« When I was silent… » — Interview with Sulaiman Addonia

After writing he needs to heal. In the hours past midnight Sulaiman Addonia watches ballet and listens to classical music. It is a ritual.

« Writing is torturous », he says. « I basically suffer. » He needs the night.

« When you are damaged », he says, « you come out of your work completely reassembled. »

At night he sews the fragments of his personality back into that of a father, a husband, friend. While writing he’d been stripped. One writes naked.

Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. The problem is, in part, a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch: it becomes the driving engine we interpolate into the interviewee’s work, the thing that somehow explains a piece of culture. But the strategy backfires, veering into sentiment or cynical marketing, when it becomes a template. Addonia, in any case, doesn’t write because he suffered, nor does writing deliver, properly speaking, a catharsis. Writing is its own travail.