They Tried and They Kept Going

An interview with Saeed Teebi about his incredible book "Her First Palestinian."

5 (OF SO MANY) amazing Palestinian books to read right now

Saeed Teebi’s short story collection Her First Palestinian is one of my favourite books of all time. I read it in August 2022 after seeing a personalized bookseller recommendation card at Massy Books in Vancouver. Reading it led to my first awkward TikTok, and constantly mentioning the book anytime I’ve been asked about recommendations for what to read since then.

The name of the collection comes from the title story “Her First Palestinian” which was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2021. A year later, the collection was published by Anansi Press. All the stories feature Palestinian characters who have immigrated to Canada, and are connected to Toronto in particular.

And so when the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University announced a talk with Saeed Teebi on September 14th I instantly got tickets. (And I’m so glad I did - it was a powerful evening about language, memory, diaspora and migration.)

He very kindly responded to my invite for an interview, and despite our interview location turning out to be the loudest coffee shop I’ve ever been in, we had a wonderful conversation about craft, hope, centring one’s narrative, earning stories, economy in language, and so much more. My deepest takeaway was a sense of hope that it is never too late to make art. To read deeply, to invest in craft, to publish. He was gracious and generous with his time and reflections, and I’m so excited to share this conversation with you.

Due to illness and other complications I haven’t been able to publish this conversation till now. Now, as I share this conversation Gaza is in a complete blackout and bombing has intensified, more than 7000 Palestinians have been killed and dissent is being suppressed everywhere. Despite the cancellation of Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the cancelling of literary events at the 92Y, the suppression of MPP Sarah Jama in the Ontario Legislature, the countless people and artists who have lost jobs/work from speaking out about human rights violations in Palestine - I see conversations about Palestine everywhere now, and we are in a moment of learning and exploration unlike anything I’ve seen before. Now more than ever is a time to read and amplify Palestinian voices and artists and to speak in every way possible for justice and for peace.

3 actions that you can do:

1. Write/email/call your local representative (in Canada your MP). You can write to the Prime Minister directly here. Alternatively you could sign a ceasefire letter. (Islamic Relief for example, has a letter that calls on Canadian leaders to stop the bombing.) Even if you’ve sent letters already using their link once, the letter continues to be updated and so please keep using this tool.

2. Amplify calls for a ceasefire within your personal network.

3. Read to resource yourself: I deeply appreciated this article by Hala Alyan in the New York Times this week, as well as the following Substack read.

   The Point of Politics Is to Stop This

And now, on to this fantastic interview. (note, this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity)

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Shagufta: I read that you spent a year during the pandemic writing all nine stories. And so my first question is: did you know this was going to be a collection when you first started writing? 

Saeed Teebi: 100% never. Never. I never intended to do a collection. It became a collection completely accidentally. I had a writing group that was born out of a class that I took at U of T.  I used to write in my early twenties. And then I kind of stopped because I thought, “I'm going to be a lawyer now. Be serious. Quit wasting time on this writing stuff.” And so I didn't write for 15 years. And then during the pandemic I had an extra few hours and I took a class. Not so much to learn craft, more just to get myself in the habit of doing something. I'm one of those, the pejorative is, lazy people - unless I have a reason to do something, I won't do it. And I was fine not writing for 15 years, so what's going to change that without some deadlines? 

Anyway, I took a class and I was super lucky that I had an exceptional cohort of writers. And we stayed in touch after the class. And by stayed in touch, I mean that in the most intensive way possible. We were meeting every two weeks to discuss further stories. So I came out with two stories from that class, and then basically every month I would submit another story to my group. It would be a brand new story.

Shagufta: Every month! Wow that’s fast.

Saeed: Because I had a routine established from the class it became easy. Already two, three, four hours of my day were devoted to writing. And I knew if I just kept doing that, then I’ll have more stories. And I submitted the first story “Her First Palestinian” to the CBC directly after the class. And then by the time I had about five stories or four stories maybe, the shortlist happened.  

The reason I mention the CBC is that it’s out of that that I had an editor approach me and say, “Hey, do you have a collection?”

And so I said, “I have a few other stories that I'm writing to impress my friends.” But I said yes.  Because when an editor approaches you, you say yes. Your approach is to say sure. But I really didn't have the last 3-4 stories.

Shagufta: I’m curious about the competition. Was it something that was always on your radar?  Or did you just think, why not? I'm curious about that confidence. 

Saeed:  Just to be clear, it’s not a question of confidence. It's a question of naivety, okay? It's a question of being foolish. And having $25 extra in your pocket and saying, “Sure, I'll submit to this competition.”

I also submitted it to The New Yorker. It's not about confidence for me. It's about, “Why not? Why wouldn't I try it?” And as to the question of whether it's on my radar, I consider myself very much an outsider to the writing community. So the CBC competition was one of the few things that I actually knew about. It's not that I followed a thousand writers. I followed none. I don’t read a lot of literary magazines. I read The New Yorker and my favourite authors.

Shagufta:  Right. Okay.

Saeed: I read books a lot, but the CBC Short Story Prize was the one that I knew about, so I submitted to it.

Shagufta: Right. One of the things that really struck me about this collection was how much there's like a struggle of power and agency, and a powerlessness in the characters. That they sort of expect less or they are struggling with confidence a little bit and struggling to exert themselves. Tell me about that theme.

Saeed: Yeah. I mean, for sure. It's a product of people in diaspora who are Muslim, who are relatively new here, who find themselves essentially powerless and essentially in a system that is designed with other people, not them in mind. For me, it's always a question of how much am I allowed to exert myself? How much am I allowed to be myself versus change into somebody else that only has a passing resemblance to the person I actually am? 

Shagufta: Right.

Saeed: Personally, I spent years cloaking. I spent years being somebody else - and we all do that to some extent.  Like people say, “Oh, yeah, there's the work me and then there's home me.”  Sure, but they're actually not that far apart. You just say slightly fewer swear words at work. That's basically how it is for most people. For me, it wasn't like that at all. Most people would not have known, for example, that I was Palestinian. A lot of people would not know that I was Muslim. I’d get asked you know, to go to a bar and I'd have to find a way to hide the fact that I wasn't drinking, saying things like,  “Oh, I'm not feeling well today”, or I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, you know, doing things like that. And some of it is failure to assert yourself. But some of it is simply feeling that you're not able to, or you're not permitted to be who you are. And so that's certainly going to be a theme in the collection.

Shagufta: So there's the process of being with a very trusted writing group writing this collection and getting feedback, and then there is the book living out in the world. Anyone I know who has read this book has loved it, but any time there are Palestinian stories out in the world there are mixed reactions. How has it felt artistically to have your stories go from something that was very close to you, to now it's very clear that all these identities are part of your story?

Saeed:  Yeah. So I actually would say that the main leap is not so much the stories going out into the world, but actually the stories going to my writing group which was almost uniformly white. And I was always writing for them - essentially knowing that they are the people who are going to be reading my stories because I didn’t think far ahead to publication or anything like that.  But luckily, I mean, they are not an entirely unrepresentative sample of what general publishing looks like. Mainly women, mainly slightly older, couple of guys. 

So for me it was really about what can I say that they will understand, but also struggling against that was: What can I say that I will like? What can I say that I will be proud of? And a lot of the time these two things were in opposition.

The story that I probably consider the first one is “Her First Palestinian”, in the sense that I finished it first, I was happiest with it first. And for that story, I wrote about 40 pages trying to figure out how to write a story for this audience, for this kind of audience. For example, at one point I noticed that I had written so much justifying why this Palestinian man might be loved by a white woman. 

Shagufta: Right.

Saeed: You know what I mean? And at one point, I said, “I'm writing for these people.” Like I understand all that. I understand why he might be liked, I shouldn't have to justify it. It's a normal thing. And not just that. There's obviously a lot of socio-political type issues that you have to sort for yourself before you are able to figure out what your voice is. So once I decided that if I'm going to air on any side, it's going on the side of proving myself and having a story that is representative of the voices that I want to have, versus the voice that I think might be palatable to my audience, then it became much easier to write all the other stories. And of those 40 pages, none survived. There was nothing. I finally just said, “Just assume that everybody understands that the Palestinian issue is correct.  Just assume that. And then go from there.” 

Shagufta: Tell me about the humour in this collection. I found the whole book really funny, particularly “Her First Palestinian”. Was that tricky to get right? 

Saeed: A lot of people say it's a really funny book. And only in certain stories was I trying to be funny. And in other stories, I was just representing what I thought these characters would be like. So, for example, in “Her First Palestinian”, Nadia comes off as essentially as a white saviour type of person. And a lot of what she says to a racialized person is gauche. But I was writing her empathetically to be honest. I like Nadia. I wanted her to succeed. I wanted her to find what it is she's looking for. It's just sometimes she bumbles along.

Shagufta:  And you've done it so masterfully. There's so much in each sentence.

Saeed: And actually that was one of the things about writing short stories - and I was discovering it at the same time as I was writing it - you just have to be okay with telling people stuff. That's just a fact. It’s always the tip of the iceberg. The rest you just leave it. And especially for us racialized people, there is a constant bug in the back of our mind that says, “What if they don't understand? What if this thing that is second nature to me is not understandable to people?” And you just have to stop thinking that way and write freely. Write for ourselves. And then if you need to fine tune later on to make the less dense among the others understand, then sure. But write for yourself first.

Shagufta: And the endings of these stories are quite open ended.  Was that hard as a writer? Did you want to take your reader to a particular place? 

Saeed: [laughs]  Not for me. I love withholding. I love not telling everything. I understand that. And certainly in the class that I teach now, I'm constantly telling students: “Chop your beginnings and chop your endings and that’s the story that you really should be telling.” And that's because certainly in a short story, we all want to tie things in a knot. But the short story is so short. That you actually don’t deserve to tie it into a knot.  You have to earn the privilege of tying it. So for example, in “Her First Palestinian”, the thought in his head is: let her go. A lot of people interpret that as they are breaking up.  

But they didn't break up. He had a thought.  Let her go. You don't know what the next thought is. The next thought could have been: “No, but I like her. Let's just stay together and let her go on her trip and maybe I’ll go visit her on the trip.”

So what I earned in that story is that thought, because I gave you enough information to reach that thought. But I didn’t give you enough information to explain for example, what else in their relationship was working and what he might want to preserve, what they both might want to preserve. I give my readers what I think I earned in the story, but I don't give them more than that. Same with the story “The Body” for example. It’s open ended enough. It tells you a little bit - maybe they're patching up their relationship. It doesn't tell you: Has he become a good lawyer? It doesn’t tell you what he looks like 20 years from now after this initial seeming breach of ethics that he committed. I didn’t tell you that. I didn't earn that. 

Shagufta: Is there a particular journey you were trying to take readers through in the ordering of the stories?

Saeed: So the ordering of the stories is very intentional. But I don't think I thought of it as a journey. I thought of it more as: “How can I control the tempo of the stories? How can I control the feelings that you’re experiencing?” I knew only two things. I knew that the last story would be last because I didn't think it was recoverable for anybody to read that and then go to another story. 

I didn’t think that was possible. And I probably knew that the first story would be first. Other than that -  I actually came up with an Excel sheet. It had a bunch of columns: things like themes, length of the story, opening words versus last words because I wanted to make sure that the last words of one story flow into the first words of the next story. It was more about, I wanted you to experience a range of things without being: “Oh, here's the depressing half and here's the upbeat half.” Like, that didn't make sense to me. 

Shagufta: And so one of the things I read was that you read the short story collection Natasha and Other Stories” by David Bezmozgis a lot. What other kind of literary influences shaped your sensibilities as a writer? 

Saeed: So I would say I'm heavily indebted to someone like Nabokov for example. I read him a lot and a lot of the way I think about writing is derived from his writing. As far as short story writers are concerned, I love Jhumpa Lahiri, I love the American writer Kirsten Valdez Quaid. People like that I gravitate towards more. J.M. Coetzee was a big influence for me. I'd say those are the people.  

I consider myself more of a stylist. It’s ironic that I'm now sort of the “Palestinian guy” in Canadian writing, because I more think of myself as somebody who is interested in the way things are structured and the way things are crafted and playing with the language. I don't do a lot of that in this book because I wanted my first book to be an introduction to the kinds of characters I have. But that's how I think of myself. I think of myself more like somebody who pays attention to the style, more so than anything else.

Shagufta: Are there things on your nightstand or your bookshelf right now that have really wowed you in terms of style?

Saeed: Yeah. I'm reading this book called Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. I had never read her before. She won the Nobel Prize in 2018. So that's how late I am on trends in literature. And it’s about an astrologer who is trying to solve the series of murders in her neighborhood. It's just a fantastic book. I’m halfway through it right now. It’s not even supposed to be her major work, but I can just tell that I'm in the hands of a really fantastic writer.

Shagufta  And so when you read, are you also taking notes in the margins about how something is crafted? 

Saeed: I don't write in my margins. But I read extremely slowly. I'm an ESL person, so I learned English as a 13 or 14 year old. And I read like that. I’ll read a paragraph and then I'll reread it and I'll reread the sentence. And so it takes me forever to get through books. So by the end of it, I have usually absorbed as much I want to absorb out of a book because I have reread it while reading it the first time. 

Shagufta: Are there like Arab artists or writers who influence how you write in English?

Saeed:  Novels are not the dominant art form in Arabic literature. The dominant art form is really poetry. There are Palestinian poets but there are lots of poets from centuries ago that I read. And in the book that I'm writing right now it heavily -

Shagufta: Are you saying you're working on something right now?

Saeed: Yes, I'm working on a novel. And it heavily includes references to al-Mutanabbi who is an old Iraqi poet from around the year 1600.

Shagufta: Oh, he has a poem about pearls doesn’t he? [At this point I pull out this poem]

Saeed: Oh, yeah, that's right. It's a good one. 

Shagufta:  So the novel is about him?

Saeed: No, it's not about him. I just include a lot of references. In one of those things that only writers do, I include in the book a character who loves him because I love him. 

Shagufta: Amazing. Ok, last question. Where would you say hope lives in this collection? There is a lot that these characters are struggling with.

Saeed: I think there's two things.  First, in none of the stories, do the odds that were stacked against my character actually defeat them. There's an argument that this happened in the last story. There's an argument that it didn’t. But in none of them was there a clear defeat. They persisted.  And people like them will persist. And generally Palestinians will persist. So if there's some hope as far as my writing is concerned, it’s that they tried, they were defeated here and there, but they kept going.

 The other aspect that gives me a lot of hope and that was entirely unexpected for me is the reception of the work. It's been way more well received, way less ignored than I expected it to be. It would have been very easy for this kind of book to simply come out, receive one or two notices, and then fade into oblivion. Many books do.  Even great books. This hasn't been one of them. It's now over a year since the time it was published, and I'm going around talking about it. So, yes, that part is really hopeful.