Naeem Murr is the author of the new novel Every Exit Brings You Home. His other books include The Boy. He is a dual US-UK citizen.
Q: What inspired you to write Every Exit Brings You Home, and how did you create your character Jack?
A: Every Exit Brings You Home was prompted nearly five years ago when I took a walk in my Chicago neighborhood one afternoon and noticed a man and woman sitting in an old Chevy Impala hitched to a U-Haul trailer just outside my condominium building. An infant sat asleep in the back.
Though the couple were leaning tenderly against each other, they looked bereft—alone. I couldn’t tell if they’d arrived or were about to leave. It felt like the moment after the Biblical Fall.
My paternal family were Palestinian refugees in 1948, and for a while I’d been thinking about what “home” means for a Palestinian. Gaza was also on my mind because it had erupted into the worst violence in years over tensions in East Jerusalem.
This prompted the idea for a novel about a Gazan immigrant to Chicago, Jamal (Jack) Shaban, the story catalyzed by a troubled and aggressive single mother moving into an apartment in Jack’s condominium. Her conflicts with others in his building return Jack to his traumatic past in Gaza, including a taboo affair that nearly cost him his life.
This book felt as if it had been gestating in me for a long while and was ready to be written. It just needed the trigger of the couple in the Impala. When a book is ready in this way, the characters appear more or less fully formed, emerging and deepening as the story itself progresses.
Jack and the story are not separable. Before I began writing the novel, I had no idea what Jack’s history in Gaza had been or why he was forced to escape. I had no idea he’d be a flight attendant, or that he’d lead such a compartmentalized life, lying to everyone.
Only after I’d completed the novel and could look at it a little more objectively did I begin to understand why Jack behaves in the way he does, living these separated lives, this man with a past too full of love to cauterize, too full of pain to integrate.
When I began the novel, I thought he’d be single, but Dimra, his wife, appeared. She’s a perfect contrast to him, Palestinian to the bone and obsessed with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. For Dimra, being Palestinian and Muslim is her identity, her essence, her being: I am what I am. For Jack, it’s his predicament: I am not what I am.
But, again, I didn’t think about any of this beforehand. A novel always fails if a character is not substantial enough early on to challenge the author’s desire to control their fate and story.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Home is a complicated concept for any Palestinian, particularly one who grew up in a refugee camp inside the Occupied Territories.
Jack is also running from something: from his past, from himself. As a flight attendant, he could potentially fly anywhere he wants to. When he’s working, he’s constantly departing for distant locales, creating the illusion of escape. In the air, a plane is nowhere, a liminal space that suits him.
But his final flight always returns him home. Returns him to Dimra, herself an embodiment of Palestine.
The essential conflict within him—escape your past, you cannot escape your past; escape who you are, you cannot escape who you are—condemns Jack to be forever flying away from his home, forever returning. Hence the paradox of the title.
Q: The writer Jenny Offill called the book a “rich and complex portrait of the immigrant experience that has at its center a heartbreaking and thrillingly suspenseful story about tragic histories and new beginnings.” What do you think of that description?
A: I would say it’s accurate—I hope so, anyway. I’ve already talked a little about the complexity of tragic histories and new beginnings. And about Jack and Dimra responding in different ways to their immigration: Dimra is an abortive immigrant, ever looking back, while Jack has become no one nowhere. Their new beginning exists in the hope for an American child.
Jack was always an immigrant, even in Gaza, his world and culture created by his once-wealthy Egyptian Copt mother, who saturates him in Western literature, so that he lives as substantially in the worlds created by Dickens, Steinbeck, and Tolstoy as in Gaza.
The experience of those, like Jack or Dimra, whom we typically think of as immigrants, is simply a more visible iteration of almost everyone’s experience. Many of us don’t feel at home even in our own cultures and countries, and many no longer live where we were born and brought up.
Childhood itself is a world from which all of us are exiled. Like an immigrant negotiating a new country, each of us has to translate ourselves into an adult domain and identity.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: When I began the novel, I knew the inciting incident: the arrival of Marcia and her child in Jack’s condominium building. And I knew where it was going to end: with Jack and Marcia sitting in the Impala hitched to a U-Haul, just like the couple I’d seen. I even knew exactly what the last line was going to be.
This was the light leading me through the darkness. A sense of where you’re going is vital for longer narratives. But the “dream” out of which a novel is conceived requires imagination, and imagination requires a free rein. I had to remain open as I wrote, open to the novel’s developing life, respectful of its mystery. I had to avoid the plan.
Ted Hughes in his essay, “Myth and Education,” describes the danger of a person without imagination. “They are planners,” he says, “and ruthless slaves to the plan—which substitutes for what they do not possess.”
As it turned out, my novel didn’t end with Jack and Marcia in the Impala. Though that scene, which still appears in the book, provided the impetus for the novel, as well as a thematic through-line, the characters found their way to a different ending. The dream of a work of art is a direction, an impulse. It is not an imperative. It is not a plan.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I will return to a novel I’ve been working on for several years—based on the lives of two of my Palestinian uncles.
The novel, a family saga, covers the entire life of Ibrahim Warda, born in Haifa in 1938, becoming a refugee in Lebanon in 1948, and is built around Ibrahim’s answers to the questions his radicalized daughter has asked him all his life: “Who are you? Who are your people? What land is yours?”
He becomes extremely wealthy, living all over the world, and is constantly being drawn into the black hole of the Arab/Israeli conflict: mistaken for an Israeli spy, he’s jailed and tortured in Algeria; unwittingly, he becomes connected to the terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre; he’s in Beirut for the horrors of the Lebanese civil war, risking his life to save his daughter from the Sabra/Shatila massacre.
As much as I can tell at this point, the novel is about both the responsibility and tyranny of identity.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I think one of the most difficult aspects of the publishing process is that a writer loses control of their work. A book is like a child in many ways. It’s born out of the writer and their life. The writer nurtures it, often over years, as the book discovers a life and self of its own. Finally, it leaves home, so to speak, and has to live independently in the world.
One thing you hope is that a book has gained enough depth and substance to resist the tendency of the world to formulate it, to slot the novel into a category—immigrant book, Palestinian book, American book, and so on.
This is a novel about someone, like most of us, burdened by his past, groping his way blindly forward. Though Jack is loving and compassionate, he’s also deeply flawed and painfully aware of the capacity for evil within himself and within us all.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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