The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar is a novel that brings a much needed voice from the Middle East. Set in Kuwait, the narrative depicts the dualities in the experience of being a modern woman in a patriarchal system. In the story, Dahlia is living two lives; as a working woman in the outside world, and a daughter whose parents are bound by the dictates of patriarchy.
As she edges closer to the age of thirty, she is faced with the brutal societal expectation to get married, just as her other friends have, while also dealing with past trauma that she hasn’t fully come to terms with. Layla AlAmmar’s novel is a brilliant and brave new story from Kuwait that offers a wider, more nuanced and complex picture of living in urban cities of the Gulf. We spoke to Layla AlAmmar about her novel, writing in Kuwait and her character’s distinct interest in art. - Sumaiyya Naseem
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The Borough Press (UK), 2019
Congratulations on your debut! The Pact We Made gripped me from start to finish because it’s character driven but also has a steady plot. What was the path to getting published like for you, as someone from the Middle East who is writing in English? Were there challenges or surprises that you did not anticipate?
Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed the book. Getting published is always a challenge, no matter where you’re from, and it was a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. I considered that it might be difficult to get published, having grown up in the Middle East where there’s not an infrastructure for creative writing or publishing, particularly in English. Consequently, I took it slow and focused on developing my craft and learning as much as I could about the industry.
In 2013, I pursued a Master’s in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. This was a huge opportunity for me to network with other writers and industry professionals, in addition to bettering myself as a writer through receiving and giving critiques. During my Master’s, I had a few short stories published in the UK and US, one of which was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Soon after graduating, I finished this novel, which began life as a short story written during the programme. I then spent the following three years editing it while querying literary agents to seek representation.
In 2017, I signed with an agent and two years later The Pact We Made was published by Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
The Pact We Made is a #MeToo novel set in Kuwait and it certainly adds to the narrative on trauma, especially with its setting in a rigidly patriarchal society. Did the global #MeToo movement impact your writing process?
No, it didn’t, and to be honest, I find the #MeToo tag a bit reductive when applied to the novel. I think the narrative is much more expansive than that, and using that label leads people to define Dahlia, the main character, by her trauma, which I feel is ultimately unfair/unhelpful. In general I think labels place too many expectations on a work. The reader immediately begins to frame the way they expect to receive the book when you tell them this is a Trauma novel, or Arab novel, or Muslim novel, or whatever the case may be. The narrative does deal with trauma and patriarchy, but these are themes and settings that transcend borders.
We definitely need more novels set in the Middle East, written by people who actually live there. What is the challenge that new writers face? What does the literary community in Kuwait need in order to share their voices?
I think the biggest challenge for new writers or those with an ambition to write is the lack of institutional support within the country, or indeed the wider region. Creative Writing courses or degrees aren’t a thing at university level, and literary arts are not very encouraged within the education system or on a wider post-school level. Certainly the support isn’t there for people who write in English. Moreover, while there are workshops and courses (I’ve given a few myself), there isn’t much space for sustained improvement in the craft. Yes, writing is a talent, but much of what is needed to get published involves a great deal of work and discipline and persistence, which can be hard to cultivate if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Recently an organisation called The Writer’s Hub has come up in Kuwait to support and encourage writing in English, and they’ve held conferences and workshops to help writers. I would love to see that continue and build and expand.
Your novel depicts life in urban cities of the Gulf that are expanding to include spaces for artists and art appreciation. Was it your intention to highlight this side of the Middle East or did it happen naturally while you crafted the story?
It happened quite naturally. I’m encouraged by the increasing visibility art and artists are getting around the region and on an international level. There are some incredibly unique creatives out there who are really making an impact and challenging expectations of art in and from the Middle East, such as Mohammad Sharaf, Zahra Al-Mahdi, Aseel AlYaqoub, and Maha Alasaker. I have a huge appreciation for art and so I love to go out and see and support art initiatives in the country. Consequently, that appreciation and respect seeped into my own creative work.
The way you write about art is intimate in the way it connects to the self—for Dahlia, art is her escape and a channel for her inner turmoil. The artworks mentioned in the novel also affect its mood and tone. Can you talk a little about the Romantic art that Dahlia is drawn to and the significance it holds for you as the writer?
I love art and I have for as long as I can remember. It might be odd for a writer to say, but I do feel there are times that words utterly fail us, and I find that art is quite adept at filling that silence. There’s a transcendance to art, an openness to it, that I find very thought-provoking. I particularly enjoy depictions of literary works like Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and John Milton, and so when I realised that Dahlia was an artist, I tried to think about which artists might appeal to her. I felt the gothic, melancholic styles of Dore’, Goya, Harry Clarke, and others would resonate with her. They have a way of illustrating the human condition which I find to be quite sublime. In a sense, there’s a kind of monstrous beauty to their work--the depth, the interplay between light and shadow, the unflinching nature of it—that transcends or even collapses time and space.
The gateway piece to this was The Nightmare by Henri Fuseli. It is, to my mind, a perfect depiction of the sensation that we in the Arab world call the yathoom—a demonic creature of folklore who perches on your chest in the night as you try to sleep. When I saw that Fuseli painting for the first time, I was struck dumb by it. Here was this Anglo-Swiss, an ordained priest, from the late 18th century (which is about as far away as one could get from my reality as a woman living in modern-day Kuwait), and he’d managed to capture, in one image, what I had felt on more nights than I could remember. The uncaring weight on the chest, the featureless eyes in the dark, the draping of oneself at the wrong end of the bed (in what can be nothing but an effort to confound the demon), it was all there. It was a message from 1781, one that had traveled 238 years to tell me I wasn’t alone. That’s the transcendance I speak of, the ability to connect with a shared humanity and a shared empathy.
For Dahlia, I felt like Francisco Goya’s series Los Caprichos, or The Caprices of Society, would resonate strongly with her. It’s a series of 80 quite grotesque illustrations centering on the follies and foibles of society—from persistent superstition to marital shortcomings to class issues. These were tensions that Dahlia would find interesting to ponder.
There’s a sense of duality to Dahlia’s identity which causes her to feel torn between her family and independence as a woman—can you talk about dual selves in the context of patriarchy in Kuwaiti society?
I think we all wear masks. I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to women, much less Kuwaiti women. Many people feel a sense of tension and friction between different aspects of their personhood, which is something they may or may not be able to resolve, and it has far-reaching implications and impact. Speaking to Arab women in particular, I think it’s a very pivotal time in our part of the world. Things are changing rapidly and there’s a great deal of awakening and consciousness raising that’s happening, in no small part because of the democratising power of social media. Arab women are being exposed to many different narratives and a widening universe of possibilities upon which to inscribe their own stories. It’s a liberating feeling, to be sure, and yet there is pull back from tradition and custom (whether this comes from outside a woman or a discomfort/anxiety within herself). It’s quite easy to place the blame, as it were, on the long history of patriarchy in our part of the world, but we have to interrogate our role, as women, in perpetuating and reinforcing this status quo—whether it’s through the mother-daughter relationship or how we speak about and assign judgment or value to the actions of other women.
In a sense, we are tasked with deciding what it means to be an Arab woman, for ourselves, and then trying to find some way to communicate that idea, both within our region and abroad.
The novel’s ending is a moment of triumph for Dahlia, but one that raises more questions than it gives answers. Did you know how the story would end before you wrote it or was this something that grew out of the character’s development?
I never know how my stories end. I’m not a planner or plotter in any sense of the word. I just write my way to whatever feels most organic. As I was approaching the end of the novel, three different endings opened up before me as possibilities, and broadly speaking they could be classified as ultra-feminist, quasi-independent, and somewhat-conforming. It could have gone in any of those directions, but as I closed in on the end, the possibility narrowed to the first and second options and then finally rested on what I feel is the second. I didn’t think it would feel particularly authentic for someone like Dahlia, with her life story and set of experiences, to suddenly have this ultra-feminist moment, but I also didn’t think it made sense for her to fall back into a “weaker” ending. I felt like charting a middle course made the most sense for the character, but as I said, it was an organic ending, not one that I contrived or tried to force into being from the outset.
I’m constantly asked what happens to Dahlia after the book ends, and I always say that it’s for the reader to decide for themselves. It’s not my place to dictate what happens after the book ends, and for me, a book should begin and end with questions. It should leave the reader with thoughts about what they read but also how it relates to their own being and way of seeing the world.
We’d love to read more of your work! Is there something you’re currently working on?
I wrote a short story that takes place in the same universe as The Pact We Made and is told from the point of view of Dahlia’s father. You can find it in a collection called Underground: Tales for London. I’ve had other short stories published online as well, but my second novel, Silence Is a Sense, comes out in spring 2021. It deals with a Syrian refugee who has been resettled in the UK, and so the novel looks at alt-right rhetoric, Islamophobia, and the rise of nationalist thinking, but also to what extent chronic trauma can be articulated.
Who are some of the female writers and artists whose work you admire?
As I was growing up in Kuwait, there wasn’t any emphasis on the arts in my schooling, so I was not at all knowledgeable about Arab writers, much less female ones. Consequently, my reading tended towards the outside, to the work of the Brontes and Austen and Woolf. My favourite book as a child was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and when I was older I fell in love with Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle , if only for the sheer volume of allusions and references she manages to pack in such a small space. I also adore the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Han Kang, and Hilary Mantel.
On a regional level though I’m really digging the poetry of Zeina Hashem Beck. She’s a Lebanese poet based in Dubai who is doing phenomenally interesting things with language. I’m a bit of a word nerd and the etymologies of words, the tensions within and between them, is something I’ve always been fascinated by. And being bilingual, the dialogic poems she’s writing, which sort of dance between Arabic and English, are very much in line with the way many of us in the Arab world think and feel and express ourselves now. It’s something that I’ve wanted to experiment with in fiction, but I think poetry is a wonderful medium for that.
Can we know what you’re currently reading?
I’ve just started a PhD in Arab women’s fiction, so most of my reading has been scholarly and/or revolving around my research area. I recently read a novella called Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur which I found incredibly inventive and original. I’ve also been looking at the work of Adania Shibli, which have an inventive and unconventional narrative style that is quite mesmerizing. For fun though, I’ve been re-reading a lot of Joseph Campbell’s work on comparative mythology as well as Stephen Fry’s retellings of Greek myths in Mythos and Heroes.
About
Layla AlAmmar grew up in Kuwait. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and her work has appeared in The Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine, The Red Letters St Andrews Prose Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine where she was a finalist for the Creative Writing Award 2014. In 2018, she served as British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. She currently lives in the UK where she's pursuing a PhD in Arab Women's Fiction.
