Leila Al-Mutawa: I narrate the sea as I carry it in my memory 

Al-Ittihad

Mohamed Najim

The Bahraini writer Leila Al-Mutawa has recently published her new novel The Forgotten Between Two Waters, which critics have hailed as a profound work by a novelist with a distinctive, promising voice. In this interview, Al-Mutawa reveals the presence of the sea in her novel and the circumstances and events that drove her to write it. She had previously published the novel My Heart Is Not for Sale, and took part in the International Festival of the Novel organised by Villa Gillet in cooperation with the French Cultural Institute. She also joined the Booker Workshop—the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)—to select promising writers and discuss their upcoming works, and was chosen to contribute to the book How Many Lungs for the Coast when Sharjah was named World Book Capital in 2019.

Leila Al-Mutawa tells Al-Ittihad: I regard the book as one of the experiments through which I try to understand the world around me. My work is about water—in both its forms, fresh and salty—which has shaped my identity and that of my ancestors. Our relationship with the sea today arouses my curiosity; it pushes me to find out what happened that made us drift from the sea that once meant everything in our lives, and to trace the effects of these changes.

My father would seat me on his lap to teach me the divers’ clapping rhythms. The sea’s chants never left our home, which was built on top of a buried sea that had been turned into land. Every morning the gulls would gather on the pavement—gather over their entombed sea. They cried out at me, opening up the first question and forming my curiosity about this treacherous dry land, which the gulls insist is their sea while I see it as my house. For years the sea retreated, generously granting us soil to live on; at other times it would enter the houses, storming in and leaving its shells and fish in the inner courtyard. The houses leaned toward the sea and we knew we were in a coastal city—homes almost flinging themselves as an offering into its waters. Today, though, we and our dwellings have turned our backs to it; we buried its shores and moved away.

When the sea was buried

Q: As you’ve mentioned, the sea features prominently in your novel. Why choose the sea—a subject well-known to Arab and world narratives?

A: During my research journey, I met a fisherman who sits on an artificial island. There he used to have the sea to himself; he spent his days in that spot when it was still water. When the sea was buried, he kept sitting in the same place, except it had become the land that took its place. He saw it as sea while we saw it as land—because that is what we were conditioned to: land. His eyes were seeing something I could not grasp. He was alone, living in his memory without his boat, without his tools—like the gulls who faithfully return to their sea even after it has been interred.

These transformations are a kind of hidden violence—we feel it but cannot define or comprehend it. The sea, with its blueness, used to captivate me; then the water turned into buildings creeping toward the blue being, devouring it. All that water became dry land. But I am a creature who needs this water to surround and immerse me. It is the water by which I am known; I carry it in my name and identity—I am from Bahrain, from the two waters—so how could I not write about what made me who I am? It is the sea that granted me my identity, and my identity is water.

I will recount my sea as I carry it in my memory, as I feel it. I do not care who wrote about the sea before me or who will write after me; what matters is to understand this blue expanse from my own vantage point. So I began chasing the water every morning: to see how fishermen dismantle their huts and follow the tide, how they hoist their boats and follow it. We all love it and follow it—and the water recedes, turning its back on us in anger.

Searching popular memory

Q: Can we say that in your novel you worked with the storehouse of memory and grandmothers’ tales to shape this narrative?

A: My grandmothers whispered the sea’s stories to me. The sea terrified me when children drowned in it, when its waves swallowed whole families, when mythical beings emerged from it—like Baba Draya, who calls you, and the moment you turn your head he snatches you down to the seabed. It is the very sea we fear, on whose shores we played, gathering its shells, standing before it to confide our worries, casting offerings to it and contemplating it with love.

While writing, I searched through popular memory and through books, and imagination came to complete the missing spaces. There are story beginnings that were left without documentation; that is where imagination steps in to complete the tale. I tried to dive into the depths of this blue expanse to read its geography, and so I left “Salima,” who greets the reader at the very start of the novel, to take them on a journey across the water. She is one of the maqālīt women—that is, a woman whose babies do not survive until she treads the blood of a sharif—through whom I reveal what the sea conceals beneath its blue skin.

How do you see the fiction scene in Bahrain?

When writing my novel over eight years, I tried to keep away from the narratives of the region—whether in Bahrain or the Gulf—so I wouldn’t be influenced by others’ treatments of water. A writer under the sway of another may end up repeating what others have said. Today, however, I have returned with great enthusiasm to read the marvellous works I missed. I seek wonder when I read, and at the moment I’m immersed in the most important fictional voice in Bahrain, the great novelist Amin Saleh; his imagination carries me to different worlds that amaze me.