Naeem Murr was in the middle of a research-intensive novel he was writing about his family — who was forced to flee from Haifa in Israel in 1948 for some 15 years — when he decided to take a break.
Born in London to a Palestinian father and an Irish mother, Murr was thinking about the concept of home and what home is when he landed on the idea of the character Jack, a Gazan immigrant. Although Jack finds a new place to live in Chicago, he still never truly feels at home. Jack’s story became Murr’s fourth novel, published this February.
Every Exit Brings You Home is drastically different from Murr’s other novels, such as The Boy, The Genius of the Sea and The Perfect Man, which often explore themes of mystery.
Every Exit Brings You Home instead examines what it means to pursue the American dream and to find a place to call home. At Unbound Book Festival, Murr will appear on the panel Disappearing Acts.
Murr sat down with Vox reporter Aciya Tajoury to discuss his most recent novel. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Aciya Tajoury: What led you to explore the themes of home in Every Exit Brings You Home?
Naeem Murr: I haven't written about my Palestinian family in any of my previous books, and I think it was because I just felt that I needed more time. It’s a big and complicated subject.
And I took a break, and I decided I was going to write some short stories based around the idea of home. And I had been thinking about Gaza because there had been — this was about five years ago — there had been another flare-up over some expulsions in East Jerusalem. I was looking at some of the camps and how … this place was home, of course, in that some people had lived there for at least a generation, and, you know, ended up they had never been able to leave. But for them, it wasn't home.
Home was in the past, and home was in the future, but it was not here. And I think, in many ways, Jack sort of just encapsulates that whole predicament. He is here; he's an immigrant in America. But he's sort of not here at the same time, so that's part of who he is. I mean, his job as a flight attendant is a job that puts him in a liminal space constantly, right? He's always in an airplane, which is between one place and another. But, of course, he's always returning home to his wife, who is, in some ways, Palestine, right? She identifies completely as a Palestinian, and she's kind of obsessed with everything that's going on there, and so he doesn't know how to move forward.
Tajoury: You're a national of both the U.S. and the U.K., in addition to your Irish Palestinian heritage, so I imagine you're quite familiar with this feeling of being alien to the culture that you exist in. How did this inform your depiction of the immigrant experience?
Murr: I was born in London, and then my father was Palestinian. My mother's Irish, and she then took us immediately to Lebanon, where we lived in a sort of villa in the hills above Beirut.
I do think that I've never felt substantial. I've never felt that I am home. I've not had a sense of what home is or really means to me for most of my life.
I've sort of felt like a constant immigrant in some ways. The immigrant situation is like, how do you translate yourself into a world? You have to be willing to translate yourself into a world. And particularly for a second generation immigrant, the child of an immigrant, you then have these two worlds in particular, right? You have the world that you go home to, which is often the culture from which your parents have come, and then you have the world that you go to outside that world. And you have to negotiate both of those things with Jack.
Tajoury: The panel you're participating in is titled Disappearing Acts. This exists in a lot of ways in the novel, especially through Jack, who culturally erases himself and has this emotional distance with everybody in his life. In what other ways do you feel like this theme of “disappearing acts” exists in the novel?
Murr: I think Jack is sort of nobody. And I think what he's struggling [with] is not to be nobody. Nobody truly knows him. He sort of made himself into somebody who listens to people and says as little as possible and sort of lies — but often it's just lies of omission. He just doesn't say anything. And so, he engages with people, and they have no sense of who they're engaging with. He's a ghost, and there's a sense that he wants to disappear, right?
"The immigrants are the life of any nation. They bring their new culture, a new life, a new perspective."Naeem Murr
It seems like so many things are disappearing. I mean, even what it is to be an American is sort of disappearing, right?
We don't want immigrants to disappear from this country. The immigrants are the life of any nation. They bring their new culture, a new life, a new perspective. Without it, the country has no creative soul and no economic drive.
Tajoury: In the U.S. at the moment, there's this larger battle against censorship and erasure, particularly when it comes to stories like Every Exit Brings You Home. What do you think festivals like Unbound bring to these times?
Murr: The thing about books is, people say, "Well, can a book change the world?" You know, no, I don't think the book changes the world, but it's like the underground, right? It is keeping the flame of intimacy and connectedness and empathy alive. These books are life.
What is a book? A book requires the author, right? It requires an author to imagine their way into a character, and it requires a reader to empathetically and creatively engage with that book. It is a very intimate experience of mutual creation — by an author, by a reader, and by a character — that the author and reader bring to life between them, and a world that the author and reader bring to life between them. This is what books do.
