Your latest novel, "The Dissenters", explores gender, faith, freedom and loss through the story of a woman whose life is shaped by shifting political forces. Who are the dissenters in the novel, and what message does it leave us with? 

Youssef Rakha: All the characters in the novel are dissenters. I wanted to do two things with this novel. Firstly, I wanted to talk about the 2011 revolution in a way that transcends activism, which is why I go back 70 years, to contextualise it and make sense of what happened. Secondly, I wanted to present a woman character of my mother's generation, a character who embodies the Egyptian identity.  

I wouldn't say there is a message so much as there are questions—literature will always raise questions. A key point is that all the characters dissent: the brother who works for the secret police is dissenting against the family, the father is a political dissident, the mother dissents against the father's socialism and from the political status quo, and the daughter dissents against the mother. 

You write between different times, hopping between the past and the present. What made you use this structure for this novel? What similarities do the past and present have for you?  

At the political level, this is interesting. At some point, I realised that to write about the present, I had to contextualise it, historically, within the fictional world I was constructing.  

The discourse of the January Revolution (2011) was largely activist and neoliberal, and one problem with that discourse is that it tends to speak of events or phenomena as if they happened in a vacuum. It eats away at their meaning and significance. The effort to write the history of the moment I'm documenting—as part of the process of documenting it—became a structural aspect of the novel. The two timelines reflect the transformations of the main character. 

For me, the Arab Spring was an enormous learning experience; it was the moment I realised all kinds of assumptions I had about Egyptian society were not true. I think that is why it was important to look at it in the context of the history of modern Egypt. Thinking about this idea of progress, for example, it is fascinating to see how, in some essential ways, very little has changed since the 1950s. 

In 2016, you said that writing in English was a way to create distance between yourself and what is happening in Egypt. Is that why you wrote this novel in English? 

I think it was simply due to the fact that I was functioning in English at that point. In the aftermath of the January Revolution, I felt alienated from my Arabic literary milieu, for political reasons—many had taken issue with me for openly rejecting the Islamist takeover as an acceptable outcome—but also because the composition and structure of the cultural sphere was already changing, perhaps disintegrating.  

It was already an ambition of mine to write an Egyptian novel in English. This was an opportunity to realise that ambition. One of the strange advantages of writing in English is that Modern Standard Arabic is connected with nationalism, so even if you write in opposition to nationalist assumptions or make fun of them, this perspective is embedded in the language. In another language, you don't have to deal with those ideological assumptions at all, so you can look at reality from a more neutral perspective.  

Cairo is an integral part of your work. What is your relationship to the city?  

In practice, I've realised I am not really able to write outside of Cairo, regardless of the language I'm using. I thought this was just something about Cairo as a place, but it turns out it is equally about time—the way time is experienced in Cairo. Of course, Cairo is a huge and incredibly diverse city. My Cairo is only a tiny part of that, but though it might be insulated from the worst of the hardship here, it is representative of the whole.  

I think that if I embody a certain version of Egyptianness, that is how it manifests itself: in the space and time that is my Cairo. And one aspect of that, maybe the most important aspect, is that—like Cairo—I'm forced to embrace and use a modernity that is intrinsically biased against me, as an Arab Muslim, and is designed to conquer and control rather than serve me. I cannot embrace it fully, but I also cannot survive without it. 

That dilemma is Cairo, it is present in every aspect of life in Cairo. I think it is my central theme in a way, it reflects a tension within myself. 

How has Cairo's literary landscape changed in recent decades? Can you describe it in comparison to, for example, the Mubarak years? 

At least in my experience, what started in 2005 was a very promising movement. Literature was becoming part of the social structure, and a readership was developing around interesting books, beyond sales and profit. 

This went on until the revolution. After the revolution, nobody paid much attention to literature; it was all about activism and politics. By the time a literary scene re-emerged, it had been fully commercialised, it had developed along lines very similar to the publishing world in the West, except that Arab readerships are much smaller. For the first time, I heard about serious, celebrated writers being rejected by publishers simply because they would not sell. Political affiliations also reconfigured communities. You had to be part of the group to be paid attention to, and this obviously discouraged a lot of people, while others were left by the wayside.  

Right now, there is very little money and energy to support a literary movement of any kind. There are a few things that are promising—this publisher called Waziz, for example, has developed an effective brand. They publish some great things and make the necessary effort to back their authors and promote their books. I think this is an example to be followed—something compatible enough with capitalist norms to be visible that nonetheless goes beyond capitalism. 

How would you describe the situation in Egypt more broadly? What role does it have as a cultural and political centre for the Arab world? 

I don't think that it is a cultural center anymore—but I don’t know if there is one in the Arab world at the present time, though there is certainly more money and cultural production elsewhere. Geopolitically, Cairo remains central and that will continue to be the case, but culturally it now lacks any source of support.  

State support is no longer forthcoming, all state money is channelled into real-estate developments outside the city proper, and the commercial scene doesn't promote cultural production as such, unless the money comes from elsewhere and that exacts its own price. At a certain point, there was a much bigger NGO scene, too, and the foundation money used to help with cultural activity. At present, I feel the Cairo I've known is in danger, it is being encroached on and eroded.  

Do you think the revolution in Egypt is continuing in some forms? Or has it completely halted?  

I think the interesting question is "What is the revolution?" I think in terms of activism, neoliberalism and the Arab Spring—that has failed. It failed to bring about change, but I think it also failed to suggest change that was in any way desirable. It failed to even address issues like personal rights or freedom of belief. It was happy to accommodate theocratic fascism.  

But the revolution in the sense of the continuous struggle for personal liberty and space to live as we choose—that, I hope, is always ongoing. It is very difficult to see how things might improve now because of regional and global conditions, but that doesn’t mean the drive to liberate ourselves will disappear.