Manifesto

Sirocco Letters began because I needed a place for my books.

They were written in English and French. Algeria remained present even when a story had moved elsewhere, and the two languages did not always hold the same sentence in the same way.

At first, I thought that was enough reason for a website.

I wanted a small home where the books could be found and read about on their own terms.

As I kept writing, I noticed that certain questions kept coming back. They had to do with leaving, with family histories, and with what children inherit from events they did not live through.

I no longer think identity is a fixed location.

That thought entered the books gradually. I did not always recognize it when it was happening. A question of belonging can seem settled for years and then return.

Migration makes some of this visible, but it is not the whole subject.

What a family does not discuss can still affect the people who come later. A name can affect what people assume about you. Habits can remain long after the circumstances that produced them are gone. Someone can leave a place and discover much later that part of the old life is still present in the way he thinks.

This is material I know, and it finds its way into the fiction.

I am interested in what happens when an explanation a person has relied on is no longer enough. Sometimes there is a clear cause: somebody comes back, a document appears, a fact finally comes out. At other times, there is no event to point to. Something that once made sense simply stops doing so.

I do not write fiction to settle that.

What interests me is what follows.

Working between English and French has made the writing more complicated in useful ways.

Translation is not a mechanical transfer. I have changed sentences because the French sounded too formal. I have changed others because an English phrase became stiff when I carried it over. Occasionally I leave the difference there.

The two versions do not need to pretend that every sentence can be the same.

That has influenced Sirocco Letters too. I want both languages to have a real place on the site. I do not want French to look like an addition to an English original, or the reverse.

The books remain at the center.

The Rose of Jericho, Apollo’s Curtain, and AMACHAHOU are different books. They share some concerns, but I do not think of them as versions of the same argument.

There are also things that gather around a book and never quite belong inside it: notes made during revision, questions that remain after the manuscript is finished, fragments, correspondence, and material that leads somewhere else.

Sirocco Letters gives me somewhere to keep some of that.

But it exists because of the books.

The name came from the sirocco.

It is a North African wind that crosses the Mediterranean. I was drawn to the fact that it travels far from where it begins and still carries something of that place.

I knew that feeling.

I have lived among different places and languages for a long time. What I remember of a place changes. So does the person remembering it. New places also change how the old ones are remembered.

I do not think the wind needs to explain more than that.

Sirocco Letters began as a home for my books.

I would like it to remain one.