Betty Shamieh, a Palestinian American author, will present a keynote speech during Claiming Williams Day on Feb. 5. Shamieh’s most recent work, Too Soon, is this year’s Williams Reads book. The contemporary novel follows the lives of three generations of Palestinian women as they face the tribulations of love, political exile, and familial pressures.
In an interview with the Record, Shamieh discussed her background in playwriting, her upbringing in a Middle Eastern household, and the role of humor in political literature.
Prior to writing Too Soon, Shamieh was an established playwright hoping to break into the television industry. “This book erupted out of me in a way that was really surprising,” she said. “After a decade of working in theatre, I was planning to break into a more lucrative field like television. Instead, I felt compelled to write this book with the expectation that it would just be something I did for me, because I wanted it to exist in the world. I wanted to understand [the characters’] relationships.”
Despite her recognition in the theatre world, Shamieh’s journey to becoming a successful novelist was anything but linear. “I had a failed attempt at writing another novel,” she said. “I think it’s important that people, especially students, know that most people do not simply wake up one day and write a novel that is selected as a People Magazine Book of the Week on their first try.”
“It usually takes a lot of failure beforehand — trying and getting back up after you’ve been knocked down by rejection repeatedly,” she continued. “When people ask me what it feels like to be a writer, I tell them it’s akin to being a boxer. You get punched in the face, and you’ve got to get back up knowing you’re likely to get punched in the face again but doing it anyway. You’re not fighting another opponent per se, but you’re fighting despair. You’re beating back a version of yourself that wants to give up.”
Shamieh explained that she is interested in portraying the shared aspects of the human condition. “For me, it is very interesting that all these cultures that seem so different are actually quite similar,” she said.
“I grew up in a Middle Eastern household where there was a great emphasis on matchmaking and getting married,” Shamieh said. “When I moved to New York to become a theatre artist, I was surprised to find that many of the American women around me, once they starting to enter their mid-thirties, seemed desperate to find husbands in the same way that my grandmother was desperate to find me [a husband] when I was still in my twenties. Though it happened later in an American context, it seemed both cultures make women feel that their worth is tied to motherhood and fitting into cultural norms.”
Shamieh’s novel follows Arabella, a Palestinian American woman caught in a love triangle between two men — Aziz, a medic serving in Gaza, and Yoav, an Israeli American theatre artist. In an interview with NPR, Shamieh described her novel as a Palestinian-American Sex and the City, touching on the same elements of comedy, relatability, and intrigue that made the series a touchstone for women in the early aughts.
Although Too Soon is not autobiographical, Shamieh drew inspiration from her childhood growing up in a Palestinian American family living in San Francisco. “Almost my entire village immigrated to America in the 60s, [they] fled from war and economic destruction,” she said. “[The Too Soon characters are] more like a conglomerate of the women from my village of Ramallah specifically… There’s a salacious scene with a woman on a refugee boat. That’s not my grandmother’s story, but it’s a story I heard about another woman of her generation.”
Shamieh’s project was sparked in part by a desire for better representation in contemporary literature. “When I was growing up, the cultural landscape was different,” she said. “Before the emergence of superstars like Alice Walker and Amy Tan, it felt like there wasn’t much visibility for female writers of color, and they weren’t given the reverence that was afforded to white writers, especially men. And so I said, ‘Let me try to write the book that I needed as a kid, like my Joy Luck Club or The Color Purple.’”
While the novel is set in 2012, Shamieh feels the current political moment has made it especially relevant today. “The power of literature is that it can reach people, if they are capable of being reached. My hope is that Too Soon is a book that can do that.” she said. “I have been writing plays about Palestinian identity, usually comedies, for a long time. Therefore, I’m used to my work dealing with very polarizing subject matter where there is a great diversity of opinions. I always look forward to engaging with that diversity of opinions, especially on college campuses like Williams.”
Shamieh’s work depicts the harrowing plight of refugees but tells their stories with humor, a move that ultimately humanizes the characters, she explained. “I think that people appreciate watching messy people, seeing somebody slip on a banana peel, metaphorically,” she said. “And all my characters keep slipping on banana peels. And it gets more and more intense as the story goes on.”
Her relatable, character-driven writing conveys a timeless story about contemporary conflict. “I don’t just write for this cultural moment,” she said. “I write about the human condition, and I hope that people see my [characters] as human. But, very clearly, the book is about the legacy of a people who are displaced because they are born a different religion. I don’t think that can not be political.”
“I think my existence as a Palestinian is politicized, so no matter what I write, it will have a political bend to it,” she said. Shamieh looks forward to discussing her work with a diverse audience at Claiming Williams and hopes to share her story with people who may not have otherwise picked up her book, she said. “As a reader, if you’re choosing not to read widely, that’s political. [If] you’re choosing to read widely, it’s also political,” she said.
