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The Literary Desk · Interview · Issue 15

Saadi Youssef interviewed by Leilah Nadir and James Byrne

Saadi Youssef · Leilah Nadir · James Byrne · Khaled Mattawa

A short introduction presents Saadi Youssef as a poet born near Basra in 1934, who began writing at seventeen and went on to publish over thirty collections, a volume of stories, two novels and several essays. He translated Whitman, Cavafy, Lorca and Vasko Popa into Arabic. Khaled Mattawa's English version of his poems, published by Graywolf Press in 2002, took a PEN translation prize the following year. Youssef had settled in the United Kingdom in 1999.

Leilah Nadir opens by asking how he felt in exile on 20 March 2003. Youssef says he was in Amsterdam and was half-paralysed for hours, and he predicts decades of consequences, comparing the American presence with the British one that took until 1958 to end. He describes the revolt of 1920 and the shifting positions of Iraq's political parties. Asked whether he will return, he says never: his arrival at that moment would have been symbolic, and he ties the decision to an Iraqi tradition of the poet as a symbol, naming Marouf al-Rusafi and Mohamed Mahdi al-Jawahiri. An Arabic saying about three stages of love, from sugar to torture to the cemetery, frames his earlier homecomings in 1959 and 1972.

James Byrne asks whether England gives his writing freedom, and Youssef speaks of personal security after years of fear. He recalls Algeria in 1964 and Paris, and why pressure from the French authorities led him to leave. He discusses his poem 'America, America', read to applause at a London festival, and answers Byrne's question about the responsibility of western poets writing on the 'war on terror'.

The later questions move to freedom in Iraq after the invasion, the nightmares that made him stop following the news, and childhood scenes he treats as a store to draw on. On nostalgia he says it must be handled rationally. On the pull between art and politics, and on writing in besieged Beirut in 1982, including the poem 'Mary Comes', he insists on direct experience. The interview ends with Syria's secular publishing climate and his pleasure at having a collection in English.

Poems in this selection

  • America, America
  • Days of June
  • Mary Comes
  • The Last Communist Goes to Paradise

I will never go back.

Saadi Youssef, The Wolf, issue 15

Art is more strategic and moral than politics which tilts always towards the tactical and the immoral

Saadi Youssef, The Wolf, issue 15
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