Mara Naaman is a New York–based scholar, writer, and editor whose career has been shaped by a commitment to literature, culture, and thoughtful inquiry. With expertise spanning Arabic and American literary traditions, she has built a reputation as a respected voice in the fields of cultural studies, literary scholarship, and creative writing.
Born in Oakland, California and raised in Michigan by a single mother who worked as a painter, Naaman developed an early appreciation for the arts. She attended Interlochen Arts Academy as a dance student before pursuing English literature at Wesleyan University, where she graduated with honours and began studying Arabic. Her interest in language and storytelling eventually led her to Columbia University, where she earned a PhD in Arabic Literature after years of research, study, and immersion in the Middle East.
Throughout her career, Naaman has held teaching and leadership roles at institutions including Williams College, Hunter College, Columbia University, and the Modern Language Association. Her work has focused on contemporary Arabic and American cultural production, gender, and working-class identity, helping students and readers better understand the relationship between literature and lived experience.
Mara Naaman Q&A: Writing, Editing, and the Creative Process
- You have worked as a scholar, teacher, editor, and writer. What keeps bringing you back to writing?
Writing is clarifying. It helps me order my thoughts and find a narrative frame for thinking about my life, particularly all that is unpredictable, contradictory, and complex. Joan Didion begins The White Album with a declaration that “we tell ourselves stories to live.” That is true of course, and this line of hers gets cited often. And yet, her opening essay reflecting on some of her encounters with various iconic figures in the sixties ends with a confession that “writing has not yet helped me see what it means.” This is also true. The sense of order that narrative provides is helpful in the moment as a form of reflective practice. It helps us make sense of things in our present or past, but the process is fluid. What something means changes over time just as our perspective changes. I come back to writing because it allows for a kind of free play of the imagination and the unconscious. It is generative. It offers images, patterns, metaphor and voice as a way to get at the emotional truth of things. This is as close as I come to understanding the troubling, complicated aspects of my life and the world we encounter daily. And, of course, it also brings me joy.
- You are currently working on a novel. What inspired you to begin this project?
I’m at work on a historical novel that traces the immigration of a Christian Iraqi family from Mosul, Iraq to Detroit in the 1930s. The novel is both a coming-of-age work and a text that maps a young woman coming into her artistic and political consciousness. The narrative is initially told from the perspective of a young girl who observes both her father’s struggle as a grocer during the race riots of 1943, her parents’ nostalgia for the city of Mosul that they left behind, and the way in which she comes to understand herself as an artist in the sixties in California apart from her family during a time of great social upheaval for the country.
I’ve wanted to write this novel for a long time and have been mulling over many of the themes it explores for years. Still, with all the recent debates over immigrants and immigration as part of our national conversation, I felt compelled to tell this story about an Arab family wrestling with problems similar to those of immigrants today. What does the history of a diverse industrial city from nearly a century earlier teach us about bias, privilege, and xenophobia today? What do we sacrifice when we choose to not conform or to resist familiar or cultural norms? If we can begin to understand some of the complexities of our past as well as our missteps, perhaps that will inform how we think about change and the possibility of forming a more tolerant society in the present.
- Without giving too much away, what themes or questions are you exploring in your fiction?
On some very basic level, I want to tell the story of early twentieth century Detroit through the voice of a young, female Arab protagonist sensitive to the cultural and racial tensions of the time. Drawing from newspapers and photos available online from the Detroit Free Press, various photo galleries, the Detroit Historical Society, alongside my own family lore, I have tried to render both downtown Detroit and the Virginia Park neighborhood as a diverse space of social mixing.
Part of what I want to understand through the voice of your narrator is how someone can go from being educated in a Catholic school and raised in the warmth and safety of a Christian Iraqi family to becoming deeply radicalized through her years at university and in her decade in Berkeley, so much so that she becomes virtually unrecognizable to her own family. This transformation from being religious, God fearing, and family abiding, to growing into something far more open but also unmoored and uncertain was extremely interesting to me.
Woven into this story of immigration is also the story of our narrator’s father who witnessed Iraq’s early nationalist struggles as his countrymen attempt to liberate themselves and define themselves apart from British colonial rule. Watching from afar, we see him contemplate the fate of his homeland in the first half of the twentieth century, as he attempts to maintain his store and provide for his family in his newly adopted country.
Beyond that, I was interested in depicting some of the challenges and optimism that brought this early generation of Iraqi immigrants to the Midwest, and the way in which they both believed in the great experiment that was America but also grew more cynical as they experienced some of the racial unrest firsthand as grocers in the downtown Detroit. Drawing from stories that my own family has told, I was committed to unearthing some of the complexity and richness of this diverse urban area and attempting to understand how this generation made sense of their world.
Finally, one of the things that has always fascinated me is the way in which many Arab families organically integrate storytelling, art, and music in their home cultures but almost always require their children to enter practical professions that will make them financially secure. To grow up in an Arab family with an artistic sensibility can often result in a lot of friction. I wanted to explore from the point of view of this young woman what it was like to observe the world privately and reflect her experience through her artwork, while also feeling the responsibility of needing to make her family proud and become “successful” in the conventional sense. How does one make their peace with committing to their art, especially when it means going against the grain of the larger community? How does one defend the legitimacy of this pursuit for their parents who have all the anxieties and fears of being first-generation immigrants?
- What have you learned about yourself through the process of writing fiction?
Writing requires a quieting of the mind, patience, and discipline. In order for me to write, I have to shut out everything that normally competes for my attention. This process of focusing and abstaining from technology for long stretches helps give me a sense of calm and productivity. Writing, like any artistic act, can be rehumanizing in that it helps return one to a fullerr sense of the self. For the hours I am working, my attention is no longer scattered. I am merely in the flow.
The more I write, the more I continue to think about the less planned or less deliberate aspects of storytelling. I’ve observed how the worlds we create often become shadowy lenses for understanding our interior lives and the way this self is in conversation with the world around it. There is something almost magical about the way stories can unearth aspects of our unconscious. The critical, objective voice is there, but there also exists something less fully formed that comes to the surface through image, tone, dialogue, and metaphor.
- In an era of short attention spans, why do books and long-form writing still matter? What role does reading play in your creative life and are there particular writers who continue to inspire or challenge you?
I suspect many of us have watched our reading habits change with our ever-increasing attachment to our phones. What I read on my phone is different from what I read in print—the articles are shorter, they often don’t occupy my full attention. Sometimes I don’t finish them. Reading the news or a piece of cultural commentary on my phone is something that’s pretty habitual and helps me feel connected to our national conversation and the big stories swirling around the media. Still, off-screen reading time is essential and something I like to think of as a sacred almost religious practice. The time I spend reading novels, poetry, or long-form criticism requires more effort. I often take notes or jot things down in a journal. I take photos of passages I like. I rewrite poems on my computer and save them in a file. When I’m working on something for a long stretch, I often tack passages or lines from things that I’m reading on the walls around my desk.
My friends pass on books to me as do teachers. I read the reviews of critics I respect for newer recommendations. Needless to say, there are so many excellent books out there to read. Lately, I’ve tried to prioritize reading women writers. I love LiYun Li for her stark and stunning prose that rips out your heart as she chronicles her suffering. I’ve enjoyed the dry humor and social criticism of Danzy Senna and Katie Kitamura’s novels. I also try to keep up with works by Arab and Arab American writers. In particular, I highly recommend Rabih Alameddine’s work for its iconoclasm and satirical lens. I also appreciate the lyricism and overwhelming sense of grief and national mourning in the works of the Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon.
- What makes a piece of writing memorable?
In a word: language. I read because I’m interested in human behavior, psychological complexity, connection, and understanding worldviews different from my own. Still, in the end, what moves me is the music, imagery, humor, and originality of the language itself.
- Do you approach revising your work differently today than you did earlier in your career?
As an academic by training, I have to silence my inner critic to get anything down on paper. I set a very low bar when writing a first draft and tell myself to embrace mediocrity, so I don’t feel paralyzed by fear that what I’m writing is not good enough. For me, real creation happens through the act of revision. This is my favorite part of the process. I sharpen my language, kill the metaphors and descriptors I initially thought were brilliant and craft the work for sound, subtlety, and structural sense. Maybe I like revising because it allows me to be a critic of my own work, and this feels more comfortable in some ways than the generosity and openness required to write imaginatively.
- Your work often explores culture, identity, and belonging. Why do these subjects continue to resonate with you?
Growing up, I was always fascinated by my family’s past. In some ways, it always seemed more interesting to me than my own life being raised in the eighties in a big-ten university town in Michigan. Most families have their storytellers. My grandmother loved to tell stories of her childhood in Iraq and her early years raising four children in Detroit. I spent weeks in the summer with her in Southfield (Detroit), and she would tell me some of these stories as we walked—long walks after lunch and dinner. As the child of a single parent, my mother, my mother too was very open about her past and told me stories of her family life in Detroit and her adventures in California in the sixties and seventies. Because my life growing up was so different from my mother’s and my grandmother’s, I think the stories they told and the few photo albums we had helped me understand my place in this cultural and familial continuum. Even when we think we have defined ourselves apart from the cultures and values that informed our upbringing, they have a way of coming back to shape our lives and those of our children. There are the gatherings, the taste of the food and the sound of the language of course, but how we encounter others—the warmth, the hospitality, the gentleness—that is cultural too.
It also seems to me that immigrant families often like to frame their stories as heroic tales of social mobility or rags-to-riches stories of becoming true Americans. In reality, there are often many ruptures that immigrant families endure—being severed from one’s language and culture, the pain of resettlement and geographic distance, long hours spent working in repetitive, sometimes mind-numbing jobs, younger generations who don’t identify with the values and traditions of their parents. Part of telling stories of migration also necessarily means telling stories about these sorts of ruptures and schisms. My family is no exception. Ours is a story of a certain kind of success and cultural assimilation. But it is also a story of loss and the cleaving of a family. Bringing into relief all the myriad dimensions of the immigrant experience, whether through my own writing or highlighting the brilliant contributions of novelists and poets before me, is something to which I feel deeply committed.
- What do you think literature can offer people that other forms of media cannot?
Like so many others, I ask myself this question daily. For years I advocated to students in my classes the importance of literature and reading in the face of other forms of media. I told them that literature is an essential part of learning how to become human—that reading helps us learn to become sensitive and empathetic—to understand the complexity of human behavior. I would offer the somewhat simplistic idea that it provides both “mirrors and windows,” namely, characters through which we see ourselves reflected as well as stories of characters and worlds entirely foreign to us. I would tell them that reading challenging literature will deepen you and help you maintain a certain kind of humility before the truly big, and important questions of life. For some students this resonated, for other students, this was merely another class for them to pass on their march toward attaining a degree. These days I find myself trying to defend literature to my children, which feels like a losing battle when the loop of entertaining video feed offers immediate and constant gratification. There are pockets in the day when we sometimes read books together. I love those moments. There are car rides when we sometimes listen to a novel as a family. Still, reading a longer work of fiction is not an easy sell.
With AI ever more integrated into our daily lives, the case for literature feels increasingly more urgent. Superintelligent bots will outcompete us on every intellectual front, but they cannot know what it means to live inside a body and experience the world physically, emotionally, sensorially. Reading itself is an embodied act; it is not passive. Reading allows us to imagine, free-associate, and make certain cognitive connections. It is both pleasurable and edifying. Reading fiction can be exciting, triggering, delightful, restorative, and even healing. Yes, it means unplugging and slowing down. It means taking a break from one’s social life, career concerns, caregiving, chores, homework, or whatever else and realizing that there is nothing more urgent or essential that you are missing out on. Most importantly, it means fortifying certain spaces in our lives and homes so we can do something that is not just good for us, but that will help us maintain some semblance of life that is uniquely and solely human.
- What advice would you give to someone who wants to write but struggles to find the time or confidence to begin?
To stay with the question of AI for a moment, one of the concerns I have as a teacher and longtime writer, fundamentally has to do with our agency and free will as humans. The more we are tempted to use AI to write, the more we will lose touch with the value of having to generate our own ideas and craft our own sentences into clear prose. While many of us might say that we are merely using a bot to assist our drafting process or to fix our grammar, the lines between grammar help and idea generation have become very blurred. Language is thought. If we are no longer coming up with the necessary language for our ideas, then we are no longer thinking for ourselves. Already it is often impossible to detect what information (or misinformation) is generated from a bot and what has been created by a human. Still maintaining the importance of this distinction seems imperative. We must keep working to find the language for our ideas and instilling in our students and our children the importance of doing so. If we begin to outsource all thought to our devices in the name of efficiency, we will become an unthinking, uneducated population controllable by whatever bots or corporations wield the most power.
So, for new writers, I would say that your voice—generated from your lived, embodied experience and all that you have read and felt in your lifetime—is your greatest weapon and your greatest gift. This is what you have to offer the world, and this is what the world needs most at this time. Give your voice time to grow and evolve and be patient with your writing process—if it is slow or hard, that is good. As the great German poet Rainer Marie Rilke wrote to his young student, “live what is difficult.. live the questions now.”
