What I Was Looking For All Along

It took me years to realize that I had been asking the wrong question.

For the longest time, I believed I was searching for good Arabic literature. Before that, I thought I was drawn to English literature. Looking back, I understand that language had never been the destination. It had been the route I happened to take.

I was searching for a particular type of conversation.

Not conversations that offered answers, but those that handed me better questions than the ones I had arrived with.

Perhaps that is why I found myself returning to certain books while others remained strangers. They were written in different countries, different centuries, and different languages, yet they seemed to speak a common literary language. Not one of grammar or vocabulary, but of curiosity.

Only much later did I find the words for what I had been searching for all along. 

What these books shared was not immediately obvious. Their plots differed wildly, their settings had little in common, and their authors rarely resembled one another. Yet they all possessed an unusual willingness to leave certain doors open.

For years, I believed that a satisfying novel was one that neatly explained itself before the final page. Murakami dismantled that expectation.

His novels rarely explain themselves. They leave doors open instead of closing them. Characters disappear without explanation. Dreams blend into reality. Talking cats appear as naturally as ordinary neighbours, and mysterious figures seem to wander in because the story allows them to.

Years ago, that uncertainty frustrated me. I wanted answers.

Yet I slowly figured out that those unanswered questions were precisely what kept me returning. The novels refused to end when I closed the book. They continued quietly in my own mind, asking for interpretations rather than conclusions.

The mystery was never something to solve.

It was something to live with.

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” – Kafka on the Shore 

I don't remember the page number anymore. I don't even remember what happened immediately before or after that sentence. What I remember is closing the book and sitting quietly with it for a while.

As my reading widened, I began to recognize that uncertainty alone could not explain why these novels lingered in my mind. Plenty of books end ambiguously, leaving little behind. What distinguished the ones I returned to was something quieter. They trusted me to wrestle with difficult ideas without insisting on a single interpretation or guiding me gently toward a conclusion. 

They never paused to explain every philosophical idea or moral dilemma. Instead, those questions emerged naturally through conversations, contradictions, and ordinary observations. They assumed I was willing to wrestle with difficult ideas without needing the author to guide me toward a single conclusion.

That was the conversation I had unknowingly been searching for.

To my surprise, I eventually discovered that same intellectual companionship in Arabic literature.

This novel, عزازيل, was the first to catch me completely off guard.

 I expected historical fiction. Instead, I found myself pausing every few pages to verify theological councils, forgotten historical figures, and philosophical debates I had never encountered before. The novel never demanded that I agree with it. It never allowed me to remain a passive reader. Every chapter extended beyond its own pages.

"“والفهم أيها الأحبة، وإن كان فعلا عقليًا، إلا أنه فعل روحي أيضًا.. فالحقائق التي نصل إليها بالمنطق والرياضيات إن لم نستشعرها بأرواحنا، فسوف تظل حقائق باردة، أو نظل نحن قاصرين عن إدراك روعة إدراكنا لها. "

The quote roughly translates to:

“Understanding is never inherited. Truth is not received second-hand. Logic may illuminate part of reality, but some truths can only be perceived by the spirit. If we deny them, they remain forever beyond our grasp.”

Then came دفاتر الوراق by جلال بردس. Another novel that unsettled me disconcertingly. Rather than exploring history, it blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, leaving me wondering whether certainty had ever existed in the first place—or whether stories might be another way of making sense of ourselves. Long after finishing the novel, I found myself questioning not only its narrator, but also the stories people construct about themselves in order to survive.

Then came غصون البندق.

Its greatest surprise wasn't its plot.

It was the quiet realization that I had finally found, in Arabic, the same literary companionship I had spent years searching for elsewhere.

The language had changed.

The conversation had not.

That was the moment I stopped searching for literature in a particular language and began searching for literature that spoke in a particular way. 

None of these novels simply taught me something.

They made me curious enough to continue asking questions long after I had closed them

I encountered that same feeling years later while reading Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness.

Rather than presenting philosophy as something distant or academic, Ozeki gently wove it into the story itself. Books, objects, memories, and language gradually became questions rather than answers.

I often found myself closing the novel only to realize the conversation had continued inside my own head.

Where does a story end?

Where does memory begin?

Which parts of ourselves belong to us, and which have been written by others?

Those questions never demanded answers. Their value lay in carrying them with me, reshaping the way I looked at stories—and perhaps at myself.

The best novels, I noticed, never insist that you agree with them.

They invite you to think.

As I continued reading, I noticed another recurring pattern. Certain images refused to remain mere objects within the story. Murakami's crows, wells, forests, sheep, and talking cats were never puzzles waiting for the correct answer. Their meanings seemed to shift depending on where I stood as a reader. Each rereading revealed something slightly different. The symbols hadn't changed. I had. 

Each rereading revealed something slightly different.

The symbols hadn't changed.

I had.

Perhaps that was the point.

Looking back, I came to see that none of these books taught me the same lesson. If anything, they often contradicted one another. They came from different cultures, different religions, different centuries, and different literary traditions. What united them was not their subject matter, but what they asked of me as a reader. They asked me to slow down. To tolerate uncertainty. To question ideas I had assumed were settled. To continue thinking long after I had closed the book.

Conversation, to me, has never meant agreement. The conversations I value most are the ones that unsettle me. They make me question an opinion I thought was fixed, notice a perspective I had overlooked, or realize that certainty is often more fragile than I had imagined. The books that stayed with me did exactly that. They never asked me to adopt their worldview. They invited me to spend time inside it.

For years, I believed I was searching for books written in the right language.

In reality, I had been searching for books that asked the kinds of questions I wanted to live with.

Some happened to be Japanese. Others Russian, Italian, or Arabic. Some reached me in translation; others spoke to me in their original language. Somewhere along the way, those distinctions became less important than I had once imagined.

Language, I now understand, had only ever been the medium; the conversation was what endured. 

For the first time, I stopped asking whether a book belonged to Arabic literature or translated literature. Instead, I found myself asking a much simpler question.

Is this the conversation I want to have?

Once I finally knew the answer, one final question remained. 

If so many of those voices had reached me through translation...

Whose voice had I really been listening to all along?