Reading While Black

Before commencing with the interview, I asked Nadina about her unique heritage. According to Nadina, “I’m perfectly happy being referred to as Arab, and this is what you should probably use for the purposes of the interview (it’s similar to ‘Latina’ or ‘hispanic’ and I’m certainly proud of my Arab heritage), but I am most precisely, Palestinian-Canadian, not Lebanese, and the reason for that is the abject treament of the Lebanese government of the Palestinian refugees who flooded Lebanon after the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. We never recieved citizenship, even now that there are fourth generation Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, with nothing more than refugee status! It’s not an easy situation to explain, but you can stick with ‘Palestinian’, ‘Lebanese with Palestinian roots’ or ‘Arab’.“

1. How long have you been published?

Fashionably Late is my first novel, so I’ve only been published since June of this year.

2. How do you feel your heritage has shaped your writing and outlook on the genre in which you write (themes, characters, settings, etc)?

My heritage has had a huge impact on my writing and has lent it the kind of authenticity sought after by agents and publishers. I don’t think that multicultural writing in the Western world is anything new, it’s just nice to see how mainstream it has become in the past few years. This opens doors for authors such as myself and adds some much-needed perspective in commercial fiction. Aline Hallaby, the main character in Fashionably Late is a thoroughly assimilated Lebanese-Canadian chick, but she still has to walk that line between living her own life, a very western notion, and duty to her parents, who’ve sacrificed so much to get her to where she is. I also really enjoyed including other characters who share Aline’s ethnic background but who have very different ways of dealing with their ethnicity: Yasmin is only Lebanese in name and no longer identifies with her roots at all, while Sophie comes from a very progressive Lebanese Christian family (Ali is Muslim). The Arab world is so rich and layered that it’s hard, as an author, not to find material and inspiration in it.

3. While you are obviously proud of your heritage, do you feel an “ethnic” moniker can hinder your ability to reach a wider range of readers?

This is a very debated topic – almost as debated as the whole ‘chick lit’ thing (as in, does a pastel cover help or hinder a woman’s writing career, and why is she being marketed as a female novelist in the first place, not just a novelist?)

My personal answer is that the marketing department at my publishing house knows best! I do think that anything you can do to differentiate yourself from the mass of books out there is good, and if you look at my novel, it has not been overly marketed as an ‘Arab’ book for ‘Arab’ readers anymore than Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner is for South Asian readers. People enjoy reading new perspectives (just as I adore Indian and Latina chick lit, and as many books about far-off places I can get my hands on) will enjoy Fashionably Late, and will identify with it just as I identified with Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back even though I’m not a divorced black woman having an affair with a man half my age. I think that a person closed to different, fresh perspectives might not enjoy Fashionably Late, so maybe it’s just as well that I’m identified as an ‘ethnic’ writer.

4. What is your reaction when a non-Arab writes a successful novel featuring characters of your ethnicity/heritage?

I haven’t seen any yet! I have an advantage in this field in that Arab-American characters in commercial fiction are still extremely rare. Probably because of the political climate, and perhaps because it might seem coldly flippant to treat the very serious topic of being Arab-American today in the light tone of commercial fiction. I do not think there are many non-Arabs out there that would choose to write about Arab characters unless they were somehow immersed in the culture – either through living in the Middle East for a while, or through a family or work connection. If it’s well done, nuanced, multi-layered and above all, honest, I have no problem with it. Quite the opposite, I would love to see more positive books about Arab-Americans out there.

5. Have you, at any point in your publishing career, felt marginalized by your heritage?

Absolutely not, but my publishing career is still very young, so maybe you should ask me again in a few years!

6. How have you or your books been marketed? Has the content of your books enabled you to market them towards a mainstream audience?

Because Arab-Americans, like Americans with Greek or Asian heritages for example, are not a recognized marketing sub-group unto their own (unlike say Hispanics or African-Americans), it wouldn’t make business sense to market Fashionably Late only to Arab-Americans and Canadians. Also, Fashionably Late was written with a broader audience in mind (much like, I suspect Terry McMillan and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez or Mary Castillo’s books) so not marketing the novel to a broader audience would have been a bad idea. That being said, I did take extra steps to bring Fashionable Late to the attention of the Arab-American and Canadian communities, just to raise awareness that a novel about our immigrant experience with North America now exists in national, commercial fiction, where in the past, only literary novels (like Diana Abu Jaber’s for example) dealt with that topic.

7. Do you feel that you are required, whether due to external or internal opinions, to write characters sharing your ethnicity?

To be honest, yes. That’s not to say I can’t or won’t write about different ethnicities – in fact, I consider myself a ‘citizen of the world’ and having lived in such culturally mixed places like Saudi Arabia, Montreal, and the Cayman Islands where you rub shoulders with South Africans, Greeks, Italians, Jamaicans, English, Kiwis, Cubans, Hondurans, etc on a regular basis, I look forward to including a rainbow of cultures in my writing. But, I do feel a responsibility to write primarily about the Arab experience for now because a) we’re so misunderstood in North America , where negative portrayals of us fueled by ignorance and misplaced fear run rampant, and b) I love writing about the Arab culture. It’s really interesting to me, and with all our issues, the conflicts in my novels just write themselves! As long as I can still write a fresh story with Arab-American/Canadian characters in it, I’ll do it!

Visit Nadine at NadinaDajani.com!