Official Website: www.larissasansour.com/

Bio: Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist. She was raised in Palestine but had to move when the events in the Middle East forced her to move first to Europe and then for higher studies in the US where she received MA in Art from NYU. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature and covers multiple mediums and is usually informed by current political themes. Her work spans utilities video art, photography, documentary, graphic arts, the book form and the internet.  Her work has been featured in a number of galleries, museums, film festivals and art publications worldwide. Many of her works are informed by science fiction themes. Her project Nation Estate gained world wide attention which presents a  dystopic vision of the Palestinian state which exists in the form of a single skyscraper and is surrounded by a concrete wall and houses the entire Palestinian population. Each Palestinian city has its own floor and intercity trips which were previously marred by checkpoints are now made by elevator.

Muhammad: What inspired you to become an artist?
Larissa: I always knew that I would become an artist. As a child, I drew and painted incessantly and was very good at it. Eventually I ended up studying at art schools in Europe and the US. My main focus back then was still on painting, but after graduating from university with a master’s in fine art, my practice took a considerable turn. Nowadays the medium that I choose is determined by the subject matter. My practice has become more interdisciplinary involving video, photography installation and the book form.

Muhammad: What are the main themes or influences that inform your work?

Larissa: Ever since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, events in the Middle East have been the major source of inspiration for my work. For a Palestinian, politics is not just an option, but something fundamental and inescapable. The dichotomy of belonging to and being removed from the very same piece of land – be it physically, mentally, administratively, militarily or otherwise – is central to my work. Ordinary understandings of identity are often linked to the idea of belonging to some kind of geographical unit – a region, a land, a country. But for most Palestinians, the experience of being removed, exiled or cut off from the very same place they belong to and identify with is just as crucial for their self-understanding. In my work, the notion of belonging manifests itself in anything from architecture, ownership and geography to social relations, local produce and gastronomy. In contrast, tangible restrictions on mobility – walls, fences, checkpoints – maintain a permanent sense of being cut off, uprooted and kicked out.

Muhammad: How did you come to choose science fiction settings for your work?
Larissa: In general, the sci-fi realm is a fantastic conceptual and philosophical playground. In several pieces over the past years, I have been exploring not only the sci-fi genre, but also the comic book superhero. Both forms have an inherent ability to make accessible the most fundamental ambitions of a people or a civilization in a way that is naturally inspired by, but never hampered or restricted by a non-fictional reality.

Also, despite its stylized imagery, sterile futurism and high production value, sci-fi tends to allow for a specific kind of almost nostalgia framing of the topic at hand. Sci-fi almost invariably carries within it a sense of retro, ideas of the future tend to appear standard and cliché at the same time as they come across as visionary. In the case of Palestine, there is an eternal sense of forecasting statehood, independence and the end of occupation. The ambitious ideas that we hope to achieve have long since become so repetitive that the odd mix of nostalgia and accomplishment that the sci-fi genre often embodies lends it itself well to the topic.

Muhammad: Your submission to the Lacoste Prize generated some controversy for being “too pro-Palestinian” – can you give us some background on this controversy?
Larissa: After being nominated, I produced three photos for my upcoming Nation Estate project and submitted them in November. The piece introduces the idea of a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood – the entire population living in a single skyscraper. The museum praised the work and raised no concerns about its content – at least not to me.

A month later, I received a phone call from the museum director. He told me that my nomination had been revoked because Lacoste found my project ‘too pro-Palestinian’, as he described it, for them to support. The decision was final, I was told, so there was no room for discussion. The museum had defended my work, but to no avail.

As a form of protest against the Lacoste decision, the museum offered to show my work at a later stage – outside of the confines of the sponsorship. I was also asked to review a document. I automatically assumed that this document would be about the change to our contractual relationship, now that I was no longer in the competition.

Next day, a mail from the museum asks me to approve a statement saying that I had withdrawn voluntarily from the prize ‘in order to pursue other opportunities’. So the document for me to review was not related to the contract, but rather a statement aimed at masking the true reasons for my work being banned. Asking me to approve this statement struck me as even more shocking than having my nomination revoked in the first place.

Muhammad: Being an artist of Palestinian background do you encounter these kind of impedance in your work frequently?
Larissa: The Lacoste episode certainly stands out in many ways, but at the same time, this kind of pressure is not uncommon, and it has expressed itself in various forms over the years. I have experienced several calls to close down exhibitions I have featured in. These calls normally come from special interest groups opposing any kind of rights, let alone statehood to Palestinians. But there have also been attempts at muffling my work from people initially favorable to it. I have been asked by gallerists showing my work to change the title of my exhibition or a specific piece in order to avoid aggravating Jewish communities, for example.

Muhammad: You have also worked on a graphic novel with Oreet Ashrey, how did that come about?
Larissa: In my art practice, subject matter usually dictates the medium, and since artist Oreet Ashery and I both make use of ourselves in our works, we decided to incorporate ourselves in a graphic novel but as fictional superhuman characters. In the novel, we wanted to question the power of artistic practice, how much influence does art have on societal change and whether we are better off trading it for superhuman powers. The work is very much a tug-and-pull between a dystopian idea of art practice to a complete belief in its potency. In a way, it portrays a somewhat schizophrenic journey into the world of art.

In the Novel of Nonel and Vovel, we investigate critical strategies of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to clichés that are present both in the world’s understanding of Arabs as well as in the making of art. The experimental novel tackles issues such as terminology and its effect on the unconscious collective understanding of the crisis in the Middle East, artistic agency and politics, representation of victim and oppressor, the psychology of victim-hood, race issues and Orientalism, history and its documentation and the role of art in engraving as well as subverting a historical narrative.

Muhammad: What do you think is the role of the artist in the society?
Larissa: It is always difficult for an artist, I think, to find a balance between being a critical commentator and taking on an activist role. I often find it uncomfortable to be put in the position of a political spokesperson detached from the artistic context. The mere fact that my artistic work is immersed in politics should not mean that I have to resort to same political discourse outside of art. There is a potency to political art that should be preserved as unique and its impact on the political dialogue cannot be underestimated. That is why it is a difficult act for me to juggle all these positions.

Muhammad: What projects are you working on in the future?
Larissa: I am currently working on realizing the Nation Estate film and photo project as originally envisioned. After a long stretch of pre-production, the shoot itself has just been completed, and I am currently fundraising for post-production. I am working with an unbelievable group of people who are all excited about this project and trying to make it happen. Among the people involved is a Danish theatre costume designer on the futuristic costumes in the film. An Iraqi musician is currently composing the electronic Arabic music score, and a film production company is developing the on sci-fi interiors for the Nation Estate building. The film and photo project is scheduled to premiere in August at the Centre of Photography in Denmark before traveling to Paris and Dubai later in the year.

Lariss’a Project Nation Estate

PCA/ACA: Conference April 11-14, Boston MA

April 14, 2012 3:00 pm -4:30 pm, Conference Website
Copley Marriott Hotel in Boston

Special Roundtable Session: Countering the Master Narrative:  Locating Muslims and Islam in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Comics

Abstract: Science fiction, fantasy, and comic book literature is experiencing a “revival” in modern day Muslim communities with Muslim and non-Muslim writers use of the faith of over a billion adherents to enhance and often drive the narrative of their creative output.  Historically Muslims have had an impact on speculative fiction from the fantasy tales of the Arabian Nights, to the world’s largest epic in the form of Dastan Amir Hamza, to the time-travel stories of the 19th century Egyptian, al-Muwaylihi, to the obvious borrowing of Islamic themes by contemporary writers such as Frank Herbert and Steven Barnes, films such as Dune and Pitch Black, and music by artists such as the Last Poets; but oftentimes these connections are unacknowledged or obscured. The early interconnectedness of science fiction and fantasy to scientific inquiry in the Islamic world provided the impetus for many discoveries that spurred imaginations toward turning the impossible into the possible.  The Islamic advances in science created conditions that encouraged creativity and adventure; a belief in the dynamism of the universe arguably provided the incubation for stories of castaways (Ibn Tufail) and outer body transport (Avicenna). The embracing of science fiction, fantasy, and comic book literature within Muslim communities the world over are elements that are changing the Master Narrative that has historically excluded Islamic contributions to this genre.  This panel of presenters will explore the influence that Muslims and Islam has had in the past and continues to have on the current literary output in the Americas, Middle East, Europe and Africa.  The panelists will discuss the depiction of Muslims by non-Muslims and Muslim writers of science fiction and fantasy, comics, manga, graphic novels, and other speculative fiction.  5 minutes

Schedule: April 14, 2012 3:00 pm -4:30 pm (Salon A, Copley Marriott Hotel in Boston)

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad has recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. He has been fascinated by Science Fiction since his childhood and greatly appreciates the use of Science Fiction to illuminate relationship amongst people and the relationship between technology and man. He is also an aspiring artist and edited the first anthology of short Science Fiction stories on Islam and Science Fiction in 2008 with Ahmed A. Khan titled “A Mosque Amongst the Stars.” He is the founder and Editor of the Islam and Science Fiction website which he has been running since 2005 to address a glaring gap in literature on this subject. Muhammad will provide an overview of Muslims and Islam in science fiction, fantasy, and comics.

D. Waheedah Bilal is an Assistant Librarian at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis; she is new to the field of Islam and Science Fiction. Her interests include African American studies, women in Islam, and world literature. Waheedah will discuss the image of Muslim women in science fiction and literature generally.

Rebecca Hankins is an Associate Professor, certified archivist/librarian at Texas A&M University, College Station TX.  Her previous employment included 12 years as senior archivist at The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, the premier research repository on Africana historical documentation, and two years as Assistant Librarian at University of Arizona Library, Special Collection; Tucson, Arizona.  She has published in peer-reviewed journals and her latest publication is on Islamic science fiction and fantasy in the international journal Foundation: The International of Review of Science Fiction out of the UK.
Rebecca will speak about the negative and positive depictions of Muslims in science fiction, fantasy, and comics.

Image Source: Veezle.com

The first blurb on the back of Saladin Ahmed’s debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, comes from Nebula winner Walter Jon Williams. Williams writes: “Readers yearning for the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser will delight in the arrival of Adoulla and Raseed.”

The comparison accurately places Throne in the genre of adventure fantasy, and specifically in the sword-and-sorcery subgenre of Fritz Leiber’s famous duo, who first appeared in the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Adoulla and Raseed, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, are fighting partners with little in common beyond a determination to combat evil: Adoulla the ghul-hunter is sloppy, pleasure-loving, irreverent and old, while the dervish Raseed is stern, single-minded, scrupulously devout, and young. These differences make for a lot of entertaining bickering between the two, but they also mean that the heroes complement each other. Adoulla’s spells combined with Raseed’s forked sword pose a formidable threat to all who would disturb the peace and safety of the Crescent Moon Kingdoms.

However, these heroes also need help. The novel teems with colorful characters, from the shape-shifting nomad Zamia Banu Laith Badawi, to the dangerous leader of a band of thieves known as the Falcon Prince. These very different individuals join forces with Adoulla and Raseed against a ghul-maker strengthened by ancient and malignant magic. To destroy him and save the Kingdoms, they must avoid distractions: grief for dead kin, guilt over those they’ve slain, and the complications of love. Adoulla, Raseed and Zamia all find their deepest commitments—to guild, religious order or clan—tested in the process.

This is bold, rip-roaring stuff: the kind of story that demands the vivid, high-contrast color of the pulp magazines that are its direct forbears. The cover art, with its grim-faced heroes and half-incinerated ghuls, evokes that ethos. So does Ahmed’s prose, which ranges from the mildly baroque—“When he was outside of Dhamsawaat, stalking bone ghuls through cobwebbed catacombs or sand ghuls across dusty plains, he often had to settle for chewing sweet-tea root”—to the ker-pow: “A crossbow bolt! Men and women screamed.”

What Throne of the Crescent Moon offers, then, is a decidedly old-school pleasure. Here be secret scrolls, ancient curses and various types of undead. Yet the book is also emphatically contemporary, especially in the way it deals with age and gender. Adoulla, the old man, is the main character, not a Gandalf who pops in and out of the tale to guide and advise the real, youthful subjects. He even gets a love story. And his love interest, the courtesan Miri, is a sensible, realistically portrayed, and erotically powerful woman of his own age. These mature heroes are so compelling that they threaten to eclipse the less complex Raseed and Zamia—but hey, that’s the privilege of the old. Adoulla and Miri have a long history together, and their difficult, charged relationship allows them to steal the show.

Zamia and Miri, with the alkhemist Litaz—another vibrant, gifted older woman—form a trio of strong and highly individual female characters, something not typically associated with the sword-and-sorcery genre. For me, Ahmed’s interest in characters who fall outside the traditional young, male hero-type is what makes his book unique. His representation of a complex, religiously-based society is also welcome, but it’s his subversion of the most common definition of “hero,” within an uncompromisingly heroic fantasy story, that lets Throne of the Crescent Moon deliver something we don’t get every day: an old-school pleasure that’s not a guilty one.

The Mirage, Matt Ruff’s new novel, is based on a striking reversal of history. Set in the Islamic and democratic United Arab States, it opens with the traumatic events of November 9, 2001, the day a group of radical Christian terrorists hijacked four planes. The terrorists flew two planes into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry building in Riyadh. Now, in the aftermath of 11/9, three agents with Arab Homeland Security discover a secret that pits them against the crime lord Saddam Hussein and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Osama bin Laden.

The Mirage is more a mirror-history than an alternate: while set in the “U.A.S.,” it’s really about the U.S.A. The implications of this mirror-trick take shape when the three security agents find a weird artifact in the apartment of a suspected suicide bomber: a New York Times newspaper from September 12, 2001. The goal of the characters through most of the book is to find out what that alien newspaper means–and whether it’s real, or just a mirage.

A lot of people, I suspect, are going to read The Mirage. They’ll read it because of its gripping concept, and because they’re eager to see a new take on 9/11. They’ll read it because they want to see Muslim characters portrayed with sensitivity, something Matt Ruff does well. By and large, he succeeds in crafting a varied Islamic world, with different kinds of Muslims–Sunni, Shia, doubting, lapsed. There are also Jews, who have a comfortable relationship with Arabs, as Israel is now located on the Baltic Sea. There are Christian Arabs, Russian Orthodox, and a variety of extremist Christian groups, who have broken North America into fundamentalist dictatorships.

Part of the fun of The Mirage is turning this upside-down world over again, and catching a glimpse of our own reality. Twirl Matt Ruff’s globe around a few times, however, and a curious gap emerges. The Mirage pits a democratic Islamic state against Christian fundamentalist terrorists who, in a clever bit of historical sampling, call themselves “crusaders.” Every country has a religion, and an Abrahamic religion at that. There is no secular state.

This is strange, because it results in a reversed version of the U.S. that is missing the secular voice–a voice that wields a good deal of power in the world we know, and one with a specific position regarding not just Islam, but all organized religion. Jewish, Christian and Muslim perspectives, however much they differ, share a good deal, especially when placed opposite a secular worldview. The similarities are even stronger when it comes to extremists, which is why it works so well for Ruff to change the 9/11 attacks into attacks by crusading Christians. His careful portrayal of Muslims is laudable, but by making their enemies Christian extremists he misses the chance to portray any version of the secular West, from which he will probably draw a large proportion of his readers. One might argue that Samir, a non-practicing Muslim character, is meant to stand in for a possible secular reader, but Samir lives in an Islamic state, and his position within it is weak. What’s missing from The Mirage is a secular voice with power.

By leaving a culture like that of the U.S., with its strong secular influence, out of the picture, The Mirage gives the non-religious reader an easy out, and might even be taken to suggest a link between religion and violence–an idea that is not exactly new. This means that while The Mirage is a fast-paced and clever thriller, it never crosses the line that would make it a thought-provoking meditation on history. It remains a colorful spectacle of religious folks fighting each other–an entertaining, but not at all challenging, mirage.

Background: Our latest interview is with Muslim American writer G. Willow Wilson which was conducted by Rebecca Hankins. Wilson is a writer and scholar, a convert to Islam whose commentary often addresses Islamic and interfaith issues. An avid supporter of new and alternative media, Wilson has written for political and culture blogs from across a wide spectrum of views. Her official website is at the following URL: http://www.gwillowwilson.com http://www.gwillowwilson.com

R Hankins: Tell us a little about your background.
G. Willow Wilson: I was born in New Jersey and we moved to Colorado when I was a child so I’m sort of a hybrid east coaster mid westerner. I went to college at Boston University, graduated with a degree in history, and I had been kind of a closeted spiritual person for most of my life, you know I say in the book, I tried to be an atheist, and just wasn’t very good at it. I was not raised with any kind of religion, but in college I began to get a little bit more serious about exploring religion and what it meant. I knew that I was a monotheist, but I didn’t know what kind of monotheist I was.   Islam to me, on a theological level, embodied the kind of relationship that I had to God, and the things that I believed about the nature of God.  It was a slow process. I was not enthusiastic at first about the idea of converting because I knew even before 9/11 what kind of hardships would come along with it, and questions, and potential risks from people I loved and I didn’t want that. So I really resisted for several years, the idea of converting, and especially– 9/11 happened my junior year of college and that really pushed back my conversion process because I said “wait a minute I have to go back and really make sure that this religion isn’t actually about terrorism and that it’s not about killing innocent people or hijacking airplanes” so I had to really be firm in that because if that’s what it’s about then it’s not for me. It took a couple years after that to really reassure myself that these people really were aberrations and that there was nothing in the religion that could possibly justify what they had done. I was approaching Islam through a purely textual route. I really didn’t know any Muslims at the time. I had never been to a Muslim country; I had never been inside a mosque. I didn’t know any sort of contemporary issues. I knew that I had a sense and I watched the news; I saw women in Burkas and those kinds of things, but that was– my knowledge was pretty cosmetic when it came to gender relationships within Islam. I thought, well okay I’ll go into it with an open mind and I’ll see, and that’s part of the reason I went to Egypt after I graduated. I got a job in Egypt to teach; moved there a couple of months after graduating college. It’s because I wanted to kind of see first-hand, what the situation was, and what it was like for women in a Muslim country, and come to my own decision that way.

R. Hankins: How did you begin writing in the genre of graphic novels and comics?
G. Willow Wilson: I have been a fan since childhood. I think I was maybe ten years old when I first got a sort of PSA, little six page comic book in school that featured the x-men talking about how bad it was to smoke and how you shouldn’t smoke, so it really had nothing to do with comics as a medium.  It was really to get kids to not smoke, but I was so fascinated by these characters that were in these costumes, running around, they were so strong, and they knew everything that was going on. I started watching, at that time, there was a Saturday morning cartoon show on Fox of the X-men, and I watched it religiously, no pun intended, every Saturday for years or at least a couple of years. So that was really my introduction. I was a big reader as a kid, of all kinds of books. I loved fantasy. I loved the Lloyd Alexander series: The Chronicles of Prydain, The Children of Llyr, and all those wonderful books based on Welsh mythology for children.  My father read me Lord of the Rings when I was two or three and so, I was really sort of dedicated.  I didn’t know what geek culture was at that age of course, I just thought these are what good books look like. Comics kind of stood out to me because they were so multi-sensory; you had pictures, you had words, even at that time a lot of comic books were being adapted into cartoon shows or movies, so it seemed almost like a kind of mythology that crossed the boundaries of media; and the characters were sort of alive in all these different ways and in books, and in movies. I love comics, it was really an X-Men addiction for a long time and then in high school I branched out and started reading a lot of the Vertigo books that were coming out around that time; Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which of course transformed the whole genre. Shade the Changing Men by Peter Milligan, which is another fantastic postmodern, more mature literary oriented comic.  In high school, I figured out if that these books exist then there must people who make them for a living, so I sort of set out on how to do that.

It is true that women are really underrepresented in the creative side of comics and in fact right now there is kind of a big brouhaha, going on because DC is re-launching, DCC is the company that does Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, a lot of those big characters. They’re re-launching a lot of their monthly comic books, and women creators have dropped to one percent of the total number of creators on these new books. One percent of these books are written or drawn by women, and there was a lot of fall-out from that, because lots of people said this is ridiculous, you know, women are underrepresented to begin with and you’ve got a mere one percentage of books are going to be drawn by women. However, there are quite a few women editors in comics, who don’t get the proper credit that they deserve, and who do an amazing job steering and guiding a lot of these, you know, really mythic characters and the stories and that kind of thing. So I have been lucky enough to work with several women editors in the industry. Joan Hilky, edited my first graphic novel Cairo. Karen Burger who is a legend in her own industry and the editor of Vertigo, I did a book with her, Air, that was nominated for an Eisner Award. The first issue of my first Marvel project at Marvel Comics, Mystic, which came out yesterday, was edited by Janine Schaffer. Things are starting to change, and I think more on the editorial side rather than on the creative side where there is still a huge gender gap, but more and more women are filling those positions within the big comic company as editors, so that’s a good start.

R. Hankins:  Have you found that there is any pushback or negative reaction to your writings?
G. Willow Wilson: I think that part of the reason I haven’t is because number one I’m writing in English and that limits your audience somewhat and people who, number one can read and access stuff and would go and pick it out are generally not people who are antagonistic to it.  I think if I were writing in Arabic I’d have a different experience.  But at the same time one of the original works of fantasy in world literature was written by Arab Muslims, the Thousand and one Nights, so I think, there is this discomfort in the community with the idea of magic, that I had some conversations about, but certainly there is so much in the Islamic cannon when it comes to things like the Jin and there are things that we can’t see. There is a belief in most of the parts of Muslims world that magic is quite real, but that it’s very dangerous and that’s it sort of irreligious and you should stay away from it. Ironically I think some of the discomfort with fantasy is the genre that exists in some parts of the Muslim world arises not from a particular rejection of some of the ideas behind fantasy, but it’s because a lot of people really believe that this stuff is true; that you can be hurt for instance by the Jin, by the Unseen, that there is black magic, that it can be very damaging, and so I think it really comes from a belief rather than from disbelief. But I think it’s changing, for example in the Arab world there’s been some; I think I saw a piece on this on NPR, but this is something that I hear also from friends and family. Living in Egypt for example, there’s been a new wave of young authors that are producing more novels that are becoming more popular. A great example is Yacubian Building, which of course is translated into the English Yacoub and was made into a movie. It was the closest thing the Arab world had to bestseller in a while, and it was made into a movie with a bunch of very famous actors. The English title is the Yacoub Building. I’m not sure that it’s too great a leap to say the fact that in the Arab world at any rate people do seem to be reading more and at the same time we have this wave of revolution. I don’t think those two things are disconnected.

R. Hankins: Do you think there is a general lack of interest in Science Fiction in the Muslim world?  What has been your experience?
G. Willow Wilson: I have been very surprised by the level of interest and support that I’ve gotten. For a long time I thought it was just the American Muslim community, because there is a lot of geek cultures, generally sci-fi fantasy comics, is really big in the Muslim community because it’s an outsider culture. That really resonates with American Muslims who are kind of struggling to reconcile too often conflicting identities. I mean that kind of thinking is at the core of sci-fi and fantasy. You’ve got the kid who’s kind of on the outside, but he has super powers; he discovers he’s got this great destiny or you know, things really aren’t that bad after all, and I think that really appeals to Muslim, especially youth, Muslim youth in America. I had always thought, “gosh it’s a good thing that people abroad, and Cairo, and the Middle East are not reading this stuff because I’m sure I would just get skewered, and then I started, just before last year, I got a message on Twitter from a couple of guys in Cairo who said we really want you to do a signing in Cairo. We love your books and we’ve read Cairo the graphic novel and some of the other stuff and we want you to come do a signing. I said “Oh my God and I was planning to travel there to see family. My husband’s family is Egyptian. We had been planning to travel there anyway, and so I said okay let’s set something up while I’m planning on being in Cairo. The event, which was in an English language bookstore, was packed. There were more people there than at a lot of my US signings that I’ve done. There were probably 50 people in this very small little space, asking very good questions and they were really engaged. One guy actually got up and he had written a little speech about how he’d been studying abroad in the US in the winter, it was snowy and cold, he had never seen snow before, and he was kind of miserable. Reading Cairo the graphic novel had given him kind of a taste of home and made him feel less homesick and had inspired him to do his own comic book, which he had just sort of drawn, written, and laminated on a home computer. He gave me a copy and it was probably one of the best moments for me as a writer ever, to hear that from him, and I thought at that time that “oh my God, this could really work”, I think things are really starting to change. Sure enough six months later, those same kids who came to that signing were over-throwing the government. It was really amazing for me.

R. Hankins: How did you write your graphic novel Cairo? Is this opportunity to breakdown stereotypes where you even include a sympathetic portrayal of a female Israeli Special Forces soldier.  Tell me a little bit more about how you wrote that dialogue and was it difficult to write dialogue for the male voice?
G. Willow Wilson: Yeah it is kind of tough and I did have to think very very carefully about exactly what I was saying. Are people from one side going to be able to attack me about this, and are the other people going to be able to attack me about this stuff. It was tough, I had to think about it very carefully, but I was lucky enough to give part of the early manuscript to one of the original, Refuseniks who had served time in prison for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territory. He read it and gave me some good feedback. It’s a really tough call with anything like that and anytime you try to include a conflict like that you’re really kind of borrowing trouble, and I kind of knew that. I was in Cairo doing a reading and somebody asked me about that; she  said you know this could never happen right, this love affair between an Israeli soldier and an Egyptian guy?  Probably not, but that’s part of the fantasy, you get to write a happy ending.  On the other hand I think people are a little bit in denial, you go to Sinai and you see tons of Egyptian/Israeli couples.

Something that is really important to me is bringing a new perspective, and putting combinations of characters together that would not occur to anyone. That’s really a reflection of my own life.  I’m lucky enough to have a very broad diverse set of interests and they come with a broad diverse set of friends and so the idea of very, very different kinds of people coming together and sort of being forced by destiny to interact and cooperate, is I think one of the biggest themes in all of my books. Certainly it’s there in Cairo, where you’ve got a would be suicide bomber whose sort of on the run, kind of a naïve American girl who thinks she’s going to kind go to Egypt and cut a swath, and everything will be great; a journalist and an Israeli soldier. To me, the thing that I think is so urgent right now in the world is this reminder that there are these core parts of the human experience that really do transcend culture and religion. People get restless and get hurt and fall in love and fall out of love, and in kind of some of the same essential ways even though they express them very differently, and so that’s important to me to communicate through these very varied cast of characters that I put in my books.

It struck me once, and this is partially the inspiration for Tova, even though it has nothing to do with soldiers or anything like that. I was in Sinai at a little beach resort-camping site basically, and there was a little Israeli girl there with her mother; the girl was maybe six or seven. They were sort of keeping things very much on the down low trying not to say where they were from. They were very cagy because they didn’t want to get into it with people, so I could tell the little girl was speaking Hebrew to her mother and the mother would speak back in English trying to get the kid to not speak in Hebrew.  There were eels in the water and the little girl was frightened, the automatic response of the Egyptian guy was to comfort her because it’s a child who is afraid and he needs to comfort a child.

Why an American of Lebanese descent? Number one because I wanted to make him kind of on the down low Shia so that I could have some religious variety within the Muslims that I was portraying. I also wanted to have an Arab character that looked non-stereotypically Arab because there are blonde haired, blue eyed Arabs, Arabs with very dark skin. It’s a extremely diverse ethnic group so I wanted to have one character that was an Arab that didn’t look like what a Western reader would envision an Arab looks like. There wasn’t any sort of deeper stick than that.
(End of Part 1)

(Image Source: Matt Ruff’s Official Website)

About Matt Ruff: Matt Ruff is a well known novelist whose work has won numerous awards inclusing being long-listed for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, winning the 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Washington State Book Award, two PNBA Book Awards, and two Washington State Book Award. Matt has also recieved the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Prose. He has published five different novels with Mirage bring the latest one. Mirage is an interesting an nuanced take on the Alternative History genre where the roles between the side are reversed in the war on terror.

Matt Ruff’s Official Website: http://www.bymattruff.com/

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: Mirage is set in an alternative world where the sides in the war on terror are flipped, what inspired you to write this novel?
Matt Ruff: It grew out of a desire to tell a story about 9/11 and the War on Terror that wasn’t just a cookie-cutter version of what other writers were doing, but that would explore the issues involved from a unique angle. I wanted it to be an engaging read that also gave you stuff to think about. Other items on my wish list were that I wanted to give a more central role to ordinary, non-terrorist Arab Muslims who typically got short shrift in stories like this, and I wanted to create a more naturalistic portrait of Islam.

And my solution for accomplishing all this was to turn the world upside down: to create a classic 9/11-themed thriller, but with Iraqi protagonists, set in a reality where Arabia was the world’s superpower.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: In many cases the countries, ideologies and even personalities are the mirror images of their counterparts in the real world, do you believe that it is the circumstances that make people who they are or was there some other idea at play when you were writing this?
Matt Ruff: Without giving too many spoilers, much of the mirroring comes from the fact that what I was trying to evoke was not so much a realistic Arab Muslim democracy as the more fanciful version held out by the Bush administration as an enticement for invading Iraq: the one that was supposed to spring forth magically from the ashes of Saddam’s kingdom, without any real effort or concern for historical context.

On the level of individuals, I think we’re bounded and shaped by circumstance, but ultimately the kind of person you are is up to you. One of the rules I devised for the mirage world is that people’s basic characters wouldn’t change, only their job descriptions. So Saddam Hussein is still a wicked man, but since he can’t be a dictator, he becomes a gangster. Osama bin Laden is a warmongering politician. And my protagonist Mustafa al Baghdadi struggles to be a good man, as he would in any world, within the limits of the choices life has handed him.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: What kind of research did you do in writing the novel?
Matt Ruff: I read up on the history of the region and on the famous personalities involved, so that I’d know just how much my alternate reality was changing things. I read first-person accounts and reports of life in Iraq during and before the war, and other material that I thought might provide useful anecdotes. With Islam, I tried to be careful about getting specific points of theology right, without falling into the trap of confusing religious orthodoxy with the diverse ways religion is actually practiced by members of the faith, particularly in a free society.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: What is the main lesson that you want your readers to draw from this novel?
Matt Ruff: I’m reluctant to spell out specific lessons or messages. What I try to do in The Mirage is show readers a world and people they think they know from a very different perspective, and trust them to draw their own conclusions from that.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: Do you believe in the inherent goodness of humankind and the capacity of speculative fiction to highlight or even bring it out?
Matt Ruff: I’m temperamentally an optimist—sometimes naively so—but I guess what I believe in is the inherent humanness of humankind. Which is to say, the ability of all people to commit both good and bad acts. I’m pleased by the former, disappointed by the latter, and not especially shocked by either.

And yes, I think speculative fiction can portray human nature as well as any kind of fiction can, and perhaps inspire people to do better.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: The world of Mirage seems very ripe for an expanded universe, any thoughts on this?
Matt Ruff: Well, my original idea was that The Mirage would be a TV series. But at the time—this was late 2006/early 2007—the concept was simply too controversial for any American TV network to want to touch, so I decided to do it as a novel, which was actually OK, because it meant I had much more control over the story.

With the passage of time I think the subject matter has become at least somewhat less radioactive, so who knows, if the book does well enough, maybe a TV series could still happen. Certainly you could expand the basic arc of the story to allow side trips into other parts of the mirage world and a much deeper exploration of the characters.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: What are you favorite Science Fiction and/or Alternative History authors?
Matt Ruff: My favorite alt-history novel would probably be Robert Harris’s Fatherland. Philip K. Dick also looms large, though if I’m honest I usually like his ideas more than his execution of them. Other writers in the broader speculative fiction field who I feel a close kinship to would include John Crowley, Shirley Jackson, and Neal Stephenson.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: Mirage is very different from the previous work that you have published, are there common threads that link the various works that you have written?
Matt Ruff: I think the two most persistent themes in my work are seeing the world through other people’s eyes—including people we may not like very much—and figuring out how to get on in a world where people will always disagree but have to coexist anyway. Both of those themes are very well represented in The Mirage, I’d say.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad: After Mirage, what is the next project that you are working on?
Matt Ruff: My most likely next project is a novel called Lovecraft Country. It’s set in the Jim Crow era and concerns an African-American travel writer and pulp-fiction geek who drives around the U.S. reviewing hotels and restaurants that accept black customers. So, another attempt to view a familiar reality through a different set of eyes—and have some adventures along the way.

Sophia Al-Maria, who also goes by the nom-de-plume Sci-Fi Wahabi, is a Qatari artist and a writer. Her work is mainly fused with futurism in the Gulf region. In the past she has curated a tour of Doha by Dhow called “Future Tents” and has also performed  ‘tours from the future’ at Art Dubai. Part of her is also about fusing American and Arab pop cultures. She is also the Gulf Collection Curator at the Arab Museum of Modern Art. She is currently writing a book for Harper Perennial. More information about Sophia’s work can be obtained from here, here and here.

The Orion’s Arm Universe Project is an online collaborative project focused on world building. Recently I received an invitation letter from the creators of the project. These folks have been around for sometime now and the projects has been praised by the likes of Cory Doctorow. The invitation is not just to our website but to the reader of Islam and Science Fiction. I encourage the readers to take up this offer and contribute to the Orion’s Arm Universe. Here is  the letter:

The Orion’s Arm Universe Project is an open source collective worldbuilding and fiction writing project that seeks to depict a plausible world set 10,000 years in the future.

Orion’s Arm (OA for short) is a big place with nearly a decade of history and hundreds of contributors.  But we’re always happy to welcome new friends and new ideas.

From time to time, the members of the project have discussed the fact that although we seek to depict the future of the entire human race, we have little information on the site regarding the future of cultures that don’t have their origins in Europe or the America’s. This is primarily due to the fact that the bulk of our membership comes from those parts of the world and also because we are reluctant to attempt to write about cultures and parts of the world we know little or nothing about beyond what we might find on Wikipedia or the like, which would likely not be fully correct or realistic.

Recently we came across a blog from a Muslim SF fan that included a link to your project.  After looking at your site, we discovered that you actually have a link to us in your site archive, specifically related to one part of our website, the Stellar Umma, which can also be found here.

Based on this, as well as the quality of your website and project, we’d like to do the following:

First, we’d like to return the favor and add a link to your website to our Links and Extras page.

Second, we wanted to extend an invitation to any authors or artists associated with your project to pay us a visit, explore the OA universe and its fictional future history, and possibly contribute ideas, stories, or artwork to the project.  In particular, we were hoping you might be able to help us expand our depiction of Muslim and possibly non-European cultures and ideas within OA.  Any such contributions would need to fall within the bounds of the Canon of the OA universe but in general we’ve found that the setting is large enough to accommodate just about any idea.

So please, check us out, explore the Orion’s Arm setting, and consider joining one of our discussion groups, where everything in the OA setting gets started.  If you have any questions or concerns regarding any of the above or just on general principles, please don’t hesitate to contact us, either via the discussion groups or using the link on the OA homepage.

Abdourahman Waberi’s Aux États-Unis d’Afrique was published in 2006, and the English translation, In the United States of Africa, came out in 2009. It’s a brief, lyrical and pointed satire that imagines our world in reverse: Africa is a region of stability and prosperity, united by a single government, with the desperate multitudes of the impoverished West begging for its aid.

In the United States of Africa is science fiction only in the loosest sense, in the way that Gulliver’s Travels is science fiction: it’s a social commentary that creates an imaginary world in order to critique the world we know. Waberi is not interested in exploring how technology might have developed differently in the United States of Africa, or in inventing new socio-political systems. His interest is in images: “the moon, polished by Malian and Liberian astronauts” (p. 4); a “shelter for destitute Caucasians, with their straight hair and infected lungs” (p. 5). It’s his exuberant prose, laced with just enough irony to sting, that gives these images the destabilizing force of the best science fiction.

At the center of the novel is Malaïka, called Maya: a white girl adopted by African parents and raised in comfort in Asmara. The book describes Maya’s life and her development as an artist, but it’s also addressed to her: “You were an angel, Maya,” declares the unnamed narrator, “both light and vigorous. You were as fresh as a newborn butterfly in the pure air” (p. 29). This creates a curious mirror effect: Maya is shown, but she is also told about her own image, so that she is present both as an actor and as the observer of her own story. Mirrors figure prominently in the novel: “[I]s the person you see every morning in the mirror—that double, that twin—so familiar? Or is she already taking up too much space?” the narrator asks (p. 38). Maya’s mirror-twin is a sinister, threatening figure, but its disappearance later in the novel is even more disturbing: “You are…absent from your own dreams. You really are invisible, there’s no doubt about it. It happens at night, when you take your clothes off before going to bed: you look at yourself in the mirror and you can’t see a thing” (p. 82).

Maya’s alienation is caused by her status as a privileged young woman who nevertheless bears the white skin of “the wretched of the earth” (p. 15). To find herself, she sets out to seek her birth mother in the decaying slums of Paris. “You put on a calm face as you drag two suitcases stuffed with clothes to fight the cold, medicine against the thousand microbes they have in Europe, not forgetting small presents for the people you’ll have to deal with. You were told many times never to leave empty handed” (p. 95).

Maya’s journey provides plenty of opportunities for Waberi to frame Europe in the terms commonly used to describe Africa. There’s a certain amount of glee in this reversal of stereotypes, but the novel is more than just an extended joke. It is, itself, a mirror. In its pages, a reader of any background will see herself or himself reflected in the body of the other. The insistent address of the narrative voice, the repeated you—you are seeing this, you are doing this—underscores the urgent call for self-examination that lies at the heart of the book.

Often, science fiction imagines the future; In the United States of Africa re-imagines the present. Yet it also gestures toward a future in which Maya will find peace, a peace that the reader is called to seek as well. In that future, the narrator declares, “the world will refuse to turn into mud.” This future must grow from the quiet reflection of the present, but it is far less static, less dependent on the image in the mirror. “You will convert the blue sky to palpable works, you will wave azure handkerchiefs in farewell” (p. 123).

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