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. While he trained, they lived in New York City, then New Jersey, then Los Angeles. Then they moved to Logan, West Virginia.

 

In 2006, after Kamel finished his Los Angeles training, he 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!’” 

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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.”

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​“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.”

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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The beginning of a writer

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“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?”

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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.”

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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.’”

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An Appalachian identity​

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​​​​​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?’

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“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.”

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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").

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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

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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.” 

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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!”

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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.

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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."

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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.

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

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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.” 

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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.”   

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 “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.

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 “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.