The child of a Scottish mother and an Egyptian father, Aisha Abdel Gawad grew up in an immigrant household in Virginia.Footnote 1 She is a New York University alumnus and holds an MFA from Cornell University, where she previously worked as a lecturer, and is currently an English teacher at Greenwich Academy, Connecticut. A novelist, short-fiction writer, and essayist, Gawad has demonstrated, in different stories and articles, the reality of living in a post-9/11, politically overcharged landscape for Americans of Arab descent. Her foremost articles, “No Safe Place to Grieve: The Trauma of Muslim Americans Living under Surveillance” and “Living My Life as the ‘Muslim Ron Swanson’ in the Age of Digital Surveillance,” have been published on Literary Hub.Footnote 2 They detail the sense of paranoia that plagued the Arab American community due to its post-9/11 hypervisibility.
Gawad won the 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story “Waking Luna,”Footnote 3 which has been featured in the Kenyon Review and the literary magazine American Short Fiction. Two additional short stories, “The Belly of the Whale” and “Some Other Cloud,” are developed into chapters in Gawad’s debut novel, Between Two Moons,Footnote 4 and have appeared in the Muslim World scholarly journal in an issue on anglophone Arab women writers. In addition to writing fiction, Gawad has also written a culinary column, titled “My Egyptian Family Was Eager to Meet My American Husband – but What Would They Feed Him?”, for Bon Appétit on her Egyptian family’s reception of her vegetarian American husband.Footnote 5
While Gawad’s work has not yet been the subject of academic scholarship, it has received wide recognition from different literary organizations and magazines. Her most recent work and debut novel, Between Two Moons, published in the summer of 2023 by Doubleday, has been awarded the 2023–24 Hornblower Award for a First Book and was a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize.Footnote 6 The book was long-listed for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the 2023 New American Voices Award, and the Brooklyn Public Library Prize. It was also short-listed for the Maya Angelou Book Award. The novel was described as an “astonishing debut” and a “winner” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review and as “multifaceted and moving” by Nina LaCour in a 2023 New York Times book review.Footnote 7 Becky Meloan from the Washington Post praised Gawad for “honestly” portraying “the excitement and uncertainty of adolescence,”Footnote 8 while Halie Lesavage from Harper’s Bazaar highlighted the novel’s unique “portrayal of sisterhood.”Footnote 9 Eleanor J. Bader’s interview report in Ms. Magazine hailed the novel as an “emotionally rich and revelatory” documentation of Arab American struggles in the post-9/11 era.Footnote 10
In an NPR interview, Gawad describes her debut as a “love letter to the Arab community of Bay Ridge.”Footnote 11 The community is also the subject of “Waking Luna,” which follows a chaotic cousinship involving two teenage girls, Amira and Luna. The two cousins are, comments editor David Lynn in his Kenyon Review column, “already and irrevocably American – though their challenge is also to define just what that means for their generation.”Footnote 12 This challenge is reexplored and developed in the debut novel, constituting the nucleus of the two heroines’ adolescent quest.
Between Two Moons complicates the Bildungsroman tale with the theme of state surveillance.Footnote 13 The reader is offered an elaborate and vivid portrait of the Arab American community of Brooklyn’s Muslim-populated Bay Ridge area through the adolescent perspective of the twin protagonists, Amira and Lina. The novel is, in fact, partly informed by Gawad’s experience working as a youth coordinator at the Arab American Association of New York in 2009, where she assisted newly arrived immigrants. Gawad’s experience in Bay Ridge was marked by the sense of paranoia troubling the Arab communities there. This observation is fictionalized in Between Two Moons, which captures the haunting presence of the government and its psychological effects on the community members. State surveillance also shapes Amira and Lina’s coming-of-age story. The two protagonists are hypercautious, not only of the patriarchal gaze measuring their girlhood against cultural standards but also of the government’s looming presence. The writer summarizes this dual watchfulness in one of her articles:
As teenage girls, there is the “ordinary” and universal form of being watched: they must exist under a patriarchal gaze. They are watched by men on the streets, by their older brother, by boyfriends, by neighbors. But there is also another form of watching they must contend with: the invisible eye of the state. The girls often cannot see who is watching them.Footnote 14
At first, the twin protagonists resort to escapism and anonymity. “It was all I wanted in the world,” admits a dreamy Amira, “my greatest, best-nourished, and most tender dream: to get out. To change my name and dye my hair, to become someone bold and careless. I wanted brand new. I wanted [to be] unrecognizable, untrackable, untraceable.”Footnote 15 Amira’s obsession with escapism is also a response to a deep-seated frustration with socioculturally imposed silence and the inability to communicate insidious struggles with gendered trauma. The Bildungsroman, however, culminates in a self-willed decision to embrace the sense of belonging in the heavily surveilled Arab American community. This return echoes the writer’s personal sense of homeliness. In her acceptance speech at the 2023–24 New York City Book Awards ceremony, Gawad declared that she had never “felt more at home anywhere” than in Bay Ridge, despite the heavy surveillance and overwhelming sense of collective paranoia.Footnote 16
Gawad’s intricate portrait of minority women’s intersectionality made the novel an appealing choice for my doctoral research on the narrativization of minority trauma. Being one of the first researchers to analyse Gawad’s work from an academic and theoretical perspective, I felt the need to share my findings and learn more about the writer’s experience as a hyphenated female author in contemporary America. The following interview was conducted online in August 2024. It highlights the writer’s reinterpretation of Arab American female identity to create more nuanced definitions for the hyphenated self. It also addresses trauma-based silence and shame and the double surveillance that dominates the Arab American female experience. The writer describes the sense of paranoia haunting the Arab American community of Bay Ridge, and America by extension, as well as other sociocultural aspects of a coming-of-age story hailing from an Arab American context. The interview concludes with a discussion on the experience and process of writing in a post-9/11, digitally monitored age.
Q. You begin your novel with the arrest scene of the Libyan café owner, Abu Jamal. Your protagonist, Amira, who interestingly occupies the same position you had in 2009, spends the rest of the novel observing the psychological repercussions of the arrest on the rest of the community. Is Amira an author surrogate that you use to communicate your firsthand experience at the Arab American Association of New York in Bay Ridge?
A. This book was absolutely informed by my own experiences as an Arab and Muslim American, but I do resist the category of it being a surrogate. It is important for me as a fiction writer to separate myself, the author, from my characters. I am not Amira, and Amira is not me. She has experiences and perspectives that are not my own. There is no way this book can represent the way that all Arab Americans feel. But I have tried to capture a small sliver of something that felt very true to me. I think there was just this major shift for all Muslim Americans, but especially Muslim Americans, like Arabs and South Asians, who are coming from an immigrant background after 9/11, that shattered the model-minority myth. Before 9/11, there were perhaps attempts in many of our communities to be the perfect minority, to earn our place in America, and to be successful and respected. It was a pernicious myth to begin with. It dooms everyone to failure. This myth, however, has been shattered.
Q. How was it shattered for Arab Americans?
A. For Arab Americans, there was suddenly no doubt that we were considered enemies. That is something I try to capture. I think that’s more difficult for the older generation in the book, the parents, who came to this country from Egypt with hopes, dreams, and expectations, versus the children who are a little more jaded. They were born here. They were raised here. There is this vast difference in the perspectives of the parents and the children.
Q. I think the readers can sense this ideological gap between the different generations in the book. Yet they all seem to share an overwhelming sense of anxiety that is also restrictive. To what extent does this feeling of paranoia limit the experience of being Arab in post-9/11 America?
A. That’s the other thing I wanted to try to explore, the feeling of living and coming of age, becoming an adolescent under so much uncertainty. The girls, in particular, feel watched, but they cannot tell who is watching them. They do not know who is watching them. They cannot see where it is coming from. They cannot always tell the difference between the kind of benevolent, friendly watching and watching that is a threat to them. That is definitely something that Arabs and Muslims in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the community about which I write, felt. It is a feeling of: I feel like I am being watched, but I cannot prove it. It makes you doubt yourself. It is like this massive gaslighting.
Q. You do mention the patriarchal gaze in your recent article “No Safe Place to Grieve.” Could you talk more about this double surveillance?
A. I think there have been some stories and more emphasis on the experience of Muslim American and Arab American men, often as enemy number one. These men are cast as the villain, the barbarian, the terrorist. And I was interested in exploring what this does to the Arab and the Muslim American woman. You have to start with the fact that she already starts out being surveilled, watched, monitored, and controlled. And it is not unique to being Arab or Muslim. That is a universal. I hope that any young woman who reads the book can feel that it can resonate with them. There is already this feeling of being a young woman, of being judged, of being watched, and having so many people expect things of you and want you to represent everything about them perfectly. Then there is also the threat of violence that women face daily, like walking around the streets, never knowing if they are completely safe.
Q. Is that a type of narrative benchmark for the story?
A. Yes, I wanted to start there, from the experience that we all have, as a baseline. I wanted to layer on top of that this dual feeling of being watched. Now you are also being watched, not just because you are a woman, but because you are an Arab or a Muslim woman, or you happen to live in this particular neighbourhood that, in the case of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was a real focal point of police surveillance. They are also teenage girls, so all they want to do is explore and discover themselves and push boundaries. That is what teenagers do. But they do not know where to go. Is it safer to stay in their neighbourhood, in their community, which is being surveilled by the police, or to try to flee? They are being monitored by their own community too. The girls do not really know where to go or who to trust.
Q. But this state of double surveillance does not push them away from their community. Initially, they are frustrated and want to escape. But they always return to Bay Ridge, particularly after encountering a tragedy. I think your novel explores this third option for the Arab American woman’s identity. The girls are New Yorkers, but their community and culture are also part of who they are.
A. Yes, absolutely. I am really happy that you framed it like that. That was extremely important to me in this book. I felt, as a young Arab American starting to read Arab American stories or seek out Muslim American stories, that there were only two choices for these women. One is that she rebels against and rejects her faith and her culture as oppressive and pursues a Western definition of freedom. The other is that she is religious, but in a very flat way that makes her mindlessly obedient and strict. I find that tiresome and inaccurate.
I wanted to allow Arab American and Muslim American women the full range of complexity. It was important to me that the girls feel they chose their faith. Their faith is a source of comfort and safety for them that, as you say, they can always return to, even if they go out and do something haram or forbidden. They are confused. They try something out and make mistakes. They come back to their faith. And the same thing with their culture. Their identities as Arabs are a place in which, even as the book goes on, they find more and more safety and comfort. You are right. I did want to provide Arab and Muslim American women a third option that rejects the stereotypes that have been offered to us.
Q. Is this something that you have to contend with personally as an Arab American woman?
A. I think there are many things I have to contend with. One is trying to prove that just because I’m an Arab and a Muslim doesn’t mean I’m a bad American. I stopped making that effort a long time ago because, politically, Arabs and Muslims in this country have been cast as the enemy. But that’s not my doing. And then the other thing that I have encountered is surprise. People are surprised when they meet me. They are surprised by the way I talk, the way I look, the way I dress. Then they are surprised, for example, if I am fasting during Ramadan. People make assumptions all the time. I remember I’ve had a few people in my life assume that my father was really strict, like a strict Arab dad. But my dad is the opposite. He is the most permissive, gentle dad. So you have to contend with these images of the Arab. And when you don’t meet people’s expectations, you cause a sort of cognitive dissonance that they have to recognize.
Q. I think that is the source of profound frustration for your protagonist, Amira. And what adds to this frustration is the inability to communicate it. At one point, Amira expresses her frustration with being silent. Do you think there is a crippling silence within the Arab American community and the Arab American individual that you try to re-create in the novel?
A. I think the Arab and Muslim American communities are far less silent and afraid today than they were in the early years of the first decade after 9/11.
Q. What do you think prompted this shift?
A. I think there are perhaps several reasons for that. As I was saying even about myself earlier, many people have realized there is no point in playing this game where we try to prove our worth. One thing that gives me some comfort is, of course, not that it is happening again, but that I think that our communities here have less tolerance for it and are speaking up and taking greater risks. But yes, I do think there is unacknowledged trauma. Some part of you is afraid of what is written down about you in a file somewhere. And the fact is that, after 9/11, a whole new series of laws was written just to justify the erosion of our civil rights. They are supposed to be guaranteed in this country that talks so much about its civil liberties. We have seen how those civil liberties can suddenly be plucked away. An exception is made for you.
Q. And is this part of the structural trauma that you try to depict in the novel?
A. Yes, absolutely. I do think that there’s some deep trauma in our communities. And then, as we were saying earlier, you layer onto that trauma the fact that Amira is also a woman. There are her own gendered traumas that, as a woman and as an Arab woman, she is expected to carry. She is expected to have infinite strength. I think her parents realized this, and they realized that kind of error in their ways. But early in the book, they are so focussed on the son’s pain and trauma. The girls are going to be fine because they are girls. And that is what girls do. We are fine. It is not until another scene in the book that the mother, in particular, realizes, Oh! I don’t think my girls are fine.
Q. How do the twin protagonists cope with these cultural expectations?
A. I think that there is a gendered component too. One of the girls gets raped, and they get into all sorts of trouble, but they never really talk about any of it because no one ever asks. Even when Lina’s photos are leaked for everyone to see in the US and back home in Egypt.Footnote 17 Nobody really asks, Are you okay? Yet the girls, because they are twins, have developed this interiority. I think every woman has it. We have so much space to hold inside of ourselves because it is not safe for us to always express ourselves externally.
The girls also function as mirrors for one another. They reflect their experiences back to one another. But they have no methods or skills for how to heal or how to cope. What is the language? How can we even describe what has just happened to us? I think that so much violence against women is not even seen as violence. It is just seen as something that happens if you are a girl. That is something that these girls are experiencing. They think, Oh, well, that just happened to me, but that happens. Maybe it was even my fault. They do not even truly acknowledge that what happened to them was wrong. Some would say that that is heavy, but it is something that most women, especially in the Arab world, go through because there are certain things that, as bad as they are, you cannot talk about for different reasons. One of them is the notion of shame. Even if it’s not your fault, it is still shameful to talk about certain things, as in the case of the sisters here.
Q. Speaking of shame, do you think it plays a certain role in the novel? Or in general in the Arab American household?
A. I do think it does, but I also think that is true in almost every community. It just shows up in different ways. I do not think shame, especially shame when it is focussed on women, is unique to Arabs. But it certainly is true. That is something I wanted to explore.
Q. In some narratives, the mother figure is usually the enforcer of shame. But that is not the case for the narrative we find in Between Two Moons.
A. I wanted to buck the stereotype that the Arab mother is always going to be this enforcer of the shame. That is why it was important for me to have the mother try to be a model to her girls of how she has dealt with her own feelings of shame, how she has tried to reject those feelings of shame, and how she does not want her girls to grow up feeling like they are inferior or that they have done something wrong.
Q. Conjuring up these complex and unconventional characters must have made the writing process more challenging. Did you always have a clear picture of the community you wanted to portray in your novel?
A. I do believe that the writing process is so wildly different for different kinds of writers. I started [writing the novel] when I was quite young, and I needed to grow up with the book. Eventually, the book grew up with me. I was discovering my voice as a writer. What are the core issues that animate this story? What are the most important things for me to say? It just took a while for me to discover those and weave them together. But I do believe that you have to start, at least for me, with whatever is animating you in that moment, even if you are not sure where it is going to take you. Other authors like to write things that are well plotted and outlined. They know exactly where they are headed. I usually do not know where I am headed. I usually start with a character, an image, a single scene, or something that I cannot get out of my head. And I just have to trust myself to explore. I was also processing some of my own trauma; coming of age as a Muslim and an Arab in this country and feeling confused and afraid.
Q. Is that why you described the writing process as scary in your article “Living My Life as the Muslim Ron Swanson”?
A. A lot of the research that I did for this book was scary, but it was also validating in a weird way because I found out I was not crazy. We are not crazy. This has happened. They are spying on us. It was like a weird confirmation too. It confirmed those feelings I had when I was a college student, and we would go to the university mosque and see someone new who was chatty. We would be suspicious that maybe we were justified in feeling that way.
Q. Did you ever experience writer’s block as a result of such distress and uncertainty?
A. I went through a long stretch of that these past few months. But I think it was also partly burnout from ordinary life and the studies you have. Family obligations can sap the energy you need to be creative. I think watching what is happening in the world has also made it hard for me to write. I felt like it was the only thing that mattered, and I could not quite focus on anything else.
Q. And how do you cope during such episodes?
A. In those moments, I try to make time for reading that inspires me. I read a lot of poetry. I like to feel reconnected to language, something that feels like there is just this stirring, surprising, or beautiful command of language that inspires me. I think, sometimes, taking the pressure off by sitting down to write something and realizing that you do not know what this is. Is this a short story? Is it a novel? Is it a poem? What is it going to be? Is it going to be anything? And, sometimes, I try to push those voices out of my head and realize that I do not know. It might be nothing, but I am going to write what feels good to me or follow my instincts at this moment and see where it goes. I do that all the time. But I am a perfectionist, so I always have to tell myself it’s okay to make mistakes. You can go back later and edit. But the perfectionist part of me can be extremely persistent. I know a lot of people struggle with that, but for me it is something that I’ve had to really push through and think today’s not my day. But I still write because I know this is the hour I have, and if I don’t use it then, I will have to go to work or my kids will need me. And even if I’m just making some notes to myself, but the writing, the actual prose is bad, I keep thinking that tomorrow will be another opportunity. So, sometimes, you have to let yourself write something bad.
Hakima Choukri is a doctoral researcher at the Linguistic, Literary, Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies Research Laboratory at the University of Abdelmalek Essaadi, Morocco. She holds an MA in English literature and the history of ideas. Her doctoral research explores the narrativization of trauma in contemporary literature by Arab American women. She is currently an editor at Confluence Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies.
Disclosure statement
No relevant or financial conflict of interest was declared by the author.
