Charleston woman’s debut novel mirrors Muslim experience in America
Bill Lynch
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Author Rajia Hassib has kind eyes and smiles easily.
Seated behind her desk, in an office full of books, she’s glad to talk about her debut novel, “In the Language of Miracles.”
The book is about an Arab-American family dealing with guilt and grief after their eldest son is arrested for the rape of a neighborhood girl.
It’s difficult subject matter, and the 40-year-old Charleston resident said the story is meant to parallel in a microcosm the attacks by radical Islamic terrorists on 9/11, and, more specifically, how everything changed for Muslims in America after that.
“I wanted to talk about what it’s like to be a Muslim in post-9/11 America,” Hassib said.
She said to be Muslim in America there’s a strange feeling of being both a part of the culture, but also somewhat apart from it, of wanting to apologize for what other Muslims have done, but also feeling that it’s not really your fault.
“There’s always this debate,” she said. “Muslims aren’t doing enough, not speaking out enough against terrorism. They’re not distancing themselves, but then whatever we do is too much.”
Hassib mentioned the mosque and community center that had been slated to be built near Ground Zero in New York.
Muslims, like her, saw it as reaching out, as unifying.
“But people hated it,” she said. “If we do nothing, we’re blamed. If we do this, it’s too much.”
Hassib was born in Egypt, a country whose civilized history stretches back past centuries into millennia and mythology. She was raised in Alexandria, a bustling city of four million, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.
It is an amazing part of the world.
“I loved the atmosphere of history,” she said. “You do sense the thousands of years of history when you drive past monuments that are 5,000 years old.”
She misses it and her childhood was a happy one.
“I grew up upper-middle class,” she said.
Hassib went to good schools, lived abroad as a child and learned Arabic, French, German and English, which she speaks with the gentlest of accents.
She studied architecture at the University of Alexandria, but wanted to be a writer from almost the time she first began to read.
“I actually announced to my parents at some point after first grade that I was going to be a writer,” she said.
In her teens, she even had a couple of short stories published in Arabic, but studying writing was difficult. The University of Alexandria offered a Literature program, but Hassib said it didn’t seem like a logical choice at the time.
“And they weren’t offering creative writing,” Hassib added.
She met her husband while in school, through a friend of her mother’s.
“She called my mother and said she knew this man and thought we needed to go on a date,” the author said.
They met at the Alexandria Sporting Club — a blind date.
“He told me from the very beginning that he wanted to go to the U.S. to study medicine,” she said.
Over coffees, lunches and dinners, they fell in love fast and were engaged in a couple of months. They married two years later, and then moved to the U.S.
“We weren’t sure if we were going to stay,” she said.
For the first eight years, they bounced around the country for her husband’s various training, residencies and fellowships. Hassib worked for architects and engineers along the way, usually from home.
They lived in New York for a couple of years, then New Jersey and then California before coming to Logan in 2006.
It might have been a culture shock, but so had every other place they’d been.
“The people were really nice in Logan,” she said.
The family moved to Charleston in 2011, but while in Logan, Hassib enrolled at Marshall University, where she commuted to classes three times a week.
Dr. Jane Hill, the head of the English department at the university, was one of her biggest supporters.
After Hassib turned in the first draft for her first short story in a class, Dr. Hill took her into her office and told her, “You’re a writer.”
“I almost cried,” Hassib said. “That’s the thing you want to hear; that it’s real.”
Hill encouraged her to keep writing, to send work out for consideration in publications, and to continue with the university’s Masters of Arts program after she graduated. In that program she met West Virginia writer Marie Manilla, author of “The Patron Saint of Ugly.”
“She’s a great writer and a supremely supportive person,” Hassib said.
“In the Language of Miracles” became her thesis for the program and, under the guidance of Manilla, the two worked to keep the story she wanted to tell on track.
“I wrote constantly and we met every week for a year,” Hassib said.
Manilla read pages sent to her, wrote notes for Hassib, gave advice and the two picked apart every sentence.
Hassib showed some of her work to Hill who spoke about it to her friend, award-winning author, Ann Beattie.
Hassib said Beattie told Hill she wanted to take a look at the book once she had a completed manuscript.
“That was huge,” Hassib said.
Two and a half years later, she submitted her thesis and earned her degree. Hill asked Hassib if she was ready for her to take the manuscript to Beattie.
Hassib chuckled. “I told her ‘almost’ and then I revised it one more time.”
Hill took the book to Beattie who liked it enough to take it to her agent at Janklow & Nesbit, a literary agency that also represents some of the most respected names in American writing, including Joan Didion, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tom Wolf and Jeffrey Eugenides.
“My book was the first book Dr. Hill had ever taken to Ann and it was the first manuscript by someone else Ann had ever given to her agent,” Hassib said.
“In the Language of Miracles” was released in late summer by Viking Press. It was reviewed by and recommended by The New York Times Sunday Book review, as well as Kirkus Reviews which called it a “sensitive, finely wrought debut … sharply observant of immigrants’ intricate relationships to their adopted homelands, this exciting novel announces the arrival of a psychologically and socially astute new writer.”
“Not everybody loved the book,” Hassib acknowledged with a shrug.
A few people have contacted her through her website, she said.
So far, they’ve been mostly polite.
Hassib could have written in Arabic, but explained that written Arabic is different than the Arabic spoken in Egypt or anywhere else. While it sort of unifies all Arabic readers, it lacked the flexibility she needed for the book.
Besides, she lives in America, her story deals with themes related to people living here and what she wants to accomplish as a writer is to share some of the perspectives of people like her: Muslim-Americans and Arab-born immigrants.
“There’s not enough of us inside the country writing about who we are,” she said.
Hassib doesn’t think native-born Americans necessarily understand why Arab immigrants who come from a very different culture would even want to come here.
The assumption, she said, is it’s about money. America is the land of opportunity. People come to get rich.
That’s not it at all, Hassib said.
“They come here for the dignity, I think.”
Human beings have more value as human beings in the U.S., she said. They have reasonable expectations of being protected by the police, of being treated fairly by the law and of receiving medical care if they’re sick or injured — even if they’re unable to afford to pay for treatment.
While you can point to inequalities and very clear failings in the system, Hassib said those are discrepancies to the ideal. The ideal is that people are worth something and there is a general sense of equality.
In places like Egypt, it’s not the same.
“The system isn’t set up to support everyone equally,” she said.
So, it doesn’t.
Hassib said she and her husband don’t really think about returning to Egypt.
Over the years, Egypt has become less stable economically and politically. Their families have told them it’s better if they stay where they are.
“And we had the children,” she said. “The opportunities for them here are so much better.”
It isn’t entirely safe here, though.
While she speaks openly about her family, she doesn’t want their names given or too many details about them released.
“I’m a Muslim writing about Muslims,” she said. “People don’t like Muslims right now.”
Hassib laughed nervously and said, “It’s paranoid, I know.”
She just wants her family to be safe, and maybe things will be better by her next book, which she’s diligently working on.
Hassib said she’s basically completed her first draft, which clocks in at about 80,000 words.
“Oh, but it’s a mess,” she said, laughing. “Another four or five revisions and I may have a novel.”
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