An Interview with Massoud Hayoun – Chicago Review of Books

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Author of the Arab American Book Award-winning When We Were Arabs, Massoud Hayoun has two novels out this year: Building 46, which was released in May, and Last Night in Brighton, which will be released this week. Together, these two make up the Ghorba Ghost Story Series, which is a curious categorization for books in which most—if not all—of the characters could be said to be very much alive.

But genre is just one boundary that Hayoun pushes against. Like ghosts, the narrators in his series lack hard edges. They are men whose soft bodies and attraction to other men run counter to many of the rigid norms their conservative Arab Jewish upbringing taught them to associate with masculinity. As the narrators struggle to reconcile who they are with where they came from, initially, they attempt to suppress the former. But as the works progress, the question arises: how much of themselves do they really need to hide in order to be seen as men? As someone with a background in gender studies, after reading Building 46 and Last Night in Brighton, I was eager to learn how Massoud used the ghost story as a catalyst to discuss issues regarding sexuality, body image, and gender. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with Massoud and find out.

Sam Risak

Your first book, When We Were Arabs, was a memoir, and much of your short-form writing is nonfiction as well. What inspired you to make the move to fiction?

Massoud Hayoun

With When We Were Arabs, I struggled against genre. I had a set of very clear-cut, explicitly stated goals—things I wanted to say and change about the world. I started with those. In order to achieve them, I needed to write several parallel and simultaneous works: Biographical, historical, theoretical, and journalistic. With these fiction books, I had things I wanted to say about reality, but this time, I found nonfiction itself to be a kind of constraint. So I wrote novels that are deeply rooted in reality and then departed from it, flagrantly and with relish. Bottom line: I start with the messages I want to convey, and then I survey my options and go with what gives me power and grace.

Sam Risak

But not everything in your novels is fiction. In Building 46, for example, the narrator Sam Saadoun’s investigation of the haunted ping pong room is grounded in historical research about Beijing. Could you talk a little about your decision to integrate this research? How did you decide when to fictionalize and when to stick to the truth?

Massoud Hayoun

I begin and end with reality. My first book was nonfiction, and I’m a journalist, so reality is my first and truest love. Even in fiction, I will always come from a place of truth and also hopefully end up there.

Sam Risak

The ghost story in this novel offers a sort of entry point for the critique of censorship and oppressive leadership that occurs throughout; as Sam searches for answers about the ping pong room, he is pressured to “let sleeping ghosts lie.” Your ghost story then becomes—at least, in part—a political one, which got me wondering: do you find something inherently political about the ghost story? Or was the political element something you brought in because of your journalistic background?

Massoud Hayoun

This question is very moving to me. I didn’t begin with the notion that the ghost story is an inherently political genre, but after the experience of writing two political fictions that are ghost stories — and after this question — it absolutely is. Ghost stories, especially the sort of ghost stories I offer with these books, are ultimately about our perceptions of each other and the realities that we inhabit. Those experiences of each other are politics.

I chose ghost stories for two reasons. First, because the ghost story allowed me to defy genre. There are science fiction elements to these stories, but then everything that transpires here is scientifically plausible. Then, I chose the ghost story to describe what lurks in the shadows to fit the shadowy subject matter. Many political analysts have described the structure of the Chinese Communist Party as a sort of omniscient, all-seeing entity in China with similar counterparts in Western hegemonies. In Building 46, the ghost story allowed me to appreciate what is at once sinister and even romantic about that feeling of being haunted, both by the halls of power and from beneath the floorboards. In Last Night in Brighton, I had to talk about a bunch of dead relatives in a way that allowed me to say things about them that I couldn’t in my nonfiction book, which involved biographical accounts of their lives.

Sam Risak

Sam is studying abroad in Beijing, and he has a conservative Algerian background; those two factors make it very difficult for him to accept queer sexuality as part of his identity. His struggle manifests in his fear of ghosts, and more specifically, his fear of spiritual possession. Could you talk a little about how and why you used ghosts to tell this part of the story? What did the supernatural allow you to say that you otherwise could not?

Massoud Hayoun

First, my grandmother who raised me and is very much a co-author on all of my work, even now that she’s gone, believed in spiritual possession. She wasn’t Algerian like Sam and his grandmother in Building 46—She was Tunisian. Once, I reported a story in New Orleans about the spiritual worker communities there, and I told her on the phone that I was visiting some of the practitioners for interviews. She said, sort of adamantly in a way that made me laugh, to be sure not to visit them if they had just performed an exorcism. Although my grandmother mostly rejected these traditional beliefs, the belief in spiritual possession in our homeland as a means of explaining historical periods of misery and suffering has a long tradition. There’s a specific extra-religious ritual that Tunisian women—mostly of the Jewish faith—used to perform to exorcise bad spirits from a person or place.

To my mind, the fear of spiritual possession is a compelling way of talking about coming out. Growing up, it felt like there was something in me that I didn’t want. Not just because Arab culture and later, during my time in China, Chinese culture frowned upon it—or worse—but because so-called Western and U.S. culture in the 90s and early 2000s was also very violently opposed to and ridiculed Queerness. Spiritual possession, in my understanding, is the feeling of having something within that is unwanted. My gayness was a kind of spiritual possession, at least in the poetic, analogous sense.

Sam Risak

In Last Night in Brighton, there are murders, but no apparitions. No investigations of haunted buildings. What then, makes it a ghost story? What ghosts do you see within it?

Massoud Hayoun

I’m so glad you asked! Half of the book is set in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s. With the exception of the protagonist—and that is a matter for debate—everyone in that half of the book is a ghost and, for them, the living protagonist is the apparition. In the other half of the book, we have a living man haunted by all the dead and gone people and things in the other half of the book. There are more ghosts and hauntings in Last Night in Brighton, and yet they are less overt.

Sam Risak

The narrator in this novel is also a queer Jewish Arab named Sam Saadoun who struggles with his sexuality. This Sam, however, pays to have Time Regression Therapy that will supposedly “kill” the part of him that is attracted to men. During this process, he is mentally transported to 1930s Alexandria where he exists not as Sam, but as the feminine Sam(a). Why did you choose to incorporate parentheses here? Why is it important that readers see that Sam is still a part of Sam(a)?

Massoud Hayoun

I am a firm believer that the right of interpretation, despite all my calculated choices, ultimately belongs to the reader. That is, with the exception of Sam and Sam(a)’s gender. Those parentheses are there to affirm that none of us know what gender Sam or Sam(a) is. Those parentheses can mean, as you suggest, that Sam(a) is still male in 1930s Alexandria, despite his female-presenting physical form in Alexandria. That rings true to my initial intentions. We know Sam never had the opportunity to interrogate his gender identity in real life. Hypnotherapy in the context of this book is indeed a kind of therapy. For the first time, in Alexandria in the 1930s, Sam(a) is allowed—or forced by circumstance—to wonder if his gender identity in New York is real or if society—not just Egyptian but American also—has forced him into manhood.

Sam Risak

Do you think punctuation is something you would like to experiment with more in the future?

Massoud Hayoun

Yes! In the same vein as experimentation with genre and reality and fiction. Playing with comma placement, for instance, can make you see the content of a sentence in vastly different, prismatic ways, in the way calling something a ghost story can make you wonder what is and isn’t real in a story.

Sam Risak

In addition to their queerness, the narrators in both novels also display hatred toward their bodies. They perceive themselves to be too soft and too large, and they participate in restrictive eating practices that reduce them in size. Seeing as queerness, ghosts, and the body are all reoccurring themes in these books, I wondered what drew you to them and what connections you saw between them?

Massoud Hayoun

In my understanding of so-called Western media, gay men are now accepted typically either as goofy sidekicks to straights, counterintuitively masculine bros who can hang unthreateningly with liberal straight dudes, or hot dudes whose gay sex straight women can fetishize. I wanted the center of these novels to be femme gay men without six packs because I’m one of those. I wanted them to have eating disorders and body dysmorphia because society gave me those and told me that was how I find affection, and it was, until now. Ghosts fit into that exploration of queerness and body because they are disembodied. When Sam joins the ghost world of Alexandria in the 30s, he leaves his body and inhabits one that may—like the whole experience of time travel—have been one he’d have fantasized about at one point. And then he realizes that actual womanhood is very different from the para-sexual fantasies floating around his subconscious.