Hanan Ashrawi Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 2 of 5

Being a Writer

You write about your childhood, "I took memories of family picnics, of games and jokes, and a special reverence for words ...".

Absolutely. In a sense, both my parents had an affinity for language. My father wrote, as I said. My mother was also a very avid reader, and she discussed things. But I could see the magic, even when I was three or even younger, of the mystery of books, of my sisters being able to open books and sort of solve the mystery of words, of language. And I was fascinated that people could do that, not just the spoken but the written language opens worlds for you. And in a sense that always stayed with me. That's why I started at a very early age and I never stopped.

Your father took you seriously as a writer from an early age, and took you aside and said, "Keep a notebook with you all the time," and offered warm suggestions about how you might improve your work.

Yes. Actually what he did was, I don't know whether this was common, but he always said, "Whatever you see, whatever strikes you, whatever thought, idea, whatever you have read, write it down at the moment, record it." And then I used to discuss what I had written with him. He also encouraged me to read. So in a sense, it wasn't just a passive relationship with language, it was very active. I had to capture it and I had to use my own perceptions, my own words, in order to convey it. And he took time out of his very, very busy schedule as a doctor (who, by the way, responded to every call, day or night), to talk to his youngest daughter even before I was ten on issues of style, of language and of substance, and of humanity.

As any reader of your book This Side of Peace will discover, you became a magnificent writer, and not in a scholarly sense, because often academic work can be turgid and dry and so on. But your prose is absolutely beautiful. When do you think you found your voice as a writer?

I think I've never lost it. I started from the beginning, even when I was at school. It's not whether a writer becomes one when he or she is published and is read, or whether a writer is somebody who has a special relationship with language and the use of language. I think I've had that even when I was a child. I started writing a short story once about a panhandler or a beggar, and my father felt it was extremely sensitive. He said, "You see things, you see beyond the surface, and you challenge the prevailing wisdom." I think this has always been with me, and I always took it for granted; but unfortunately, reality always intrudes. I mean, you cannot have the luxury of doing what you want to do all the time. Given my choice I would much rather be an academic and a writer.

Does writing come easily to you?

Oh yes.

It just flows?

Yes, yes. I wrote this book in four or five months, writing every night after midnight, two or three hours in between doing lots of other things. But it was not cathartic, it was a source of achievement and I felt that I had to be honest to that period, I had to record it, I had to state it. Otherwise it would be distorted or usurped.

A main part of the book is about the peace process that you got involved in. But before we talk about that, I want to focus on this extent to which your Palestinian identity has shaped your writing, or at least the extent to which you care very much about finding a voice for the Palestinian people through your words. Tell us a little about that.

I think that since the creation of the state of Israel, or even before, Palestinians were conveniently dismissed from the consciousness of the world even though we were a nation that had a tremendous culture and heritage and literary output and creative output and music, and so on. All of a sudden we found our life totally disrupted. And so we were always absent, we were always silenced, we were always invisible, so to speak, except as labels, as stereotypes. I felt that I had to give an authentic voice to a Palestinian reality that was constantly being distorted, subjected to other people's agendas and language. From the beginning I felt we had to use our own language, we had to present ourselves by ourselves. We had to stop what I described as the confiscation of our voice and our will. We had to be there. We had to get an audience as a means of getting credibility and establishing our presence, not in a defensive or apologetic way but in a very human way. To challenge people on their own terms and turf, so to speak.

So that words and language become very important to telling the story, which is a vehicle for affirmation of a national identity.

It is certainly. We have an affinity for language as Arabs anyway, using Arabic. But you can never really separate the language from the identity or the mindset or the world view, of course. How you use language is shaped by your perceptions, and the language that you use will shape also other perceptions. I felt that a national identity finds the best expression in an honest use of a personal narrative, because we were abstracted, depersonalized, we were either numbers or victims, or we were labeled in a very racist, stereotypical way. The best way to challenge ignorance by telling the truth, and through our humanity, using our own words.

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