A Work of Hysterical Fiction
An Interview with Edwin Nasr about his forthcoming debut novel Fear Eats Ali
Originally published on wirklichkeitbooks.com
This fall, Wirklichkeit Books is publishing Fear Eats Ali, a book by the Lebanon-born and
Berlin-based author and curator Edwin Nasr. This is exciting for two reasons: It is the first
novel in the program, and it will be co-published with Wendy’s Subway, a press in Brooklyn,
New York, run by good friends and known for its experimental and urgent books by
emerging artists and writers. Fear Eats Ali, a work of “hysterical fiction,” as Nasr puts it, was
written over the past three years in Berlin. In this conversation the author reflects on the
relation between the novel and the context of its genesis, its literary inspirations, and the
possibilities of fiction when history moves fast. A German translation of the book—Angst
essen Ali auf—by Lotta Thiessen is forthcoming alongside the original work.
Jonas von Lenthe (JL): Introduce us to Ali, the main character in your debut novel
Fear Eats Ali.
Edwin Nasr: Ali is a Frankensteinian construction, stitched together from the lived
experiences, dream residues, borrowed memories, overheard confessions, and existential
meanderings of people both real and imagined. He is a Catholic, homosexual immigrant
from southern Lebanon who arrived in Berlin more than a decade ago to study engineering.
He has remained there long enough for the city to become a refuge but also a trap. Ali is
deeply risk-averse and often selfish in ways that are mundane rather than monstrous. He
likes dissociating on downers and bottoming for losers, and has long abandoned any
pretenses at cracking out a space for himself within a political formation. His relationship to
the political is in fact quite ambivalent: He dismisses it as an intrusion when it threatens his
fragile sense of security, and turns toward it when it offers direction and the illusion of
righteousness. His father, Karim, fought with the Lebanese National Resistance Front
against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s, but abandoned his comrades in the middle of an
ambush. Which is to say that cowardice runs in Ali’s veins, and that he is, for the first time in
his life, having to contend with the churning of the death machine, whose gears make no
distinction between those who seek history out and those who actively try to evade it. When
the novel begins, he is facing deportation after allegedly assaulting a police officer during a
Palestine solidarity demonstration.
JL: How does Ali deal with the news of the deportation?
EN: What interested me while writing the novel was resisting the temptation to make this the
story of an awakening or a redemption. Ali does not suddenly become courageous or
principled; if anything, the deportation notice ends up magnifying his contradictions. He
continues vacillating between self-preservation and responsibility, paranoia and lucidity. But
it is precisely through those contradictions that he begins to grasp that cowardice is not
simply an individual failing but also a condition produced by the world he inhabits. He is
compelled to somehow finally confront the political and psychic inheritances he has spent
years trying to outrun.
JL: When we first started discussing the idea of your book three years ago, you were
still planning to write a non-fiction essay. How did you end up writing a novel?
EN: You’re right, this was supposed to be a very different book. When we first began talking
about it, you were starting to plan a series of short books devoted to the histories and
afterlives of Marxist thought and praxis. For this series—which remains unrealized to this
day!—I intended to contribute an essay on the Lebanese Left's grapplings with the
ascendancy of political Islam within anti-imperialist struggle after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. I was interested in asking how communist militants and intellectuals understood the
gradual erosion of their political horizon and how they navigated the shrinking of their sphere
of influence; more importantly, I wanted to analyze how they came to formulate their
positions vis-a-vis Hezbollah and armed resistance. Suffice it to say that many of the
paradoxes that continue to define the region can be traced back to that historical
conjuncture.
The project became impossible almost overnight with the unfolding of the October 7 events
and the Israeli regime’s campaign of genocidal extermination in Gaza, and later in southern
Lebanon. History had begun moving again with such speed and violence that any attempt to
pause or arrest it in the form of an essay would have always already felt obsolete or, God
forbid, irresponsible. I am in admiration of those who have managed to push against the
tides of unpredictability and feelings of insignificance and smallness in the face of
catastrophe, but I can’t say that this is something I could ever apply to myself. And this is
ultimately why I turned to fiction. It allowed me to favor proximity and fabulation and to
remain with the intimate ways in which history can impress itself upon ordinary lives,
individual desires, and family histories. The novel form became, paradoxically, the more
modest and therefore the more honest form.
JL: I remember quite early on you brought up Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose as a
reference for your own writing. What is it about that book that inspires you, and what
other literary works have been important in the process of writing Fear Eats Ali?
EN: I returned to Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose again and again because it so brilliantly
understands that, in moments of world-historical rupture, there are psychic and moral
convulsions that emerge which require tending to, lest we prefer to allow vengeful ghosts to
haunt us to our graves. Adnan’s novel is brief and compressed to the point of suffocation,
and yet it contains an entire world of impossible choices—it leaves you nauseous and
enraged. Sitt Marie Rose taught me that a novel might remain clear-headed in speaking
through a certain historical position, a set of immutable ethical and political imperatives, all
the while holding onto contradiction and ambiguity.
Another book that accompanied me through the writing process was Marguerite Yourcenar’s
Alexis, or, The Treatise of Vain Struggle because of the way it deals with the confessional as
a kind of concealment, rather than an exploration of inner truth. Her protagonist is constantly
wavering between crude honesty and unmistakable self-deception. It’s unnerving and at
times unbearable, and that tension was crucial for thinking about Ali.
I’m also indebted to Christa Wolf’s City of Angels, which is such a masterful meditation on
political failure and the impossibility of clean historical reckoning; Sonallah Ibrahim’s That
Smell, for its radical conciseness and its ability to narrate alienation in both dynamic and
claustrophobic terms; Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers, obviously, for teaching us how delirium and excess can exorcise us from the fascist inside all of us; and Houria
Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us, which I believe is single-handedly the most powerful
political treatise to come out of Europe in a long time.
JL: You have lived in Berlin since 2023, which is both the place where the novel is set
and where you wrote the majority of it. How do the specifics of this context inform
your writing?
EN: Let me try to answer this question with this suggestion. Read Fear Eats Ali as a work of
“hysterical” fiction, because this is what writing it often felt like: a torrent of distortions that
attempted both to oversaturate and to illuminate a situation that was, beneath the narrative
excesses, all too real. This has, of course, a lot to do with the time and place in which this
book is written; the hysterical register was a way to mirror, and maybe even metabolize, the
atmosphere that had seized Berlin in the aftermath of October 7. I experienced Berlin as
giving in to a sort of prolonged episode of mass psychosis: German public discourse
seemed to untether itself from reality, the language of politics felt forcibly conscripted into the
work of denial and deception, while the actuality of the Palestinian struggle was submerged
beneath a flood of racist moral panics. There were entire communities, Palestinians above
all but also Arabs and Muslims more broadly, getting stripped of the authority to speak for
and bear witness to an unbearable crime, to God himself getting dismembered before their
own eyes, denied their political agency and right to mourn, condemn, organize, resist.
Everyday life in Berlin was reorganized around suspicion and paranoia, and surveillance
took on such a participatory dimension that you would catch yourself spending most of your
time wondering which colleague or neighbor might report you to an employer or the police.
All of this obviously informed Fear Eats Ali, and I believe it could only have emerged from
the rotten particularity of this moment, which is far from over. I wanted to write about what it
means to inhabit a society that persistently demands your complicity in forms of obvious
unreality, where language functions to estrange you from the matter-of-factness of a
genocide eating away at everything you’ve ever come to know. Ali's fear is therefore never
reducible to the possibility of deportation alone; it is also about the fear of losing one’s ability
to trust and act on one’s own perceptions, of watching every available moral and political
category get gleefully pissed on, of losing one’s sanity and of turning into the Devil.
Edwin Nasr was born in 1994 in Haret Sakher, Lebanon. He lives and works in Berlin,
Germany. His writings on politics and contemporary art have been published in Bidoun, n+1,
Afterall Journal, The Funambulist, Mousse Magazine, and Mada Masr, among others. He is
the Senior Editor of Palestine is everywhere (TBA21, Silver Press and the87press, 2025)
and translates from French to English for different publications.