Marxists in translation, reading literary stuff. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider as a literary man, to a certain extent at least, in so far as I didn’t do English at BA level, nor even at A-level, for all my voracious reading habits. Since my teenage years I always knew I’d want to write books, but ‘literature’ per se was a bit later on; for many years I planned on being perhaps a philosopher or historian.

Anyone who’s read your essay collections knows you have a wide range of influences – but they need sorting! What were the landmark books for you – and how did they alter your sense of your own mission in writing?

See above, first of all. But comparatively late discoveries might be Ford Madox Ford or Evelyn Waugh. Ford, primarily for his Parade’s End tetralogy and the way he does character and dialogue there and Waugh for similar reasons. In both, what I most admire is their dramatizing ways. In one of those quotes you read in blurbs (I’ve never been able to hunt down its origin) Waugh says that what most interested him in writing was something like the rhythm of language, not necessarily some ‘deep’ investigation of character. And I think I’ve something of the same going on in me. Putting sentences down, with a certain arrangement of punctuation, commissions or omissions, and then feeling the ‘effect’ reverberate is the source of any ‘mission’ or ‘ambition’ I may have in writing. For me, in verse or prose, it’s all about ‘craft’ or ‘technique’ not content or message or what have you. Whether this is because I’m good at playing technical games or whether it’s because that’s what ‘should’ matter, I dare not say.

The Cedar Never Dies is, I think I’m right in saying, a unique project for you, in that I asked you to go away and do interviews with living figures in Lebanon’s troubled history. Can you talk a bit about how the book came about?

Well, I planned at first on writing a Lebanese novel in prose; was quite set on it, in fact. But then when I was commissioned by Northside Press, I decided, on no doubt judicious advisement, to do it as a verse novel. This serves me well because it allows me to revel in language and wordiness in ways that a prose novel would have a harder time getting away with. One of the main conceits I had at first and then kept, was the role of a father-son relationship, based loosely on my own relationship. Though I was born and bred in London, England, and though very British in many ways, my father was always a Lebanese patriot and, loving him reverently as I did and do, it became obvious that any Lebanon book I might do would have to include him quite centrally. Anyway, once set on this path, I began to interview him about Lebanon’s modern and contemporary history (I’d only very, very broad-brushstrokes to hand before that), as well as being guided by him to read a few seminal works on modern and contemporary Lebanon. I interviewed some of his politico friends as well as some of my own acquaintances from different walks of life about their experience of modern and contemporary Lebanon. And then just started writing up episodes and scenes or character sketches in verse which integrate into the novel.

We’ve done some journalism together but I think it’s fair to say you’re more of an academic. What was your experience with interviewing people and colliding with their reality. Did that make writing easier or was there a lot of complex information to sort as a result?

Yes, though not in any ‘ivory tower’, I live in a world of books more than I do in a world of (so-called) realer experience. In some ways I’d rather read Braudel’s history of the early modern Mediterranean world than go to the beach. And this is a handicap, if not for a poet, for a storyteller. But researching for this book and expanding my horizons somewhat has been a truly salutary experience. I think in some ways the experience of writing this book has had me growing up in certain ways I hadn’t anticipated, but surely was in dire need of!

Tell us a bit about the plot – and why does it work particularly well to have it in verse?

It works well in verse because that form gives me, the author, with my particular sensibility, license to use language in ways that might seem too outlandish or brilliant in a prose story. The verse format also (as with poetry more generally) makes disjunctions, or a slightly more intransitive narrative more permissible. I don’t want to reveal the plot, but I will say that the central literary ‘device’ is having an aging father tell his son tales of Lebanon of yore, and I hope this device proves to make the different parts of the narrative more unified than they might otherwise have been. The book, after all, and eponymously, is a paean to what is or has been my father’s homeland more than mine, and this, via an implicit paean to a father, tout court.

I’ve noticed you write in bursts, and it’s been fascinating to watch it come in. Like all of us, you have to work around family life, and other obligations – can you talk a bit about those pressures, and how you manage them?

I write whenever I can, whenever I can ‘get away with it.’ It’s hard balancing the family stuff and a day-job teaching at a university with a comparatively heavy teaching load. But I manage it, by hook or by crook. That said, my dream would be to be able to afford to write full-time, or at least, to be able to afford a sabbatical for a year to write full-time. But like most, the ideal life, if it ever comes, will have to wait. Who knows? Maybe The Cedar Never Dies will prove a smash hit and make me rich!?

Has doing this book altered your sense of your home city?

Well, it really isn’t in any literal sense my home city. Though my first full time job was in Beirut at the American University of Beirut (AUB), those two years from 2011-2013 are the only years I’ve lived full-time in Lebanon. I have visited and do visit every year, of course. But yes, doing this book has taught me much that I really should have been aware of earlier. So, in another sense, it’s been a vehicle for me to ‘grow-up’ in some respects. And though Beirut and Lebanon, as a nation and state, are now close to defunct, dying, my hope is that my book, The Cedar Never Dies, paints a picture, or a tapestry of them not only as they were or are, but also in part as they might be.