Leila Al-Mutawa to
Al-Majalla
Narrative will not develop unless the writer is free
The Bahraini novelist Leila Al-Mutawa belongs to a new generation of narrative voices in the Arabian Gulf, a generation that writes the memory of place and turns to what has been marginalised, daring to dismantle the novel’s traditional architecture through a language steeped in poetry and symbol—one that can make the reader a partner in both diving deep and contemplative gaze.
She has published two novels: My Heart Is Not for Sale (2012) and The Forgotten Between Two Waters (2024). In the latter, brought out by Dar Rashm in Riyadh, Al-Mutawa weaves a watery narrative in which sea meets identity, memory meets absence, and myth meets reality, in order to recast the question of belonging on an island that legend has inscribed as destined, one day, to return to water. In this conversation we touch on her bond with the sea as scar and memory, on the presence of the forgotten in her writing, and on the novel’s architecture and the singularity of her characters.
Between the sea’s memory and interior mirrors you have woven a world both enigmatic and aching. Who, truly, are “the forgotten”? People in the novel—or a metaphor for deeper layers of life and identity?
The changes across the world, and the speed of those changes, exceed our capacity to adapt. Everything around us shifts and alters, and that is a violence done to the self. When places are forgotten and swept away like this, a person no longer knows his land or his identity. The forgotten are those devoured by the collective memory—whether the memory of story or that of land and sea—those whom time has folded away: Salīma, who belongs to the maqālīt of women, whom Ṭarafa ibn al-‘Abd mentioned in a line of poetry time sought to erase, though poetry, carried on people’s tongues, proved their immortality:
Do not reproach me—she is of those women
for whom the summer lay asleep, scant, maqālīt.
Do not reproach me—she is of those
As for Iyā Nasser and others who were buried in a mass grave: we pass by it on the island and do not remember that a massacre took place here, that the people of this island, between ebb and flow, journeyed and were exposed to raids and calamities. Who remembers the spring that defends itself? Nature is not mute; it has its own language. We glimpse it in the damp climbing our walls. However much we restore our houses, moisture seeps up from the earth: the spring we buried is fighting us. We seized its place. The vanishing of a thing from before our eyes does not mean its end; it defends its existence in its own way. The forgotten are everywhere on the island—people, creatures, water and soil.
Who now remembers Mazrou‘īyah Island in the north-east of Bahrain? Its date palms withered, it turned to desert, the sea took it and it sank; later it was infilled along with the sea, and the city of Juffair spread over it. This is not fancy but fact. Such forgetting is terrifying, and this generation knows nothing of that island.
Since childhood
In The Forgotten Between Two Waters the sea is a geographical expanse that at times swallows memory and at others casts it ashore anew. How did this inner sea take shape in your narrative consciousness?
I do not think any of us has known only one face to water. Like mythical beings, it is many-faced. It is the very sea to which we used to offer votives and vows, the sea we turned towards when life pressed in; and it is the same sea that snatched our people and drowned entire families—treacherous, as they say of it, and generous, as we know it.
The sea is part of us and of our collective memory. My relationship with it began in childhood—through stories, and through the first shock when I grasped what it means to reclaim the sea and build upon it. Water knows water; islanders speak only this tongue. All tales and recollections begin with the phrase, “The sea was here, and then it was buried,” as if inaugurating the opening sentence in the sea’s biography.
I am seized by terror when I see boats stranded on muddy sands, the sea dried out around them, puddles scattered here and there, and gulls, like birds of prey, circling the sea’s corpse, their cries rising as they wheel above it. That sight frightens me. When the sea is penned into sandy cubes and the lorries arrive to turn that blue—that life—into a grave stretching over tracts of land, I feel I am writing about something that resists. When the sea drowned me in childhood and its water entered my mouth, I became part of it and it part of me. With all his wiles the sea conscripted me to defend his right to exist.
The novel seems preoccupied with “uncertainty” and “non-belonging”. Are these echoes of personal experience or your vision of a broader human condition?
There is a desire to emigrate that we live through at a certain stage. Perhaps I wanted to leave this island because I feel a violence was done to me through urban and environmental transformations. When I look out and see not my sea but skyscrapers piercing the clouds and shopping malls—is that not humanity’s struggle everywhere? Under the banner of progress and urbanity, cities devour nature and turn it into concrete cubes. It is my vision of a silent sorrow on faces, of the pains of sailors and farmers when everything fades and such callings become mere memory; when the sea recedes and the seafarers’ chants become a yearning for a past we ourselves abandoned.
Circles of narrative and the music of water
You employ multiple narrative techniques: dream, stream, oral testimony. How do you balance a deep structural design with keeping the reader in a state of constant listening?
Water creates only circles. In my work the narrative line is a circle: events begin and end at the same point; the character returns from water to water; and the novel as a whole is like the sea’s wave—circle after circle. Memory is a stone thrown into still water, raising rings that widen, stirring the water and the reader’s memory alike.
We islanders have this particularity—like the women of the Greek islands who dance while holding a sign for the sea’s wave and whirl it in their hands to proclaim that water is coming. That is what I do when I write: I transmit my unease to the reader. My island is vowed to drowning. Water is coming, and we islanders know it and believe it.
Is writing, for you, a means of resisting oblivion or a rite of confessing to fragility?
I believe writing is resistance—resistance to something we feel yet cannot see, perhaps a fear that life will swallow us and memory fold us away. The human being was made to narrate; even in solitude he tells himself stories, converses with his own soul and replays scenes from his life. He resists, even alone with himself, through narration.
A person wants to leave a trace, to say: I was here. From the beginning he has inscribed what the soul longs for and what feeling remembers upon cave walls; thus does he tell the tale and leave it for those who come after to complete. And what of loss, when we consider it? Is it not a sacrifice offered for the sake of what is to come? I think we are compelled to lose in order to recognise the worth of things. Painful as that may sound, it is a reality forced upon us. Look about you: everything in nature relinquishes in order to transform; trees lose their blossoms to become fruit. Loss is a transformation we do not understand—the disappearance of one thing to make room for another.
How do you handle this cultural inheritance without falling into didacticism or the easy way out?
I know only how to narrate; I have no other way of saying anything. Thus even in my essays you will find narrative present between the lines. I borrow here García Márquez’s phrase: I lived to tell. And I think that being a person of extreme sensitivity is part of my gift; I defend my sensitivity despite all its drawbacks in everyday life, for in narrative and in imagination it is my talent.
The Gulf novel
Your writing digs deep, going to shaded, neglected places. In the midst of this aesthetic choice, how do you see the state of the novel in the Gulf?
The scene is promising. But narrative will not develop unless the writer is free, and the reader’s growth with him depends upon that freedom. What raises a reader’s awareness is a text that challenges him. We cannot insist on issuing novels that hand all their keys to the reader from the first page. A work whose course can be predicted will not alter the reader’s consciousness or impel him to return to it. Yet this puts novelists who have strayed from the familiar in confrontation with the reader—or with the writer who will accept every narrative mode so long as it comes from a global author.
I once read a reader’s comment on an Arabic novel faulting it for its multitude of characters—although it spans generations. The very same reader rates Márquez’s novels at the highest level. And I heard of a writer repeating such a remark about an Arabic novel at a seminar. I am reading Saramago at present: in his works the narrator is part of the story, his voice loud and clear. Yet when they read an Arabic novel that takes a similar approach, they say, “The narrator’s voice is obtrusive,” and demand that he not interfere in the tale. These are the very people who revere Saramago’s manner and call it great—perhaps because the Nobel Prize gave him immunity; perhaps because his innovative style imposed itself upon them.
The point is that some license experimentation when it comes from a Western or prize-winning writer, but refuse it from an Arab author. The greater calamity is when such notions come from a writer who frames narrative and lays down laws he believes in, attempting to impose them on other works. In doing so, unwittingly, he creates restraints upon writing—and those restraints pass to readers.
These are the very writers and readers who later erase their negative comments on certain novels after those works win major international prizes. The reader must be free, and the writer must be brave. Everyone who left a literary mark forged a style of his own—and to forge one’s own style is to enter into confrontation with those who venerate prevailing literary modes.
It is odd that readers should shy away from the untraditional. I ask: ought they not to be more supple, so as to understand that each novel has its own properties and each novelist his own voice? And ought not the novelist to venerate freedom, rather than forge shackles for himself and for the writers around him?
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