A Life of Words: A Conversation With Zahran Alqasmi

How did growing up in the Dima Wattayeen, in northern Oman, shape your fiction? 

As in any village in Oman, the people here are deeply engaged with customs and traditions and popular narratives, as well as with family issues and gossip and the latest news. This makes for a fertile environment for creative writing. I have been able to construct my fictional characters from what I see and hear around me. I continue to live in my little village, Mas, which gives me a quiet and contemplative setting and allows me to write.

What led you to become a writer? 

There was some kind of internal voice that said to me: “Try writing.” This was particularly an internal poetic voice; I composed poetry for years without really having a sense of why I loved poetry so much, and why I kept on composing it—and I still do. And then, when I began writing novels, I was experimenting, I was trying it out. No human being knows their ability at something until they do it. So I tried writing a novel, my first one. And then I got completely engrossed in the joy of writing novels. And so, I am still writing novels.

There’s been a surge of global interest in Omani literature in recent years. What do you think is behind this? 

Writers in Oman have grown up in a society that loves its literature, its poetry and modes of live repartee and oral heritage. This makes for a very rich environment for writers of my generation who have embraced literary creation. Writers formed in such an environment rely on their creative work on history and other aspects of heritage and use these thoughtfully in their writing. And innovatively. We write differently, and our particular use of our heritage has gotten a lot of attention. 

How did focusing Honey Hunger on the world of Omani honey shape your approach to the book?

We know that just a few grams of honey are the bounty from hundreds or even thousands of flowers whose nectar the bees take in. I wanted the architecture of the novel to be like the bees gathering honey. From another perspective, the “hunger” that honey generates has a lot of overlap with the idea of how individuals derive and experience pleasure. Each character has their own focus of enjoyment, their own hunger—but what brings them together is the search for the honey, the hunger they share.

Honey Hunger deals with nature and the land, and the ways humans interact with both. What interests you in this subject? 

I am deeply engaged with it in my life. I love walking and observing how people get along when they live embedded in nature: how it shapes their behavior, their ways, their understanding. I believe strongly that nature plays an enormous role in shaping personalities—as in Abd al-Rahman Munif’s novel Endings, where he portrays Bedouins in a time of fertility on the land, and then how differently they act when the rains stop and drought comes. People’s behavior really depends on the surrounding environment and the changes it undergoes. … There is a “honey hunger” in times of extreme dryness when the bees cannot find nourishment. And people are hungry, and so they are searching for their own honey through their own actions and relationships.