This causes me to change my course of study from illustration to marketing, business management and sales, something I could do without having to sit at a desk all day. Around started to feel better and began writing articles on real estate and learning about journalism. At the time I worked in sales for the Washington Post out of Seattle. Surprise, two of my long-form advertorial features actually won national awards for advertising and my clients were experiencing record sales.
I wasn't looking to start writing, but writing found me. I soon left the Washington Post after being there for five years and did a year with CBS radio group where I found myself writing radio scripts for clients.
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That job I left on April 17th That day is also the day I sat down and started the first short story in The Sensuality Series as a way to flirt with my then boyfriend who lived in North Carolina. Each story I wrote got me a plane ticket and within three months I had my first book. I realized after the reviews that I have a gift for pulling emotions out through words. Writing erotica was how I discovered this but it wasn't until the mids when I joined forces with a journalist in the Middle East, that this talent really matured.
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Our articles on the humanitarian conditions in the Middle East, combining his on the ground interviews with my ability to create a theater in people's minds and place them in the middle of the story gained us substantial praise from human rights groups and got us a lot of enemies from the people we exposed. It also lead to a number of awards for our work and policy changes on an international level. About the same time, because of and my increased work reporting on the Middle East, I rediscovered my own faith, Christianity and I became increasingly alarmed at its being used as a weapon of hate, segregation, war and reason to oppress others.
This lead me into my philanthropic activities, working with people of all faiths seeking peace, an end of apartheid throughout the world and equal rights for all people, no matter who they are, what they believe or where they come from. As my writing gained readership I found myself invited to other countries to work and learn about other cultures. I also found that supporting human rights is admirable to everyone but those abusing them so I collected some enemies along the way as well.
I've also assisted on an upcoming non-fiction book about economics, oil and world affairs due out in called Ultimate Betrayal and have an work-in-progress manuscript about doing business in Saudi Arabia for Westerners. In addition I've written over articles on various subjects ranging from relationships and sexuality to the Gaza Strip, Middle East and technology.
Like I said, I have lots of interests and I just love telling stories and educating people. What I can tell you is this.
In Search of the Sensual: Hanan al-Shaykh & Salman Rushdie - PEN America
Whether I'm writing non-fiction about politics, employment, cultures and humanitarian issues, children's stories capturing human values with pictures under a pseudonym or sexy little stories I won't let my parents read, my work will always be surprising, human, educational and different. Thanks for taking the time to stop by. Are you an author?
Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Laid Off Now What: She is a person who was abused as a girl, which deranges her in a certain way, and then she comes into this world of larger derangement. In the beginning, she thinks the war is freeing her, helping her, because there is no father anymore. For the first time, she can really look at herself and think, I am a human being, I am an individual, I can do whatever I want.
But I think Zahra was a very prodigious girl because she said no to many things and she became more trapped because she was saying no to her father and her society. You deal very explicitly with what is normally hidden in many Muslim countries—explicit treatment of sexuality and sexual relations. It had to do with the war; the war fed me as well. When the war broke out in Lebanon, and when I started writing Zahra , I felt free. What brought us to this war?
Why are we in this bloody war? This is why I wanted to expose everything. At the same time, sex was everywhere. When I was a child we had a neighbor who always wanted to wash clothes in the garden. She loved to wash the clothes of her family. You only take them off to be washed!
What did she mean? I was very slim when I was young and my grandmother, whom I loved so much, was worried about me. You have to eat, you have to eat. My grandmother telling this to her granddaughter who was ten years old. Our old manuscripts were so daring. They talked about sex, about rulers who loved young men, young boys; they talked about explicit things. The same thing happened in India. These are not foreign temples. These are temples carved by people in India; it is the tradition of India. How did readers react? With pleasure or with horror or condemnation? You are normal and a nice woman!
Why would you write this book? When Zahra sees a man she thinks is a sniper, she interposes her body. She uses her own sexuality as a way of stopping him. He says he never was; he was just on the roof admiring the view or whatever it was. At the end of the book, when she is in the street and she is shot, she believes that he is killing her, maybe because she has said that she is pregnant. Did he kill Zahra? Was he a sniper? The son of a bitch! I want you to go back to bed.
He was a sniper, and when he knew that she was pregnant, he killed her. I wanted to leave it that way. It was like a film; this is how I imagined the whole thing.
In Search of the Sensual: Hanan al-Shaykh & Salman Rushdie
Does that book feel like a long time ago? Because this book felt incredibly contemporary. It was first published twenty years ago. And the condition of the women in this book. Do you want to say something the condition? One can guess that—. It was amazing the way I thought about writing this novel.
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I was at the airport on my way to follow my husband, who is Lebanese—because of the war, he had to work in Saudi Arabia and Ghana. The first five minutes at the airport I saw my personality as if I had become a shadow. Not Hanan, not the writer, not the novelist or the mother. This is when I thought, Ah, I have seeds of the novel. Of course, living with women more than men gave me insight about Saudi women—both the very rich ones and the very modest with low income.
I thought, the whole time I was writing the book, that I was leading a double life.
This room, my office, is my true self. When I leave it, I am like the other women in Saudi Arabia. I think this book created lots of attention in the Arab world. No one appears to think about anything but sex all the way through it. In Saudi Arabia, you think about sex continuously—every single person, more than in Europe, more than clubs in Soho.
Even if you want to buy sanitary napkins, you hesitate. If I want to buy it, what is the owner of the shop going to think of me? It was everywhere, in the air. The women in my book really want to breathe, and they think through sex they can breathe because maybe if we could have a relationship, we would get something. We miss this taboo. It is an unhealthy society. It is a very closed society—very oppressive, very unhealthy. And how erotic it gets. I can see why you thought you had a book. When it was published in the Arab world, it was banned from a few Arab countries.
I remember there was an Arabic bookshop in London. She has three or four novels. The book after that is an extraordinary novel, Beirut Blues. I read it again before we had this conversation and I thought it was perhaps even better than when I read it before. I actually reviewed this book; it was just about the last book I ever reviewed. After this, it was impossible to review other books. The novel began like that. I was thinking about Saul Bellow. One of the great things about Herzog is the fact that he sends mad letters everywhere.
And here is your heroine, Asmaran, coming back to Beirut into the middle of this catastrophe. You had, at that time, also left Beirut and were living primarily outside. Although, of course, you would go back. How did it feel to return to that catastrophe?
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And was Asmaran your way of understanding what was happening? How did the book come to be? I talked about the war as well. I felt that I could not write as if I was still there like the other Lebanese writers who were in Beirut. Because I was away in London, this is how it should be: I wanted to understand the war. There are terrible ironies in this book. Yet she falls in love with somebody who will then take her away again. He thought he was taking her away, but she chose not to go. How can I do that to myself?
I was feeling guilty because I left and many friends of mine stayed behind. It seems to me that one of great tragedies of the current situation is the number of Arab writers who are forced into exile. An enormous number of the most prominent Arab writers are, whether by choice or necessity, not living in their country of origin.