Mai Al-Nakib

Quotes

• Writers write precisely because they believe literature can cross all kinds of borders—linguistic, identic, geographical, temporal, experiential, and so on. It is an extremely narrow and one-dimensional understanding of what it means to be an “authentic” Arab today—and a “proper” Arab writer more specifically—if we insist upon limiting what language that writer can think and dream and write in. If literary experiments were thus restricted, literature would be a rather fallow field. In fact, it would be incredibly boring.

** As quoted in Jadaliyya: The Thing Is to Be Light as Air': An Interview with Mai Al-Nakib (2023)

• Feelings or affects are composed through our encounters with bodies—both animate and inanimate. We often do not pay sufficient attention to the ways in which inanimate objects intersect with animate life or, even further, the ways in which the division between inanimate and animate is a normative construction rather than an essential opposition. To recognize this is an ethical move, one that compels responsibility toward all that is supposedly inanimate or nonorganic and considered decidedly separate from ourselves (think here of the environment, both natural and built).

** As quoted in Jadaliyya: The Thing Is to Be Light as Air': An Interview with Mai Al-Nakib (2023)