The Brooklyn Rail

Deena ElGenaidi and I met in graduate school, during an MFA program at Rutgers. We were both working on the manuscripts that would become our debuts—a novel in her case, and a memoir in mine. I didn’t get to know Deena well until our second year, partly because she’d arrived late to the program having just returned from a teaching program in Morocco, which I thought was incredibly chic and a little punk of her. Later, I found out that she could miss that time because she already had a master’s degree (in literature) and had enough credits to carry over. All this formed an early, and it turned out, quite accurate picture of Deena: diligent and dedicated and high achieving, but above all, an adventurer. Quite Sagittarian, really. I’ve come to know her as a person who seeks out experience at every turn. Who is unafraid to break fresh ground. In her family. Her life. Her work. Like I said, a little punk. 

After graduate school, we both happened to move to New York City, and became part of a writing group. For almost six years, our group of five met weekly at a West Village diner, swapping industry info and strategies for sustaining life as an artist in New York. We commiserated over the fickle tastes of publishing and read draft after draft of each other’s manuscripts. For almost a decade we have shared a dedication to the work, above all. And I’m thrilled, now, to celebrate her debut novel, Dust Settles North, in its final, glorious form. It is a subtle, yet sweeping story of siblings in distress, of identity formation amidst debilitating grief, of finding voice and forgiveness where and when we least expect it. 

Nina St. Pierre (Rail): I’d love to hear more about the setting of the book. Why did you choose to set it in Egypt and America, particularly during the historic uprisings? 

Deena ElGenaidi: From the beginning, I wanted to set the story in both Egypt and America to show the dichotomy of the two cultures and what it’s like being in between. I started writing this in 2015, a few years after the Arab Spring. It was a movement that I was interested in and that my family and I were following and talking about. And I visited Egypt in 2012, so I saw some of that aftermath. 

Rail: Sibling stories are fascinating to me, but I find for the most part we have such stock representations in the media. There are the bickering sitcom BFFs or high-drama Shakespearean level duos. But the relationship between Hannah and Zain is quite subdued in comparison, cloaked even, which to me, as an older sister in a complex sibling relationship really resonates. What is in the way of intimacy for Hannah and Zain? 

ElGenaidi: Hannah and Zain’s upbringing has a lot to do with their relationship as adults. They grow up having to keep secrets from their parents. In a lot of Arab, Muslim households, certain topics are just never discussed, so keeping secrets becomes the norm. Zain assumes his little sister abides by the rules and values that his parents have set, so being honest with her doesn’t feel like an option. Hannah becomes the one to start breaking that wall because she figures out that she and Zain are keeping similar secrets. 

Even when they start to be honest with one another, it takes a while for them to actually achieve any sense of closeness because that type of relationship is so new to them. 

Rail: There's a reveal of a big secret in Dust Settles—the sort that often emerges after a major loss or schism. Can you speak on the role of secrecy in the story? 

ElGenaidi: Hannah and Zain keep secrets from their parents, but we also discover that the parents have secrets. I don’t want to speak for all Arabs, Muslims, immigrant families, religious families, but there’s often a culture of secrecy in those communities tied to shame and religion. Hannah and Zain feel they need to keep secrets because their parents are religious. When they break the rules of that religion, they want to avoid their parents’ disappointment. But we later see the hypocrisy happening on the parental side. There is a tendency in a lot of religious communities to flaunt the rules of that religion in private, while upholding a public image of the perfect Muslim, or the perfect Christian, etc. That inevitably leads to a lot of secrets.

Rail: There’s consistent tension between home and away, future and past, Egyptianness and Americanness. Can you say more about your relationship to the in-between and what you were exploring there? 

ElGenaidi: I grew up always feeling some in-betweenness. From a young age, I was aware of a difference between my peers and me. Most of my friends didn’t come from immigrant families, and their households were very different from mine—in terms of food, language, holidays. As an adult, I have pride in those cultural differences, but as a kid wanting to fit in, I didn’t want to be perceived as different. I really wanted to write a story that other children of immigrants could relate to in that way. That feeling of not being American enough, while also not being enough of your family’s culture. You’re stuck in this in between and don’t fit in anywhere.

Rail: In popular media, we see the stereotype of returning to the homeland as some sort of panacea—a simpler, more rooted way of living. But life “back home” is often just as complex or rife with issues, if not more so, than in the “new place.” What stereotypes or preconceived notions did your characters find themselves confronting about Egypt? 

ElGenaidi: There’s a stereotype in some cultures where the “homeland” is this innocent and wholesome place, whereas America and American culture corrupts you. I grew up with the idea that people in Egypt are more religious, they don’t drink, they don’t do drugs, they don’t even date. So when my characters go to Egypt, they find that that’s not true. Egypt is just like anywhere else. Teenagers are dating and having sex. People are drinking, but maybe they’re a little more discreet about it because of religious reasons. They go out, they party. The characters realize this idealized version of Egypt, or the homeland, that their parents sold to them never actually existed. Their preconceived notions get shattered, basically.

Rail: What do you think is still missing or misrepresented in American media about Muslim or Arab-American culture and communities?   

ElGenaidi: There’s so much still missing. There’s still very little Muslim or Arab-American representation that doesn’t have to do with terrorism. That’s partly why I wanted to write this story. I never saw myself represented in anything growing up, and maybe that’s why I wanted so badly to assimilate. When the show Ramy came out, that was huge for me because for the first time, I saw a family like mine on TV, and I felt it represented us so well. But Ramy also got a lot of criticism in the first season from Muslims who said the show did not represent them, which just goes to show we need more media about Arabs and Muslims. Ramy Youssef responded to the criticism by saying he was trying to show his own experience and not the experience of all Muslims, which, yeah, of course. There’s no way for one show to represent all of us. 

Rail: You’ve been quite active politically, advocating for Palestinian rights and against the genocide in Gaza. While I know you started writing Dust Settles years ago, is there added resonance or tension with the book coming out now in light of everything happening not just in Palestine, but in the Arab countries surrounding it, Egypt included? 

ElGenaidi: Yeah, there’s a lot of protest in the book, and that’s very resonant with the protests happening all over the world right now. I also think if the book took place today, Hannah would be participating in and helping organize those protests for Palestine, whether it be in Egypt or America. Both places right now are dangerous to protest in. The Egyptian government arrests people, and you might never know where they went or what happened, and now, in America, they do the exact same thing. It’s no longer safe for anyone here.

Rail: Toward the end of the novel, we see Zain turning toward prayer as a salve, as Hannah grows in her work as an activist. Can you talk about the role of faith in finding purpose? 

ElGenaidi: Hannah and Zain grow up Muslim, but they have trouble reconciling who they are as adults with the religion they were taught. They both break many of the rules of Islam, and the way they’re brought up is that if you don’t follow certain rules, then you’ve failed at being Muslim. It becomes an all or nothing mindset. Because of that, we see them kind of reject faith. 

Eventually, though, Zain turns to prayer. He hits rock bottom and doesn’t know what else to do, so he reaches for what he was taught as a kid. I wouldn’t say that faith ends up giving him purpose because he never becomes very religious or does a deep-dive into Islam or anything, but the act of prayer becomes a sort of familiar meditation for him. Instead of entirely rejecting his upbringing and his religion, he takes pieces of it to help ground himself.

Rail: There’s something beautiful in the idea that instead of forgetting the past, we can integrate and make it our own, then roll it forward. It feels like a part of ancestor work to me. What did Hannah, and even Zain have to work out that couldn’t have been done in the US, or even maybe with their mother alive? Do we have to return to the past to arrive in the future?

ElGenaidi: After their mother dies, Hannah and Zain begin to learn more about her outside her role as wife and mother. For some of that, they definitely do need to go to Egypt because that’s where her story took place. There’s archives of their mother’s past in Egypt, and they’re confronted with the people who were once closest to her. 

Hannah, in particular, begins to recognize the similarities between her and her mother, and she forges down a path that she probably wouldn’t have otherwise. So maybe we do have to return to the past to arrive in the future. The past always has something to teach us.