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A CELEBRATED author is returning to Bahrain for a reading and signing of her first novel at a new bookstore café just a short walk away from the recycling bins she had dumped her work in after being shunned by publishing houses.
The book entitled Out Of It – a traumatic tale about young Palestinians – has been reviewed by major broadsheet newspapers and magazines in the UK from the Times to the Guardian and the Independent.
Selma Dabbagh, 42, will be appearing at the wordsbookstore.cafe at Palm Square, Budaiya Highway on Friday evening.
The former Batelco lawyer now lives in London after a nine-year spell in Bahrain where her two children were born and regularly returns to the kingdom to catch up with friends.
“I wrote my novel Out of It, when I was living in Bahrain. It took me around five years to complete,” she said. “It has been particularly gratifying to me that the novel has been so well received as it was not picked up straight away for publication.
“I had a top London agent who described the novel as ‘tremendous’ – how that word reverberated around my head for weeks – when she read the draft in 2007 and there was a lot of initial interest from various publishers.
“But, when the novel was submitted at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008, one by one, every single publisher we submitted it to, turned it down, a total of 16 in all.”
The disappointment and stress made her unwell and she said she was covered in hives – raised, itchy red welts on the surface of the skin – for three months and looked like something out of Spitting Image, a British satirical puppet TV show.
“I drove down the Budaiya highway in 2009 when the last, smallest press had said no, with two black bin liners full of drafts of the novel in the boot of my car.
“I stuffed the wodge of bound paper into the recycling bins by Alosra supermarket and there was such a sense of despair as I saw all these various drafts, all marked up with editing notes, with highlighting, post-it notes and scribbles disappear into the mouth of the bins, the occasional sheet flying off into the desert.
“There was a feeling of ‘so that’s it then’. It was horrible.”
But that was NOT the end … thanks to an encounter with Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator Ahdaf Soueif, who initiated the first Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest).
“The novel only got published because I had given Ahdaf Soueif a copy when she came to Bahrain in 2008, to speak at the Shaikh Ibrahim Centre in Muharraq,” explained Selma.
“I didn’t think that she would have the time to read it, but she came back to me later praising it.”
Selma continued: “We then fell out of contact until I moved back to London when we reconnected over a PalFest event and she asked about my novel.
“I said that it was a sad story, that the novel had been rejected, but that I was getting on with the second one, to which she replied that could I send her an electronic copy of my novel. She sent it on to several publishing houses.”
Many months later, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Press (BQFP) came back with an offer to publish it and Bloomsbury UK and US followed.
The story is riveting. As bombs drop on Gaza, unemployed 27-year-old Rashid restlessly awaits word of a scholarship that will take him to London, his wheelchair-bound older brother writes a history of their country, and his twin sister becomes seriously involved in politics.
The critics have gone to town over the work. The Guardian said it was ‘driven, fast-paced, edgy … a narrative of Gaza, it brings a very welcome new voice and new consciousness to the Palestinian story’.
A commentator on BBC Radio’s Open Book described the novel as ‘incendiary’ and a Daily Mirror reviewer added: ‘Dabbagh has crafted a wonderfully perceptive and gripping novel’.
The British Palestinian writer – her mother is English and father Palestinian – explained how it all started: “I wrote short stories and submitted them to international short story competitions in 2003 and had quite a bit of success.
“I started writing the novel, which was based on a short story, in 2005. Inspiration for the novel came from an image I had of a young man leaping up on a roof in defiance as a fighter jet crossed over the sky above him.
“I knew the man had had enough and that he was stoned. It could have been Iraq or Palestine, I wasn’t sure. I developed the idea of him into a short story when I realised that this was the novel I wanted to write – a novel based mainly in Gaza about Palestinian kids in their 20s who were essentially ‘PLO brats,’ the children of returnee PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) exiles.
“I wanted to show the fragmentation of the Palestinian body politic as shown through one family, particularly the kids, who were just trying to get on, to do the right thing, to fall in love and fulfil their parent’s expectations of them.”
The reaction to the book has stunned her. “It has been fantastic,” she said. “It really is very unusual for a debut novel to be reviewed at all, particularly if the novel was written by a woman (only 20 per cent of all books reviewed are by women, apparently). But I have had most of the major broadsheets in the UK as well as less prestigious papers and magazines review it. I have been very fortunate.
“Some reviews have been critical, I have had pro-Israelis getting agitated at my comparisons made by one of the characters of the early Zionist settlers to the Nazis and some pro-Palestinians seem uncomfortable with my depiction of divisions within Palestinian society. But to create debate and discussion on these issues is desirable.
“The Palestinian struggle has been present throughout my life. As a result, I have always been drawn to novels, stories and accounts where a major social or revolutionary movement is going on.
“The embracing of the novel by writers and academics that I have huge respect for like Ahdaf Soueif and Karma Nabulsi (an Oxford academic and a former PLO representative) has also been extraordinarily important.”
Her literary and life journeys have both proved to be eventful. She explained: “I lived in Bahrain from November 2000 until July 2009. I moved there from London with my former husband, Abdullah Mutawi.
“We were both lawyers. He transferred to Bahrain with Norton Rose Solicitors and then moved to Trowers and Hamlins as a partner.
“He currently heads up their UAE offices and lives in Dubai. I have been based back in North London since 2009 with our two kids and was coming out to Bahrain from London for all the school holidays until their dad moved to Dubai last September.
“I still have a lot of friends based in Bahrain and have partly come back to visit them. Many of them are acknowledged at the back of my book.
“I had done human rights work prior to qualifying as a lawyer, in the West Bank, Cairo and London and was working in a legal aid firm in the field of civil actions against the police in South London before we moved to Bahrain.
“In Bahrain I had to change my specialisation and ended up working as a regulatory telecommunications lawyer with Batelco.
“We lived in a flat-roofed one-story villa in Yateem Gardens in Adliya for the whole time that we were in Bahrain. I lived longer in that house than I have ever lived in any one place – I have moved around 30 times in my life, having lived in eight countries.
“Yateem Gardens is one of the oldest (some say the oldest) compounds in Bahrain. The 50 or so houses are all slightly different from each other. It used to be a palm grove and the houses are situated between the trees.
“My two children were both born in Bahrain. They both went to Madeline’s Pre-School in Adliya, my son went on to Ibn Khuldoon and then St Christopher’s. He left at the end of Year 2.”
She hopes to meet up with old friends and book lovers on Friday at the wordsbookstore.cafe where she’ll be signing copies of Out Of It, priced at BD9.900. “I will give a short reading and discussion about the book starting at 7pm,” she said. “I am only in Bahrain for two days during this visit from April 12, but hope to visit again soon.”
She will be going to Gaza with the Palestinian Festival of Literature (PalFest) next month (May 3-10) and will be writing a blog about the experience.
