A Testimony or a Prayer

THE DISSENTERS has a cover I can show you!

My dear friends,

I wanted to share this as soon as I could, though I wish it wasn’t under such dreadful circumstances.

As I type now I know children exactly like my own are being made homeless for the third or fourth time in seven months, made to witness unimaginable atrocity and endure unimaginable horror again. I know it is happening only a few hours’ drive away from where I am, at my country’s border. And I know that my countrymen, powerless or complicit or both, are at best simply watching.

Yet I also know that living and working is part of what it means to resist. And with this book my hope precisely is to expose a reader of English to the kind of Western moral questions that are deemed universal in a context totally and unselfconsciously outside the West, and by so doing profoundly alter that reader’s consciousness. In this sense, I feel my book might contribute to the broader revolutionary cause.

Part of the consolation of sharing the cover is that its core is a picture I truly treasure. A studio portrait of my mother when she was much younger than I am now. I had imagined it on the cover since the book started to take shape because my mother was the initial inspiration for the heroine, Amna. Amna is a woman from a very similar background to my mother’s, but the further along I went with her in the writing the less like my mother she actually became.

Still, I want to thank Mama along with Noor Naga and Madeline Beach Carey, two much younger women without whose intercession the gods of Anglophone publishing might never have smiled on my efforts. I also want to thank my editor Anni Liu for picking up the book, and for painstakingly enabling me to extract a snappier, more accessible version of it out of what I had.

This is how Graywolf describes The Dissenters:

A transgressive first novel in English by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life

Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son Nour ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 50s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency. 

Bina Shah’s generous endorsement rang movingly true to me:

The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free—by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident debut from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage.

And I felt vindicated when Amitav Gosh—one of my literary heroes—sent an email containing this sentence:

The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly-told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir uprising and its grim aftermath.

The book is already available to preorder at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. And for those of you who might be interested in reviewing or otherwise engaging with it before its publication date (February 4, 2025), please let me know. (The galleys should be available by August this year.)

Finally, without sounding overdramatic, I want to share my deep disquiet. Since October 7 it’s been clearer than ever how tenuous and uncertain are the lives we’ve been gifted with, and with which, responsibly or nor, we have gifted our children: how dispensable we are deemed to be in this part of the world, and (considering the duplicity and derangement of those in charge of it) how prone the whole planet is to instant apocalypse.

In Roberto Bolaño’s short poem «Gozilla en Mexico», a father and son barely survive a bombing of Mexico City that no one else seems to realize is happening. Later on the son asks the father, “What are we … ants, bees, wrong numbers / in the big rotten soup of chance?” And the father replies: “We're human beings, my son, almost birds, / public heroes and secrets.”

A few years ago, while I struggled to find a publisher for The Dissenters, I started learning Spanish specifically for that last line. I now know it by heart: «Somos seres humanos, hijo mío, casi pájaros, / héroes públicos y secretos.»

In the spirit of «casi pájaros», I’m going to take solace in the feeling that this is not the world I thought I was living in, it is not a sustainable world, and perhaps my role is to bear witness to its inevitable demise.

In this sense I’ve come to think of The Dissenters as an act of witnessing. A memory of the future. A testimony, or a prayer. Its meaning has certainly deepened in the light of what’s happening in Palestine. As has the meaning of my life.

Yours,

Y