“This Book Wrote Me”— An Interview with Alaa Al-Musalli

Interviewed by Mandy Bayrami

ALL LIT UP: The Age of Silence is based on real events, namely the Iraqi-Iranian War and the Gulf War. What first inspired you to tell this particular story?

ALAA AL-MUSALLI: I grew up in Iraq and witnessed these wars, and this particular story unfolded in front of me when I was growing up. This story stayed with me and never let go of me until I told it, borrowing something that Nick Cave said to Sean O’Hagan in their book Fath, Hope, and Carnage.

In 2010, I had a complicated surgery, and six months later, I lost my father. I was a new mother of two, had a demanding job that offered no sick leave, and was physically unwell. I was imploding. I sat down one night and had an unexplained urge to write about Bedria, my protagonist, a mother in a war zone. Bedria is a real character, much like all the characters in the book, and “Bedria” is her real name. Everything that happened to her is real. Who she is to me is a challenge I leave for my readers to discover because books shouldn’t give away their secrets and overexplain. Stories should leave something for the imagination.

Writing Bedria’s story became my quiet place. One paragraph after the other, I started remembering what it was like growing up in a war zone. That didn’t make things any better at first, but it led me to questioning what motherhood is really like for women in war zones. I started remembering more about Bedria and the women I grew up watching back home in Iraq, her neighbours, her friends, and her daughters, all of whom had much harder experiences in life and motherhood than what I was going through, all of whom mothered in silence, quietly navigating their losses, health issues, and fear under a cloud of patriarchy, misogyny, and dictatorship. The exhaustion I was feeling from being unwell and a new mother, the pain of the surgery that took three years to heal, and my inability to say goodbye to my father before he passed all became more defined, more concrete, more manageable in comparison to the suffering of the women and mothers I was writing about. I started feeling ashamed of my depression and weakness. The more I wrote about Bedria and how she mothered and suffered in a war zone, the stronger I became, and the more I wanted to research conflict and what lingers after wars are over. But are wars ever over? How many Bedrias are out there?

For years, I just wrote to understand, to heal, to let go, and to calm down. I never thought I’d publish The Age of Silence until I started giving voice to the silent and forgotten—to make Bedria speak in the dialogue and to the reader on behalf of mothers like her. These stories are reoccurring everywhere there is a war. They are happening right now. I wrote my book to find my strength, but it took me on a 15-year-long journey of discovery, mostly to understand what it’s like to mother, and the book expanded and expanded until it became an ode, a tribute, to mothers in war zones.

ALU: How did you balance historical accuracy with the freedom to create fictional characters and scenes? Were there moments when the historical record and the story you wanted to tell pulled you in different directions?

ALAA: As mentioned in the title verso of the book, The Age of Silence is a historical fiction. All political references are grounded in real events, and the characters are based on real people. Most names, except Bedria, Salman, and Ali, have been changed to protect the family’s identity. So, the characters are not fictional, and neither are the scenes and events that unfolded in Bedria’s household. The reason I called this book a historical fiction is to mainly protect the family. As Michelle Good said at the Winnipeg Book Festival last weekend, if you say it’s fiction, and people read it and dislike it, they could dismiss it—because it’s fiction. While my book may not be as good as Good’s (excuse the pun), there are many parallels in the reasoning behind telling the stories as fiction and how the identity of the characters is protected. I have a sense that readers will notice that the book has too many truths, especially in the character-building and history, to make it completely fiction. My book is a work of creative nonfiction at heart, but it also is a historical and literary fiction. These three forms are entwined to relay the narrative that happened to the family behind closed doors. All political events are true and fact-checked, and all the events that happened to the family and in the household are as accurate as memory has allowed them to be, which make the book historical, creative and nonfiction. The fictional elements are represented in the dialogue, which is written based on what the characters were and are like—as some have passed, while others are still alive.

If you’d like to know my expectation of how my readers will connect this family to me, please listen to the radio interview I had with Vancouver Coop Radio. You can find it here (The Rational—August 31, 2026).

ALU: This is a novel about mothers and family. How do you think motherhood changes in times of conflict, and what did you hope readers would understand about mothers living in war zones? What does motherhood demand of Bedria that it might not demand of her in peacetime?

ALAA: This story gives readers a domestic lens on war and shows what mothering and motherhood is like in a war zone, not only through Bedria, but through the women she talks to or about, the living, the dead, the exiled, the kind, and the lost. Bedria struggles to keep her family together in ways that may be unimaginable to most mothers who haven’t experience war. When a war happens to a people, it inhabits them. They bring the war home, something rarely shown on the media and social media. Family ties are broken in ways that make siblings rivalry deadlier, ego more dangerous, and the psyche more obsessive and wanting power and conflict. War never ends when the battlefield is quiet. It lingers and festers and grows. In war zones, mothers carry a heavy sense of guilt that their children are suffering—that it’s their fault; they don’t function the way mothers do in peaceful countries. Silence becomes their way of coping to try to keep it together—to withhold their fear, pain, needs, and suffering. It’s their survival mechanism, but it is also a destructive imposition, especially in a culture that favours patriarchy and abidance to political and religious rules. Silence is forced on mothers and women. It is not always a choice. Mothering in a war zone demands so much that mothers lose their sense of self and identity. They become obsessive, paranoid, and end up living only to try to make up for what the war brings on their children. The silence or silencing of a mother in any time, peace or war, is dangerous, but when a mother is in a war zone, she is silent and silenced in different ways and for different reasons. When the mother is silenced, the child is finished. And when the child is finished, the homeland is gone.   

ALU: What did you discover about your protagonist only once you were writing her?

ALAA: Bedria became a mother in her mid-teens, so she was a child when she had her firstborn. While I was remembering her and writing her story, I realized that she was watching and taking note of everything and forgiving in ways unconceivable to me as a mother myself. Writing about Bedria helped me reflect on my own mothering senses, needs, wants, fears, and obsessions, and it helped me understand what forgiveness could look like. There’s a saying in Arabic that roughly translates to, “Heaven is underneath mothers’ feet.” What I realized is that this saying speaks of a unique form of forgiveness, one that I only discovered when I finished writing the book, even though the story has been with me for over 32 years when Bedria passed away. I strongly feel that spending the last 15 years reflecting and writing about Bedria rewrote me. I say this with no reservations: This Book Wrote Me. And I hope readers will find parallels and ways of connecting with it to help them reflect on motherhood, parenthood, conflict, love, loss, grief, and forgiveness.    

ALU: Your work has taken you from the Middle East to Europe and Canada, and your academic work focuses on language, communication, and conflict. How have those experiences shaped the way you approached storytelling in your book?

ALAA: I stared writing this book in 2011, when I was teaching English in the Sultanate of Oman. I continued working on it in the Netherlands and Canada where I began to find myself interested in teaching and research in the field of communication and media studies. I owe that change in interest to the amount of research I did about the Iraqi-Iranian War and the First Gulf War. In other words, the research for my book changed my academic interests. For the 12 years I spent writing the full manuscript and the three years I took fine-tuning it, looking for publishers, and completing it with the editor and copy editor, I was immersed in reading about conflict in the Middle East, disinformation, misinformation, civil liberties, and freedom of expression, all of which influenced my teaching, what I research, and the courses I created. And in turn, all of what I started teaching, researching and publishing about academically has influenced the voice in my book. I tell the story as if I’m a fly on the wall—an omniscient presence that I trust and hope the readers would trust, too.   

ALU: Since this is your debut novel, what kind of fiction writer did you discover yourself to be while writing The Age of Silence?

ALAA: I’d like to think I’m a fact-based, fact-finding, researcher at heart. I introduce myself as an antiwar writer, not a fiction writer. As I said earlier, there was a reason the book was categorized as historical fiction, but it’s a creative nonfiction first and foremost. I do believe that my fiction writing is most prominent and notable through the dialogue, which I’ve been told reads very believable, but that’s only because I know what the characters in the book were and are like, as some of them have passed and others are still alive. And I also understand the nuances of the religious, cultural, and political upheavals the characters faced. All this has helped the fictional dialogue read the way Baghdadis in that timeframe spoke, which I hope translates well to all readers. I say Baghdadis in that timeframe because they speak and live a different way now—since the collapse of the country in 2003. However, even the fictional dialogue has some truth to it as some phrases are very true to what and how they were said, for example, when Salman sees Bedria for the first time in his life as she was crossing the street in front of him and is immediately smitten by her, he did say, “She’s MINE!” How I know and what is my connection to this family? I leave this for my dear readers to discover.   

* * *

ALAA AL-MUSALLI is a professor of communication and media at Capilano University. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writers’ Studio program in 2019 and the Graduate TWS Workshop in 2023. She trained under the mentorship of JJ Lee (January-November 2019) and Aislinn Hunter (January-July 2023). Musalli has two short story publications: ‘Ghost in the Sky’ (2019) in emerge 19: The Writer’s Studio Anthology of Simon Fraser University and ‘The Inconvenient Oath’ (2021) in Hastings Journal by Freedom Press, both are war memories. The Age of Silence is her debut novel. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Find a copy of The Age of Silence here on All Lit Up or via your local bookseller.