Simon & Schuster

Iman Humaydan | Songs for Darkness | Simon & Schuster

In this wide-ranging conversation recorded in Paris, Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan speaks about her latest novel Songs for Darkness, a family story spanning four generations of women and almost a century of Lebanese history. Rather than presenting history as public drama, Humaydan explores how war, patriarchy, migration and political failure enter everyday life, shaping private dreams, family structures and inherited traumas.

The conversation moves from the quiet literary voice of the novel to questions of feminism, citizenship and the unfinished promise of Lebanon as a country of many communities. Humaydan reflects on why she does not believe in turning literature into activism, while insisting that fiction can still speak powerfully about violence, memory and the suppression of women’s lives.

She also discusses the role of the Lebanese novel in preserving a fractured national memory, the reception of her work in the United States and France, the challenges facing Arabic literature in translation, and her ongoing writing about the Lebanese diaspora in New York. At the heart of the interview is a deeply personal understanding of literature as a way of archiving lives, rebuilding memory and asking why violence repeats itself — in Lebanon and beyond.

And, as Humaydan says at the end of the conversation: “As long as I dream in Arabic, I will write in Arabic.”

Language: English | Length: 39:52

To view the edited text version of this interview, please click here.

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