The title of the novel “Five Houses for God and a Room for My Grandmother,” by the Yemeni writer and doctor Marwan Al-Ghafouri, gives a confused impression to the Arab reader, before he discovers that the writer means the stations and degrees that lead to God, or the levels of closeness to Him.
The novel published by Al-Saqi House in Beirut, which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, clashes with political and social reality and raises very precise and sensitive questions in a conservative Yemeni society. Al-Ghafouri chronicles the activity of Islamic movements that competed with each other to attract supporters in the nineties of the last century.
Al-Ghafouri is a Yemeni novelist and doctor, born in Taiz Governorate in 1979. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in general medicine and surgery from Ain Shams University in 2006.
He has published several poetic and novel works, most notably “Al-Khazraji,” “Saada’s Braids,” and “The Pisces’ Road,” and his poetry collection “Layals” won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2024.
In this interview with Al Jazeera Net, we get close to the scenes of his latest novel and his positions on literature, religion, censorship, and issues of Yemeni society.
Violent confiscation
- The title of the novel “Five Houses for God and a Room for My Grandmother” sparked widespread controversy and prompted censorship to prevent it from being displayed in some book fairs, before the reader discovered that it referred to “Five Houses for God” and not Himself, Glory be to Him. Was this provocation intended to open a discussion about the sacred and the unspoken?
I am not a Nietzschean from this perspective. I mean, I am not “dynamite” as Nietzsche used to say about himself, and I do not write with a hammer. The title came to me some time after I finished the novel, and my imagination had settled on another title.
This novel is a journey into theology. Its hero – or narrator – is a high school student who says “yes” to everything, and participates with the character “Abd Rabbo the Lost” (with whom Naguib Mahfouz ended his life) in his reconciliation with himself and his wanderings; But he is this rich and abundant wanderer.
I claim that the young man “Abu Harb” in this novel has placed us in a place where we can clearly see five houses in which the servants sit and worship their Creator: what and how do they think? What is their relationship to books, women, and the world? How do they laugh?
The book has already been confiscated from several international exhibitions in a violent context, but neither the writer nor the publisher wants to make the confiscation a source of controversy.
- How do you see the relationship between “shocking” headlines and censorship in the Arab world today?
What I know and my experience confirms is that Arab publishing houses deal with caution with the Arab censorship apparatus. Ultimately, she knows that the book is a commodity and must reach the market. The Arab publisher is living in a difficult situation, and knows that being harassed by censorship – in form or content – may worsen his financial situation.
Some publishing houses, especially those that arrived late to the market, take risks from time to time according to certain calculations, and may publish titles that transform the work from a philosophical and cognitive space into a prohibited commodity.
The history of the Arabic publishing industry in the twentieth century is full of shocking headlines, headlines that affected the reputation of the text itself. In the culture of “the answer is clear from its title,” a lawsuit may even be filed against you to withdraw your nationality.
Excitement was and will remain a part of this industry, and the title is one of its forms, but the book had not turned into a pure commodity as it is now; Which means that it is no longer a material for enlightenment and “to demolish and build” in Nietzschean expression, but rather to earn a living, and is subject to its conditions.
Even at the text level, the novel is written in the same way as if it had one editor. The publisher wants the work to convince the award jury, and the latter does not provide free space for experimentation and rebellion.
1990s Yemen
- The novel culminates in the journey of a village hero who moves to the city of Taiz, and becomes a target over which Islamic trends (the Brotherhood, Salafism, Tabligh, Sufism, and even Kung Fu) compete. Why did you choose these groups specifically? Does this diversity reflect the reality of Yemeni cities in the 1990s?
This was the atmosphere of “theology” in the 1990s. The Muslim Brotherhood came out into the open with the opening of the door to democratic activity in 1990, and the Salafists returned to the country as a result of the Yemeni government’s position on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. This religious awakening necessarily revived other groups who feared for their market share, and I mean Sufism and Tabligh.
To this, I added another status through which people view their world, which is “Confucianism,” represented by the Kung Fu school. This wealth allowed the development of a popular vision of religion and its relationship to politics and life, and before that decade ended, a “faithful version” of nationalist and leftist movements had developed and stabilized.
It was the golden era of religious and political diversity in Yemen, before the curtain slowly closed on it by the regime of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, by building an armed religious movement in secret, which would later take on the name “Houthi” and eliminate all that diversity.
- The concept of “laughter” is prominent in the novel as a tool for deconstruction and criticism, and its derivatives are mentioned 92 times, through the character of “Brother Yunus,” the joking muezzin, in contrast to the serious groups that “if I laughed, I would forget what I decided to do.” Can humor be a means of religiosity, or is it always in a defensive position towards the “sacred”?
The story of Brother Yunus – the best brother Yunus in the world – shows us a human side of the personality of the “Orthodox Muslim.” In the 1960s, the Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb developed the idea of “emotional isolation,” and through it he wanted to establish the personality of the Muslim who is emotionally separated from his society.
Naguib Mahfouz, while recalling his relationship with Sayyid Qutb, noticed that the latter had become more sullen than he had ever been before his travel to America. When Mahfouz told a joke in his presence – and he had laughed at similar jokes before – Qutb did not laugh.
I have early experience with Salafism dating back to my school days, and I can hear the men’s laughter even now. There are “Orthodox wings” within Islamic theology that do not know how to laugh; In her view, it not only weakens resolve, but “kills the heart.”
To put it simply: religious groups concerned with reforming the social system laugh and tell jokes because they are concerned with normalizing their relationship with people, while jihadist groups concerned with undermining the political system do not laugh, and are far from inventing humor.
- The five “mansions of God” correspond to the “Grandma’s Room,” which turns into a space for popular storytelling; Where the authority of the female story triumphs over the authority of men’s religious institutions. Was the novelty a tool to dismantle the masculinity in some religious discourses?
You can look at Grandma’s room like this; Perhaps it was a test of the durability of those “homes” and their promises. While they all claimed to be connected to the higher self and knew what the Creator wanted, the grandmother came carrying her illness on her shoulders and asked them to heal, and they were revealed. Here nothing was possible but for the grandmother to laugh from her high, transcendent, separate place.
In the house of Sheikh Shams al-Din (the Sufi sheikh), the grandmother, with her story about the “prostitute,” shakes the entire edifice of faith that the Sufi father built in his years.
The father asked his wife and daughters to recite the Qur’an to her, but suddenly the Qur’an stopped on the lips and the old woman spoke about the world, about a prostitute who stole her son’s heart!
I want the home to discover the beauty of faith and closeness, so the women of the house saw another beauty and closeness in another way: life with its ugly and strange beauty. The women of the pure house were fascinated by these tainted stories, and the grandmother left the house after a week, shaking its foundations. As for her illness, it shook the confidence of others.
- Some critics described the novel as “heavy in some places with information and religious text” despite its poetic language. How did you balance providing accurate knowledge about the ideologies of these groups while maintaining narrative fluidity?
I claim that the business was aware of this trap; Information should trump narrative, and the narrative should slide into dry ideological discourse. In the end, I think that the character of “Abu Harb” was convincing, and that he passed the historical novel test: satire and arousing sympathy.
The task of satire here is to protect the work from getting involved in two issues: vulgarity and preachiness. As for compassion, it must prevent cynicism from turning into nihilism and mockery.
I will not say much about whether the work has succeeded in this way, but I will suffice by saying that what has been written about it critically so far indicates that success.
- Although intergroup rivalry is brought up, you avoid depicting the violent societal conflict for which you are known in reality, preferring to remain within the framework of “intellectual concern.” Was this an artistic choice to preserve the narrator’s innocence?
I will answer you in a different way: Some of what was written about the novel expected me to go to those groups and arrest them involved in terrorism cases! Literature does not work this way, and art is not written with the intention of “settlement with reality,” as a well-known Arab narrator says. The mission of art in all its forms is to touch reality and not merge with it, and to create a conflict of a special color.
The clash of ideological groups with their society is an open secret that everyone knows, but what people do not know is what is going on behind the closed door. How would the wife of a religious man react if she heard an exciting story about a woman cheating? What will a religious young man do with himself after he finishes drawing a sex scene?
Rather, how does a young man who belongs to religious group (A) feel when he sees an sheikh from group (B) who has scientifically “insulted” an sheikh from his group? Brother Younis said that this matter broke him from the inside and weakened his strength. The novel went into those deep psychological areas, and I will claim that this is the primary task of art.
- The novel features a teenage hero who lives in a state of fluctuation between closeness to God, sexual fantasies, and doubt, a state that is rarely presented with such boldness in the Arabic novel. Was your goal to provide a psychological reading of the relationship between repression and extremism?
I had no goal outside of the intention inherent in the text. Does the book belong to the “autobiographical novel”? I don’t know, and I don’t really want to know. I wrote it over a period of three years, and stopped halfway through for a full year after I got lost between houses and lost my way, until it occurred to me that the grandmother’s story – and I was thinking of writing it independently – would save the novel, and I think it did.
The young man came down from the mountain to the city to complete high school, and decided to convey everything to the people. Because what he says about himself is bold and embarrassing, there was a need for ridicule and laughter, and then sympathy.
On the Goodreads website, there were comments provoked by the young man’s sexual confessions, but the young man was not conveying promiscuity; He built his purity during the day and demolished it at night, calling on the reader to understand his crisis and sympathize with him.
If Brother Younis was the kindest brother Younis in the world, then Abu Harb was every “Abu Harb” in the world. One of the most beautiful things written about the text is that it is a story that will not make you hate any of its characters.
- “Grandmother’s Room” turns into a haven for stories that reveal the village’s secrets. Can the duality of “healing through storytelling versus healing through religion/medicine” be read as a critical metaphor for the role of the novel itself? That is, is the novel the modern “granny room” that gives voice to the margins and exposes the discourse of the center?
This angle is very interesting; Healing through stories is an original idea in literary studies. There is an important work by writers Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin entitled (Novel Therapy), which classifies novels according to the type of illness and psychological disorder. Not all novels are suitable for all disorders. The crazy Arab poet said in the past, “I recite poetry only as a medicine.”
Art can treat the individual and society, and it can also provoke civil wars and endless conflicts, and this is what makes art a dangerous business. In 1932, at the home of Maxim Gorky, Stalin told guests that “literaries are the engineers of the human soul,” and decided to use that dangerous engineering for the benefit of the state, from his point of view.
Returning to your question, I agree with you that the novel aspires to give the silent people a tongue and lips, and puts many words on the lips that restore respect to the ideas of truth and justice. In a way, it is justice achieved in the parallel world, the world of imagination.
