Londoner Henry Hemming Writes the Middle East's New Narrative

Henry Hemming, a London native, decided to travel the Middle East with his best friend after graduating college. The experience exposed him to a world full of adventure that inspired him to write his book Misadventure of the Middle East. From his celebrations with American troops in Saddam Hussein’s old palaces to the ski slopes in Iran, Hemming takes the reader on an exciting journey that explores the complexity of the region. Hemming continues to write for major publications and is working on a new book. We got a chance to speak with him.

Elan: A lot of your work focuses on the Middle East. What inspires you about the region to write about it?

Henry Hemming: Most of the time it’s artists who inspire me to write about the region. My last book set in the Middle East was a monograph on the Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem (@abdulnasserghar), and without doubt the happiest and most compelling experiences I’ve had in the region have involved artists in one way or another.

Elan: After spending time in that part of the world, what has the region taught you?

HH: Never to think of a region as a region. It is so much more important to burrow down into the multiple identities bound up within each of the people living within any given area. One of the qualities that makes us human is the ability to find identity within an array of sometimes very different groupings, and to hold these identities simultaneously. Each of us belongs to a mass of separate communities at any one time, be it the community of our family, our religion, or the community of people who belong to, let’s say, the same book club. This is a rare ability and one to relish.

Elan: Some of your work and talks have helped to decode the region for people not so familiar with the Middle East. What is one message you hope to communicate to them through your talks, interviews and writing?

HH: I’m drawn constantly to the margins of society and expectation. Like so many writers and journalists I enjoy telling the story of characters and places that challenge or play with our prejudices. Likewise when I write or talk about the Middle East I try to highlight the complexity and variety of the people in the region by focusing on the unusual stories, those which do not fit our standard narratives. So my message is, really, about the impossibility of generalizing about an entire region.

Elan: You wrote Misadventure in the Middle East, a book about your travels through the region. You had quite an exciting journey from celebrating the fourth of July with former American GI’s in one of Saddam’s old palaces, Iran’s ski slopes, to nightclubs. What was it like to experience that and what was your fondest memory?

HH: It was thrilling. It’s hard not to feel alive as never before when walking back from a Fourth of July party in one of Saddam’s former Baghdad palaces, in the summer of 2003, an uncertain and liminal moment in Iraq’s recent history, through deserted streets, only to hear a gunfight start up in the next-door street. Yet my fondest memory of that trip was a softer one: the hospitable and consistently warm reaction to the me, an outsider, painting in the street.

Elan: What was your greatest challenge writing the book?

HH: Getting the narrative voice right. Having got together a first draft I began to inhabit that awkward, limbo-like state of having what to my mind was a finished book and wanting to call myself a ‘author’ but not being able to find a publisher. Looking back on it, this was the best thing that could have happened. It forced me to pick apart what I was trying to do with the book, why the manuscript was not working and how I could change it. Only after two years of tinkering away at the manuscript in my spare time did the penny drop. I realized why the narrative voice was not working, made the changes and soon after the book was taken on. The narrative voice within any book is, for me, by far the most important element to get right.

Elan: What are you working on now and what can we look forward to in the upcoming months from you?

HH: I’m hard at work on the biography of an eccentric British genius who might have been during the Second World War a Soviet spy. On the face of it this has little to do with the Middle East. Yet what drew me to this man was not just the extraordinary story of his life but the way he solved problems. He was described as a genius on account of his staggering ability to find solutions to any logical challenges or problems. As well as being the story of a fascinating character this book will be about the art of problem-solving, something which relates to the Middle East as much as anywhere else in the world.

Elan: Do you have any advice to young writers?

HH: Yes: don’t. The pay is hopeless and as a profession it can be enormously frustrating and unrewarding. Of course anyone who reads those last two sentences and thinks to themselves—I want to write anyway—is well on their way to becoming a writer. It requires a certain amount of bloody-mindedness and the ability to more or less ignore those who suggest you do something else. Paradoxically, it also depends upon being able to listen to criticism of one’s work and act on it. You could say that what this comes down to is working out which advice to take on and which to ignore. That would be my advice.

Follow Henry on Twitter: @henryhemming