Rajia Hassib

"... for the beauty
of her writing ..."

Her story

“It was the people, the people, who really made

us love being in Logan. From the beginning, they

were so welcoming and warm and friendly..."

At age 23, Rajia Hassib left Egypt and moved to America

with her new husband, Kamel Marsouk, an Egyptian medical student, so he could get first-rate training and residencies as a lung doctor. Through his extensive training, they lived in New York City, then New Jersey, then Los Angeles. Then they moved to Logan, West Virginia.

In 2006, after finishing his Los Angeles training, Kamel was offered a job as the lung specialist / critical care director at Logan Regional Medical Center.

“Our friends in California were upset about it,” Rajia said. “They literally warned us against moving to West Virginia. They were like, ‘You’re going to the Bible Belt! You’re not going to be accepted there! You won’t have a good time!’”

The family flew to West Virginia for Kamel’s interview. Driving down narrow, twisting Route 119 from Charleston, surrounded by trees and steep mountains, Rajia was entranced by, as one of her later characters would say, the “untamed connection to nature, a quality so different from Cairo or New York that she feels she is visiting an ancient, independent country.”

“But it was the people, the people, who really made us love being in Logan.” She and Kamel were hungry for community, and “from the beginning, they were so welcoming and warm and friendly. In other places where we lived in America, people didn’t open up like that. Logan was the first place where we made friends easily. People didn’t treat us with condescension or suspicion. They didn’t act like we were something exotic.”

“There’s this sense of almost weightlessness when you’re an immigrant,” she said. “Particularly if you move several times. For awhile, you’re really not grounded anywhere. Not only do you feel like a stranger, but often you may also literally get lost in an unfamiliar place.”

They finally felt grounded. “When my kids were starting school in Logan, the other moms talked with me at the school all the time, from the start.” They invited her to their homes. “They were curious, friendly and inquisitive, in a way I still fully appreciate. We’d stand around chatting for an hour after school and let the kids play on the playground.”

She and Kamel had planned to spend a couple of years in Logan, then move to another state, she said, “but we found we didn’t want to leave West Virginia. It was so wonderful for me, this feeling almost like we’d been taken in by the community. It just felt culturally, so much closer to Egypt than any place we have ever lived. That sense of community made us feel at home.”

Today, twenty years later, Kamel still directs the Logan Regional Medical Center’s ICU. “He’s the only doctor in that part of the coalfields who specializes in black lung and pulmonology, so people drive a very long way for him to treat them. He’s needed and he’s loved, and he’s just happy there," Rajia said.

Rajia had two children and went back to college at Marshall. She got a masters’ degree and wrote two internationally-praised books, both published by Viking/Penguin. Now she teaches English at Marshall University and is working on her third book.

The beginning of a writer

“I can remember the exact day I fell in love with reading,” Rajia said. “I was seven years old. My mom was cleaning the house. She went to a chest she’d been cleaning and pulled out an adventure book she bought for my sister, years before. She handed it to me and said, “Why don’t you try to read this and keep yourself busy?”

At 7, Rajia had never read a chapter book before. She climbed up on her mother’s bed and gave it a try. It turned out to be a story about five wild kids who solved mysteries and outsmarted detectives. “I sat on the bed all day, reading it. I couldn’t put it down. I kept reading while I walked over to my mother for help with a word I didn’t know.”

They lived in Alexandria, Egypt. “My first storyteller was my father. He read me stories every night when I was very small.” When her dad had to be away from her,“ he recorded himself telling Rajia bedtime stories on little cassettes, “so I could listen to them while he was gone.” And “at least once a week, my mother and I would walk a couple of blocks to a local newspaper and book seller, and she’d say, ‘Let’s pick up something for you to read.’”

An Appalachian identity

Rajia set her first novel, In the Language of Miracles (2015), mostly in New Jersey. West Virginia does not appear in that book. “While I was writing it, I didn’t yet feel I had the right to think of myself as a West Virginian,” Rajia said. “But after it was published, I had the most warm, amazingly accepting reactions from West Virginia writers and West Virginians who love books. You could feel that they were happy for me. I got invited to readings and book clubs and just gatherings, and it was ‘Oh, I’m hosting this gathering’ and ‘Oh, I have this radio program’ or ‘I’m hosting our book club. Can you come?’

“They never made me feel like anything other than a West Virginian who had published a book. The interactions were never ‘Oh, she’s an Egyptian.’ It was always ‘Oh, she’s a West Virginian and she got a book published.’ There was an excitement about it, so heartwarming. I felt it gave me almost permission to claim an Appalachian identity, which I would not have done.”

It was an important transition for her as a person and writer. West Virginia makes an appearance in her second book, Pure of Heart (Viking, 2019), set in New York and Egypt. A main character and his wife are visiting his West Virginia home (see opposite column).

“It took me some time for me to accept that I could write in English, to start with,” Rajia said. “And it took me a long time to accept that I could write about West Virginia. Because I had kind of assumed that I’m not Appalachian, and I don’t have the right to do it. But the way people treated me after my first book, it felt like everyone else assumed that I’m Appalachian. And it gave me the permission to think of myself as one. That was wonderful for me.”

Her second novel, Pure of Heart, follows two sisters, one in America, one in Egypt (see "Her Books").

Hassib’s third book, not yet finished, will be a sprawling tale across generations of a Egyptian family of immigrants. Whole sections of that book will take place in West Virginia.

Seeing the whole story: how she writes

She thinks back to the way her California friends warned her against West Virginia. “It’s awful, the misconceptions people from other states have about West Virginia. Their stereotypes were so incorrect. And I realize that those stereotypes are very much like the stereotypes of present-day immigrants, so I know how it feels. And interestingly, it’s one of the reasons I feel so connected to West Virginia.”

She does not wear the hajib, is light-skinned and speaks English, so she is less likely to set off stereotypes, she knows. “Once, in a store, I got a call from a friend who speaks Arabic. “I was talking with her in Arabic when a guy walked by, looked hard at me and said, “Learn to speak English!”

Rajia yelled at his back as he walked away. “I do speak English! I teach at Marshall! I teach English!”

In her second book, Rajia gave each of her main characters their own chapters so her readers will know the thoughts of multiple characters. She lets them speak for themselves and gives the reader details that help them understand each character’s situation and dilemma. That is not easy to do. Reviewers think she succeeds.

As an NPR reviewer wrote, “Hassib structures it beautifully. While there's real suspense in the book, it's not at the expense of the characters, who are each given ample space to tell their own stories, reveal their own motivations. . . . Hassib displays a keen understanding of how the relationships between spouses, siblings, and parents and children play out during times of stress. . . .. Hassib is a perceptive writer with a real understanding of how people act—not how they ought to act—and A Pure Heart is a novel that's as honest as it is engrossing."

A Boston Globe reviewer agreed, “'Very few people can see the whole story when they are at its center … And that’s the artistry of this novel: Each of the characters, in turn, is at the center; and each one, in a flawed and human way, is in pursuit of their own version of purity of heart."

Rajia’s first book, In the Language of Miracles, alternates between past and present. The two main characters in A Pure Heart, are sisters who live in two countries. The Egyptian sister dies in a terrorist explosion. The American sister goes to Egypt to find out how and why her sister died.

Neither book follows chronological order. Both feel continuous. “It’s very hard to do it that way,” Rajia said.

She starts by writing chronologically. Then she revises, moving passages around, assigning different episodes to different characters. Stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings are at the heart of much of her work, so she wants readers to see through the lenses of different characters. “If I were to stick with one character only, people would understand only that point of view.”

A bulleted sketch of her process:

“I start at the beginning. I know who my main characters are, and I know where I’m heading, but I don’t yet know how I’m going to get there.
She writes a chronological timeline of what will happen in the book. “That doesn’t mean I end up following it.”
She starts writing chapters. “Once I finish a chapter, I often have an idea of where I need to go next. I ask myself: What would people be curious about at this point? A lot of it is almost a process of association.”
“When you’re writing, with each chapter, you’re raising anticipation, expectations and questions. As writer George Saunders advises, the reader expects answers to their questions. And I have to decide what the readers would be most curious about next. It’s almost instinctive or by association. What do I feel that people need to learn next? Do I need to move to another character or jump in time?”
Sometimes the answer to that question requires her to jump to the past in the next chapter because “sometimes that’s the only way to answer the question, because people do things in the present because of things that happened in the past.”
“I try not to stay with one character too long and thereby neglect the other ones. I don’t want readers to forget about the other characters.”

What's next?

She is working on a third book, a sprawling tale of a family across continents, oceans and generations, starting in Egypt, ending in West Virginia. “This one is very hard,” she said. “I’ve thrown out enough material for three books.”

“I keep going back and forth between their stories until readers can understand why we’re getting this old story at the same time as we’re getting the new story.

“At this point, I have four generations. I intended three, but the granddaughter had a child, and I like this child very much.”

The granddaughter lives in, no surprise, West Virginia.

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Her books

reviews for

In the Language of Miracles

In Rajia's first book, an Egyptian family moves in next to an American family and the two families become close, until they must all deal with a horrifying event that shatters all their lives.

“In the Language of Miracles” should find a large and eager readership ... For the beauty of her writing alone, Hassib deserves it.

- The New York Times

"This exciting novel announces the arrival of a psychologically and socially astute new writer.

– Kirkus Review

reviews for

A Pure Heart

Hassib's second book follows two sisters, one in America, one in Egypt. The sister in America has married an American journalist. After the younger sister is killed in an explosion in Egypt, her sister feels compelled to go to Egypt to investigate her sister’s death.

“Hassib’s novel shines as one of the finest explorations of identity, religion, and culture in modern American literature."

- The Southern Literary Review

"She exposes mankind’s best and worst qualities, our universalities and differences, illuminating all the while the myriad ways in which a heart can be pure.”

- New York Times Book Review

Excerpts from Rajia Hassib's books

from In the Language of Miracles

When Khaled fell sick at age nine, his [Egyptian] grandmother descended on his parent’s house and promised him healing. Armed with incense, a thermos filled with holy water from the Zamzam Well in Mecca, and a frayed pocket-sized book of prayers, Ehsan arrived at Khaled’s bedside ready to fight any and all misfortunes that might have befallen her favorite grandchild. His illness, she insisted, had to be the result of an evil eye, its malice aggravated by her daughter’s negligence of the simplest methods of protection from such wickedness.

“Not a single blue ornament on display in the entire house! And when was the last time you played a recording of the Qur’an in the kids’ rooms? How do you expect to protect them?” she chastised her daughter again and again. Khaled, with his jet-black hair, green eyes, and that coy smile that always caused Ehsan to burst into a recitation of the sura of Al-Falaq to pray for his protection, was particularly vulnerable to the evil eye. His mother’s insistence on throwing him an elaborate birthday party a few weeks earlier must have been the last straw. “Why parade the boy around? Why invite people’s envy?” Ehsan would repeatedly mumble as she tended to the sick child. They might as well have injected him with bacteria and saved the money spent on the inflatables.

Khaled, aware of his favored status, had not thought it strange that Ehsan would travel from Egypt two months before she had originally intended, risking a flight into JFK on the heels of the blizzard that ushered in 1996, probably spending the ten-hour journey imagining her plane tumbling down the middle of the unfamiliar snow she still feared beyond reason. On the day of her arrival she walked in Khaled’s room, flanked by his parents and followed by his siblings, Hosaam and Fatima and sat on the edge of his bed, the thermos held tightly in both hands. In a whisper that implied her words were meant only for his ears, Eshan told Khaled the story of the holy water she had requested specifically for him, water her sister had carried all the way from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and that she in turn had carried from Egypt to the United States.

“This is blessed water,’ she said as she unscrewed the thermos lid and poured just enough to moisten a washcloth. ‘It is water that has run since the time of the prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon his soul. It is so pure it can heal the sick. If you were in the middle of the desert, one sip only would quench your thirst for days. This water,’ she continued as she put the thermos on his nightstand and held the white washcloth up for him to see, ‘runs out of the deep belly of the Arabian Desert, yet in this scorching heat it still comes out ice cold. This water will make you all better.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from A Pure Heart

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Rose loves the trees. She loves all trees, mainly because Egypt has so few of them. Not that this is something she complains about: the sprawling desert is, after all, the main reason the temples and tombs of the Pharos remained intact, the dry climate of southern Egypt preserving them over millennia. All the palaces, towns, and living quarters that once dotted the leagues working on the new delta excavation projections keep lamenting. But these trees—the West Virginia trees she is taking in as she stands on Mark’s parents’ deck—are different from any other trees Rose has seen: wild, spreading endlessly in waves that hug the curves of the mountains ahead, claiming ownership of the land. The trees belong here with an authority that the Central Park trees can never boast. Rose reaches over and touches the rounded, lobbed leaves of an ancient white oak, its branches extending to within inches of the deck.

During her first visit here, Mark dug up a massive folder containing a tree identification project he completed in seventh grade. Flipping through the pages, he acquainted her with trees that had stood in place since his childhood: the white oak to the left; the two sugar maples ahead; the row of thuja trees forming a privaxy screen to her right. The backyard sloped down in a neat lawn that eventually gave way to an untamed forest of maples, oaks, and beech trees, among others, many of them overgrown with climbing vines and weeds that rivaled the trees in height. Sometimes, Mark told her, you could see a family of deer strolling out of the forest and onto the lawn. Every time Rose was here, she looked out for deer, almost squealing in delight whenever she saw one. They, too, belonged here in a way that Rose envied.

She leans against the deck’s railing, watching a pair of squirrels chase each other across the lawn. Now more than ever does she believe Mark’s claim that belonging starts with an identification with the place, not the people. ‘The natives may take you in, or they may refuse to do so, regardless of how long you’ve lived among them,’ he had once told her as they strolled along the Nile. ‘But places are always more welcoming. Places don’t care where you were born or how long you’ve lived in them. If you like them and make the effort to know they, they make you feel like you belong there. It’s their gift to you. Their way of liking you back.’

Throughout his travels, Mark had made it a priority to know the place that was to become his home. In his first years in New York and, later, in Lebanon and Egypt, he had kept journals with folded-up maps nestled within their pages, had scribbled descriptions of the most random of spots—the corner of Thirty-sixth and Broadway, where he tried honey-roasted nuts for the first time; the brick-paved stretch of Hamra Street in Beirut, where he often stood under the same palm tree and watched the stores light up at dusk; the row of shops bordering the Zamalek Sporting Club in Cairo; the first bench on the right-hand side as one of the walks off the Qasr El-Nil Bridge; the coffee shop a few steps below the sidewalk on El-Moez Street. The more of these random nooks he could claim an intimate knowledge of, the more he felt at home.

Now, looking at the forest beyond the deck, Rose understands. She closes her eyes and thinks of her own nooks, the places where she feels the happiest: her desk at the Met; the stoop in front of Mrs. Kumiega’s apartment building, where she keeps her geraniums in the spring; the table by the tennis courts in Gezira Club, where she used to eat breakfast and go over her course work during her college years in Egypt; the hall at the Egyptian Museum where she often sat, cross-legged, and sketched in front of the Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who called for the worship of one god only and angered the priests, Her places, collected, are as unique and individual as Mark’s. Her places make her who she is. And now, strangely, she realizes that this spot on her in-law’s deck is one of her places, too.

“It would be unjust to call Hassib’s A Pure Heart anything but heartbreaking and beautiful. Nearly every character is trapped between political, religious, and geographic extremes, trying to figure out who they are and what they love. ”
—Ian Bassingthwaighte,

author, Live from Cairo