The Bahraini Writer Leila Al-Mutawa: I Am a Daughter of Water…!
The Bahraini Writer Leila Al-Mutawa: I Am a Daughter of Water…!
My father would keep me seated throughout the night with his companions as they sang to the sea.
The sea itself holds within it fresh springs, shifting sands, valleys, hills, and forests.
I wrote about Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd because history brushed past him too lightly.
I try to trace the transformations of places and what they do to human beings.
My grandmothers once took me to the spring to feed the jinn.
Arab societies tend to brand a woman writer as “daring”.
I look for what astonishes me when I read… I love experimentation and breaking the mould.
I am a creature filled with questions… and the act of writing, with its journey of discovery, offers me answers.
Hassan Abd Almawgud
If you read The Forgotten Between Two seas, the new novel by Bahraini writer Leila Al-Mutawa, you will sense life itself as an endless sea. In this work, the writer’s life and artistic experience rise to the surface in her ability to observe the details of island life — between harsh realities and wild legends, between two waters, one sweet and the other salty. In this narrative, one foot is placed firmly in the past, with all its tales of the sea’s vows, monsters, poets, and women, and the other foot in the present moment, where the sea has been buried and reclaimed into stretches of land.
Al-Mutawa’s earlier novel, My Heart Is Not for Sale, provoked significant controversy in Bahrain. In 2016 she took part in the Booker Workshop of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and in 2019 she was selected to contribute to How Many Lungs Does the Coast Have? — a book produced when Sharjah was named World Book Capital by UNESCO, intended to document works by authors who had shifted the literary landscape of their homelands. The introduction was penned by the Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad and the Omani novelist Jokha Alharthi.
In this conversation, Leila Al-Mutawa speaks about the novel, the myths and tales of the sea and its people, as well as her dreams for writing.
What kind of preparation did The Forgotten Between Two Waters require of you?
Each morning I would rise early and set out with the fishermen, learning the hidden secrets of this watery expanse. On other days I would wander with the farmers, climb palm trees with the kar (rope harness), and learn from them the patience needed to wait upon the land until it bore fruit. I needed contemplation, hours of walking to know the soil and its shifting changes. We no longer walk here; we move by car, and so we have lost touch with our earth and its beauty, our eyes fixed only on the expanding glass city that devours everything in its path.
I watched the fishermen carrying their boats and huts, following the sea whose shoreline was retreating under land reclamation, until they left their boats behind. The same mischievous sea once stole their boats in jest, forcing them to tie them securely. They abandoned the boats to it, but that wish no longer matters — for the sea is dying. I roamed to record stories, tracing the island’s boundaries, and found that the sea once gifted us land with a generosity we never understood, retreating as we multiplied, redrawing its shoreline. Then we began to seize its ground, besieging it, burying its waters. But I believe this imbalance and lack of harmony with nature will come back to harm us — urbanisation exacts a heavy price.
While tracing the island’s limits, I discovered that at one point a large island had suddenly appeared in the north, known as Fasht al-Jarm, before sinking back into the sea, leaving only fragments behind. This island inspired me to write the chapter of “Iya Nasser”, depicting it as a sacred isle devoted to worship, while in “Muhanna” the diver discovers relics of a previous civilisation. The sea recedes to grant us land, then returns to reclaim its place.
Those who defended the sea often perished within it: Hassan, the young man who fought for the fashts; my ancestor Saud; and Muhanna, determined to teach the younger generation the sea’s beauty and abundance. I gave these figures their names in tribute to what they did for the sea. Reflection, reading, and research helped me write this novel, which I first presented at the Booker Workshop in 2016.
What were you trying to convey to the non-local reader unfamiliar with Bahrain’s nature?
My island is destined for drowning. I employed the environmental and geographical diversity we possess — particularly the water — following it for years, unveiling its secrets to understand why this prophecy will come true, what we did to deserve such a warning. When you already know your ending, you follow the tale from its beginning: from the time Gilgamesh came to this island in search of the flower of immortality, to the present day when the two waters (fresh and salt) are buried, the fields dredged, and only a single palm tree left.
The palm is sacred in all religions: it appears sanctified on Dilmun seals, it witnessed the birth of Christ, it was worshipped by ancient Arabs, and it is cherished by the island. All that the palm has endured deserves remembrance. That is why I warn the people of water: do not rest upon land that lacks a palm — she is the guardian of the island. From her, I rewrite the myth.
After the governor kills her husband and covets her body, Salima flees across the sea in ancient times to save herself and her unborn child. Why did her journey not end?
Who said the journey ended? The uniqueness of Salima’s story lies in the journey itself. The journey of reading this water begins with the reader — that is what matters. I crossed the sea as Salima did, just as Arab caravans once walked upon the soft soils after crossing the Sahara, and as the islanders themselves, until quite recently, would wade across at certain spots to move from island to island.
I wanted the reader to begin with the sea’s geography and uniqueness: within it are fresh springs, shifting sands, valleys, hills, and forests — all concealed beneath its watery skin. This is why the reader’s journey starts here, to grasp the sea’s significance in shaping island identity. The work ends where it began, with the sea: humanity has known itself through the reflection upon water’s surface.
Is Nadia’s tale with her daughter and grandmother a continuation of Salima’s journey and legend?
I cannot dictate how readers interpret the work. But memory flows through water, and women inherit one another’s traits: they birth water, they whirl their hair for it in dance — a secret language between women and the sea. When men discovered this, they punished them by shaving their heads so they could not converse with the sea. Yet the sea avenged its women.
Salima loses more than one son. To break her curse she must step upon a nobleman’s blood, leap across his body, take his soul, and give it to her newborn. Did you take this tale directly from Bahraini folklore?
Not exactly. The idea of “maqalīṭ” women (those whose sons do not survive) is not a recognised local folklore. I encountered it in a centuries-old poem. It inspired me, and I linked it to women’s leaps upon the bīs (the ship’s skeleton) during the pearl-diving era. Shipbuilders would raise the skeleton high for fear of it being cursed and the builder’s death, while the unborn child of the leaping woman would live.
I drew upon living memory: my father’s tales, divers’ dances as they leapt left and right like the “maqalīṭ” woman. But in their case, they leapt upon reclaimed sea — the sea that died so we might build upon its land, taking the role of the nobleman whose corpse was trampled. Here I tried to understand the roots of what surrounded me; even folk dances had their presence in the narrative.
Why did you summon Ṭarafa ibn al-ʿAbd and make him the nobleman over whom Salima leaps?
The death of Ṭarafa invites interpretation, for he was obscured by time and passed over in history books with little notice. I wrote the scene, then later found one of his verses about a woman of the “maqalīṭ”. He wrote: “Do not blame me — she is one of those women / Summer sleeps, barren are her sons.” I laughed, thinking perhaps one such woman avenged herself by leaping over his corpse. Suppressed history leaves us room for imagination.
Were you not afraid we would fail to sympathise with Salima for using the corpse of a beloved poet?
But she is a grieving mother, robbed by the land of her sons. Among Arabs, sacrifices of first-borns were common. A mother’s instinct will drive her to the impossible for her unborn child to live. As for Ṭarafa, his well-known arrogance brought about his own end.
The scene of Salima giving birth in the heart of the sea was terrifying and mythic. Did you intend it to carry such weight, akin to the birth scene in
Perfume
?
The context is wholly different, and there is no real comparison with Perfume. But I see your point: about lending the narrative a sense of mythic resonance. I was re-imagining the palm tree myth, granting it the symbolism that anchors the novel’s thread. The palm is the island’s guardian, the keeper of memory, the witness that died before our eyes. As for the sea, it yielded to Salima’s tears as she opened her arms; it bore her child gently and placed him in her hands. I only sought to weave a legend for this island that might complete the others.
Your characters are many, all connected to water, all showing different faces of the sea. To what extent did water inspire your characters and places?
Water is the true protagonist. It shaped my identity and that of my people. The characters follow: Salima and Muhanna belong to the sea; Iya Nasser, Yaqub, and Darwish to the land — yet all remain tied unmistakably to the water. Each episode reveals a different face of the sea and its relationship with the character.
The sea inspired me when it engulfed me, when it lashed me with its waves, when it receded in anger and returned in eerie calm, when it tried to swallow me, when it disguised itself as land, when I plunged into its depths and saw the beauty of its bed.
Once, in childhood, I was on a sea trip when suddenly the water around us vanished as if it had evaporated. We were stranded for hours until the sea returned. Later I learned this was a tidal zone where the seabed revealed itself. The seabed is uneven, not as people imagine, and not all areas are deep.
The “ḥālah” — a sand island that disappears beneath water then emerges — also inspired me. It is untrustworthy: you think it is land, but it returns to water; you think it is sea, but it reveals itself as earth. Its lack of belonging is inspiring. Watching how humans stripped it of its power to hide was astonishing. I was fortunate to grow up in an area full of such shifting sandbanks, though inhabited.
In the novel, Najwa — Nadia’s grandmother — writes her own story, which you then include. Why did you use the device of a story within a story?
Here I was speaking of two kinds of memory: the “collective”, expressed in the “episodes” where I recount the island’s ancient history with an omniscient narrator; and the “individual”, represented by Nadia’s chapters, told in the first person. The two intertwine: Nadia shifts from narrator to narrated. One no longer needs written history to understand the place’s past.
I used epilepsy as the bridge: memory passed from Najwa to Nadia through her seizures. Najwa herself is drawn from my own life: when I awoke as a child from a seizure, my grandmother would wash my face with cold water, embrace me, and whisper protective verses into my ear. Water here is memory; it returns me to reality. So I used it to move between characters.
Would you call your novel a work about the sea’s disappearance? About humanity’s cruelty to nature? About women’s sacrifices? Or a memory of Bahrain’s islands and what befell them?
Many questions haunted me. How did earlier generations endure all these changes? Change, in this way, is violence — the violence of place transforming and transforming people. There were memories of mountains of sand dumped upon the coast, burying it. This memory terrified me, and still does.
I think we humans are made to adapt, and so we did. But in writing, I sought to understand this fear. This novel, therefore, searches for answers within me, to questions left suspended. It is about the worlds of water, our endangered heritage. Writing preserves some fragment of it, if only in memory.
Your grandmothers gave you tales of the sea and spirits who abduct fishermen, and your father listened to diving songs. How did you turn these into art?
I had many grandmothers, not just one. Because of a legend, my grandmother had to abandon my father, and so he grew up under the care of different women. I grew up in the same environment. They once took me to the spring, made me offer food to the jinn.
I was raised in Arad, an island belonging to Muharraq, surrounded by other islands, with the sea always near. This environmental richness and the accompanying legends — of Būdrīyah, who kidnapped fishermen — became part of my identity. Seagulls lined the pier each morning, and when I asked my mother why they always stood there, she told me: the pier stands upon buried sea, not solid land. The sea used to cut the road when it rose, and drownings were common. We would toss it ḥayyah bīyah — barley sprouts — as a sacrifice.
I am a daughter of water. It shaped my consciousness. My father would hold me in his lap all night, teaching me the divers’ clapping rhythms as his friends sang to the sea. I was saturated with tales: my grandmother Hessa always told me of a woman dwelling in the spring, envious of girls with long hair. My grandmother Amina taught me to cook muḥammar rice for the jinn. And my mother, as we wandered Muharraq, would point at the ground and say, “The sea was once here.”
Bahrainis remember the sea’s boundaries. Why should I not write a myth for my own generation — the one deceived into thinking all this was land, when in fact it was sea? They buried my sea, and since then I have never been able to return to Muharraq. Instead, I found another sea, and I have watched it constantly. For eight years it accompanied me, teasing me, cutting off my path as it rose, confining me to other shores until I had to swim back. I gave it all it asked, cleaned its freshwater springs of algae, and promised it I would dance for it as the women once did.
The novel shifts through multiple registers of language — reality, myth, metaphysics, science. Did you struggle to invent this?
Yes. I read every book I could find about each era I wrote on. Sometimes I spent a full year absorbing the language, thought, religions, and social life of the time, so that I could invent a language suitable for it. Then I would break it with Nadia’s voice — simpler, closer to daily speech, to the islanders’ lives in recent decades. I sought a balance between the old chapters and Nadia’s chapters. I also rely heavily on the sense of sound: I form a rhythm to suit the myth I am creating for the reader.
Do Arab traditions create a form of self-censorship in women writers?
This is a difficult question, especially when considering the differences between Arab societies and their varying codes of censorship and tradition. And when we say “women writers”, it sounds as though we are lumping them into one basket.
But yes, there are restrictions. Societies tend to label women writers who depart from tradition as “daring”. No such description is applied to male writers. As for myself, I have no limits. I am my own censor. I live in my world, untouched by the noise — noise is the first primitive human reaction to displeasure. A civilised person speaks and debates.
Might you write about the sea again?
The sea’s memory is something I still try to drown in. One work is not enough to grasp this expanse of blue.
Do you feel neglected by the media or critics?
There are fewer critics than writers. Criticism requires cumulative experience and awareness, whereas writers are plentiful. So I do not feel wronged: I am part of the cultural scene and know what is happening. Perhaps some judge me as merely a feminist writer, but I believe human beings are deeper than appearances. Any human being. And so I remain optimistic about this novel.
Who are your contemporaries in the Arab world? Which writers do you enjoy reading?
There are many pens I admire. Recently I have returned to them with passion, after years of focusing solely on my own project, away from new publications. I search for what astonishes me when I read. I love experimentation and breaking form.
Finally, what is your ambition in writing?
It is hard to answer. I am a creature filled with questions. The act of writing offers me answers that sustain me for now, but also opens doors to other questions from which I build new worlds. My ambition is that this text reaches readers, that water carves its own path.
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