Fatima Al-Rashid does not consider herself a bilingual writer. She considers herself two writers who happen to share a body. Her Arabic fiction and her English essays are not translations of each other; they operate in different registers, make different formal choices, and reach for different emotional territories. The person who writes in Arabic, she tells me, is closer to her grandmother. The one who writes in English is closer to her students.
We are sitting in her kitchen in Amsterdam, which is lined with books in six languages and two alphabets. She makes tea without asking whether I want any. She has the specific quality of composure that belongs to people who have survived a great deal of movement and have stopped performing adaptability. She is still. The room organises itself around her.
On the Limits of Translation
Her most recent novel, written in Arabic and translated into twelve languages, is about a family dispersed across three continents — Kuwait, London, and São Paulo — and the silences that accumulate between people who love each other across distance and difference. When I ask about the English translation, she pauses for a long time before answering. "There is a word in Arabic," she says, "that means the weight of a secret you are carrying for someone else. We lost it in every translation. We tried fourteen versions. I stopped looking at the English edition eventually. It is a different book."
Arabic and English reach for different things in me. I am not a bilingual writer. I am two writers who share a body.
On Diaspora and Belonging
Al-Rashid was born in Kuwait City, educated in Beirut, London, and Chicago, and has lived in Amsterdam for eleven years. She describes herself, without bitterness, as someone who does not belong completely anywhere and has made peace with that as a structural condition rather than a wound. "Diaspora writers are sometimes asked to speak for a people," she says. "I speak for this person, in this kitchen, at this age. That is already more than I can do well."