An Interview with Leila Al-Mutawa: “I Wish to Be Two Waters
Al-Markaz: How do you define what you write?
Leila: I write out of scenes lodged in memory. From there the scene grows within my imagination, creating its own characters, its own setting, its own events. I write guided by the pleasure of discovery—by the search, by the need to know what will unfold. I wander across this island, through books and maps, through the recollections of the elderly. Knowledge arrives later. A text, like a human being, only reveals itself once it has begun its journey, once it has taken its time to come into being—only then can wonder possess me. A work that can hold me captive for years until I complete it must be one capable of growth. I see it as a living creature.
Al-Markaz: What event has had the greatest influence on your writing?
Leila: I have always been haunted by the sight of the sea imprisoned in a sandy cube—when a stretch of water is encircled, squared off, prepared for burial. The sea, unable to recede and flee, unable to surge forward and retaliate, remains still and shackled. Its arms bound, its waters begin to stagnate, to turn green, to reek, to rot—until the trucks arrive with sand to smother it.
That scene, and others bound to our relationship with water, never leave me. I remember as a child the mountains of sand piled near the shore, blotting out the blue until the sea itself became sand. It was terrifying—like watching a living being in its final days, a mound of earth already waiting to bury it. We bid it farewell as one does the dead.
I felt deceived when I realised what I had taken for land was in fact buried sea. My first home stood upon a drowned ocean. And the gulls, shrieking on the pavements each morning, scolded me, reminding me this was their sea, that I had stolen it, killed it. Nature lies in wait for us, even when we mistake its silence for surrender. This island is destined to sink. The prophecy that Bahrain will return to the waters compels me to keep asking questions. The death of the sea, and our betrayal of it, are the forces that shape me most.
And then, there are the voices of the elders of the island—those who knew the land by the boundaries of the sea. For we are people of water, this is how we knew our limits, how we drew our maps. “The sea was here, then it was buried.” Always the story, the borders, the memory, begin with that sentence.
Al-Markaz: What are you reading now?
Leila: The five volumes of Abdel-Fattah Kilito, and the works of the great novelist Amin Saleh.
Al-Markaz: Which fictional character would you most like to be?
Leila: Tiamat, the Sumerian goddess from whose salty eye the Euphrates sprang. From Tiamat’s brine—the sea, the ocean—emerged a river whose very name means sweetness.
I wish to be two waters, as I am now: Bahraini, born of salt and fresh alike.
Al-Markaz: What is your favourite “intoxication”?
Leila: To walk among palm groves until I reach the sea. To contemplate everything around me, and feel that I have crossed into a parallel world. While those around me dash towards summits, captive to ambitions that drive them, I walk slowly, gathering questions that carry me into another realm of my own making—a world without answers, yet one that entrances me.
In another tale, I am the tortoise, while all around me the hares leap and lose their way.
My intoxication is slowness, contemplation. I only reach it when I walk
lailaalmotawa@gmail.com
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