Mai Serhan

Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?

Mai Serhan: I loved being a student of English & Comparative Literature as an undergrad, but I was well aware even then that my studies were detached from my reality. I was not living in the English countryside, Paris’s Latin Quarter or imperial Russia. I was a Palestinian woman living in Egypt. I needed to engage with the politics of this identity now that I knew I was a social construct, a political subject, and a historical product. So I did exactly that. I pursued an MA in Arabic Studies, and produced a thesis about translating gender in post-2011 Egypt, right then, at that watershed moment. Upon graduating, I began work on a collection of short stories. Being a married woman in Egypt, I decided to explore this subject matter as it relates to patriarchy, the military state, the economics of power, sexuality, and so on. We do not exist in a vacuum. Every writer has a black box that carries the sum of one’s experiences—cultural, economic, and political. There is never a false note once you are able to approach and access this box vulnerably and honestly.

ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?

MS: The experience of exile erases one’s history. No one in your adopted home knows your name or what it signifies. There is a chronic sense of rootlessness since you don’t quite fit anywhere. You claim you’re from a place you’ve never even seen. This distorts your sense of identity, and I have suffered through that for years, until I began to write. 

Language is what constructs reality and writes identity. It has an anchoring effect when it captures meaning. So yes, I have reconstructed myself through language and it has been a wonderfully healing, centering, and empowering experience. 

ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?

MS: So much! I want people to know there was a Palestine and a Palestinian people. We had land, schools, rivers, neighbors, streets, fruits, churches, mosques, businesses and memories. We had roots. Palestinians have been dehumanized for over 60 years. As a people, we have systematically undergone erosion from the map and from people’s memories. 

We’ve been renamed, smeared by a mighty media machine with a stronghold on the official narrative, appropriated down to our hummus, and denied our right of return. Clearly, the world has become de-sensitized, preferring to turn a blind eye instead. But even if we’ve forcibly had to assimilate into other cultures, even if the world is fed a different story about us, it is vital for us to hold on to our Palestinian-ness. At best, I am hoping to put my face and name to the experience of exile, to retrieve our humanity as a people, in return for recognition and empathy. 

ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?

MS: I can definitely see a shift in my writing since March when the lockdown began in Egypt. Socially distancing has allowed me to spend a lot of time alone, introspecting. I’m the kind of person who works better under pressure. I just throw myself into my writing to heal, so the pressure of a lockdown worked well for me. That said, I could not touch all my pre-existing projects, simply because my mind was elsewhere, trying to make sense of the so-called new normal, grappling with fear and uncertainty. I felt like I needed to respect and attend to the moment, that it warranted a new form of expression, a journeying into the darker sides of me. So I began to write poetry, a lot of it. It is said that poetry is the last architecture of resistance, and I was pretty much there, needing to lay it all bare. I would say my language has dramatically changed since then.

ORP: If you could choose one writer or artist, living or dead, as a best friend or mentor, who would it be? Why?

MS: I’d go with Ocean Vuong. Reading Night Sky with Exit Wounds and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous felt like a revelation. The things he can do with and to language cut through the bone. I literally had to put him down so many times just to breathe. That black box, which is so important to every writer, he is capable of accessing it with incredible resourcefulness and lucidity, as evident in his language, form and subject matter. 

ORP: What do you think is the most essential advice that most writers and artists ignore?

MS: I think a lot of writers struggle with taking on constructive criticism. There tends to be an unhealthy attachment to one’s own writing. But if you’re not going to leave your ego at the door and understand that your work is ultimately written to be read, then you might as well just stick to your diary. I’m not saying one needs to take every opinion onboard, but humility and open-mindedness are key.  

Mai Sarhan’s writing has appeared in Anomaly, Heirlock, Arablit Quarterly, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Magda Al-Nowaihi Graduate Student Award in Gender Studies and the Madalyn Lamont Literary Award by the American University in Cairo, a Vermont Studio Center Merit Grant, and the Emerging Writer Award from Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. Mai is currently enrolled in the MSt Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. Read her essay, “The Place Where I’m From,” which appears in our current issue, Issue 4.1.