Sofia Samatar: On Friendship Between Writers, Her Love/Hate Relationship with Genre, the Tyranny of Identity, and Her New Book ‘Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life’
How can a writer reconcile the many paradoxes of writing and publishing?
This question is central to Sofia Samatar’s Opacities (Soft Skull Press, 2024), a series of deft prose meditations born from an ongoing correspondence with a longtime writing friend. As the solitude of writing gives way to the spotlight of publicity, the tension bound up in this shift can often complicate the writer’s relationship to their own work and identity. “The disappearance dance,” Samatar writes. “The desire to disappear meets the desire to be seen.”
Samatar set out to write a book about writing that feels like writing. The result is an intimate fabric of the writer’s daily life, exploring these questions of identity and biography by turning to authors past and present. Opacities is a book that weaves and wonders, honors and collects. Samatar has crafted a monument to a stalwart creative friendship, a loving homage to her influences, and most of all a book that every writer should read.
I was delighted to speak with Samatar about writerly friendship, the differences between writing and publishing, and the unique creative process that led to Opacities.
Abigail Oswald: Opacities is founded in a friendship between two writers. At one point, you even call writing to friends “a way to stay alive as a writer.” I think a lot of writers wonder how to find their people. What’s worked for you?
Sofia Samatar: For me, it really has been through finding their work. First, I read something by somebody, and I’m like, “That was amazing.” Before I left social media, I would meet people that way. That’s how Kate [Zambreno] and I met. But also reaching out to people that I think are interesting. Let’s say if I’m planning to go to a conference, and I want to do a panel with people, or I’m doing a reading somewhere, and I’m like, “I think this person lives in this town.” Just sort of reaching out and making those connections. But for me, when I think about my writer friends—unless it’s somebody that I knew before any of us were published—I’m usually coming to them through their work. I see the work first and then I keep my eye open for a way to have a conversation with that person.
AO: I love the idea that the work can be a way into the relationship.
SS: Yeah. And this way of thinking about connections with other writers kind of suits what’s going on in Opacities, because the book is so much about the person on the page as opposed to the person who’s walking around talking.
AO: Yes! What interests you about the tension between the public and private lives of a writer?
SS: So the conversation around confession is not particularly interesting to me. That’s one conversation that happens around memoir, but it’s not one that I was thinking about in writing this book.
But there is another kind of contrast between public and private that I was thinking about a lot, which is the contrast between the person who is writing and the published author speaking about their work. In my experience, it’s not even just that they’re very different aspects of a person, but they seem like opposite pieces of a person. You have the writing persona, who’s very introverted and at the same time in touch with all of these other voices and people they’re writing to. And then you have this public persona, who is probably in a room full of people and feels extremely isolated.
AO: In Opacities, you write, “I realized that there was a tyranny of identity experienced by all authors, and a second tyranny reserved for those with representational bodies. The exemplars.” This idea of “the tyranny of identity” feels connected to what you’re saying now about that contrast between the writing and public personas.
SS: Definitely, because that’s what’s going on in the crowded room. The crowded room is about that pressure—which in my experience almost feels like it’s coming from everywhere, almost like it’s coming from the ether. But I think it obviously comes from sales and marketing people and platforms who are like, “Look, people need a hook to hang this book on. You are that hook. And so you need to present this consistent person who is described with these adjectives, and that’s gonna be who you are.”
So that’s one piece, but then so many other things play into that. I mean, you do interviews, you get questions framed around that particular identity. Certainly, if you are on social media, or anywhere where your name is popping around the internet, it will often be attached to those identity features. You know, like “Six New Books by Black Women That You Need to Read” or something like that. So it’s a lot of emphasis on a person’s biography and certain identity characteristics. That is not, in my experience, the person who writes books.
AO: Building off that, you explore this idea of an “Inauthenticity Manifesto” around your frustrations with identity and representation in the literary sphere. Can you talk more about where that idea came from?
SS: The Inauthenticity Manifesto in Opacities is really just shenanigans. I mean, it’s a very playful, unserious manifesto. As soon as you say “inauthenticity,” you’re already in conflict with the genre of the manifesto, which tends to be like, “This is a genuine point that we’re making, and this is how we really feel.” And a lot of the force and the energy of the manifesto comes from that. So mine is ridiculous, because how would you have a manifesto that’s about inauthenticity? That doesn’t make any sense in the first place. And then as the speaker in the book goes on trying to write this manifesto, the form is not even working, because the manifesto is geared toward creating a movement and carving out a group of people who are going to sign it, and who are now going to believe in it and become this group, right? And a new identity will be formed around the manifesto. Now this is contrary to everything the writer of Opacities longs for. So it’s very tongue-in-cheek, and it also fails.
AO: You mentioned “the writer of Opacities” just now. What do you mean by that?
SS: I say the writer or speaker in the book just because the time of this book has passed. The speaker is me, but not anymore.
AO: I love the idea of referencing the passage of time and the evolution of the self when discussing past work. I’m curious, too, about the evolution of the book itself. Can you talk more about the journey the text took from being a conversation with a close writing friend to an object we can hold in our hands?
SS: Every book is different from all the other books, but I really have never written anything like this one before. It’s emails, and then it’s also thoughts, and then it’s also a lot of quotes from other writers. In some ways it’s almost like a commonplace book, this kind of hold-all for all my favorite quotes about writing. And so, in order to weave those things together, I had a collage process. I had a big notebook, and I printed out emails between Kate and me, and then I cut those up and put the quotes on different pages as different themes, and then added quotes from other writers. So it feels kind of like a collage, and it has a textile feel as well—almost like a weaving-together of these different pieces. And that created a good deal of compression. So the pieces are quite compact, and at the same time they’re quite rich with thought, because it’ll be ideas from two, three, four, five different people kind of pressed together into a section.
AO: I’m thinking of your concluding note on method, in which you describe Opacities as “a series of encounters in literature.” You write, “Writers appear in this book as they do on the page… Sometimes writers slide into one another’s work… This layering of voices is the best means I have found of answering the question: Who are you when you write?” It sounds like the layering was almost literal in this case!
SS: Yeah, because I was interested in a book about writing that feels like writing, that feels like what it is to write for me. And that is what it is. It is this kind of crucible of material from daily life, from conversations with friends, from emails, from reading, and it all blends together to become the work.
AO: You mentioned that every book is different. Have you explored any other unconventional development processes in this vein?
SS: I first experimented with something like this method in my memoir The White Mosque, which came out two years ago. That book contains a lot of material, because it’s both a memoir and a history. And it was extremely difficult for me to wrestle with all of that material and make it into a shape. And so, for part of that project, I wound up with index cards with information and quotes on them, and I would always be shuffling them around. I called it The Nightmare Tarot, which I mention in Opacities. It was very hard. It was not a fun card game, because there’s always a different way that you could do it.
AO: Speaking of your other books, I was so interested in your writing about genres such as speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction in Opacities. I feel like genre can be a very expansive thing on the page and then sometimes constricting in the industry. What’s your relationship to it?
SS: I have gone back and forth on this one. I started by being annoyed by marketing categories that are applied to literature. I was like, “This is dumb,” because I’m just a reader. I don’t see things the same way those marketing people do. And so what annoyed me was that, as a reader of fantasy and science fiction, I would go to that section of the bookstore, and there would be no García Márquez, there would be no Kafka, there would be no Borges. And I was like, “They’re hiding my books in a different section, saying ‘This literature is something else.’” So it started with irritation: “Stop hiding my books somewhere else; give me my books that I want to read!” And that was before I started publishing myself. And then, writing a couple of fantasy novels and a collection of short stories, you almost get this sense of yourself as writing a low genre, right? Lower than literary fiction. People say, “There’s no point in submitting this book for this prize, because there’s no way you could win with this kind of fiction, which is like stuff that’s sold in the grocery store.” And that’s also annoying.
So there was a time when I was like, “Throw away these genre categories. This is stupid. Let’s just have fiction, or let’s go back to that old genre system where it was poetry, drama, and fiction.” But I realized that genre can actually be fun. It’s very closely related to the word “gender,” and I think there are some parallels between the two, in that it’s reasonable to think “Wow, this can be so oppressive, let’s get rid of it.” But then it can be kind of fun. They’re similar in that way: oppressive and fun at the same time. So there’s definitely a love/hate, very lively and volatile relationship between me and genre. But at this point I’m of the opinion that these categories are useful because they’re interesting.
AO: You also write about unfinished works by authors such as Pierre Menard. What interests you in the unfinished work as a form?
SS: The unfinished work, especially if it’s in some published form, is always really interesting to me, because it’s almost treading this line between published and unpublished. It’s published, but it’s still unfinished. So technically, there could be another version. Even though it’s published, it kind of escapes the locked, dead feeling that publication can give to a work. To me, as a writer, when a book is done, it’s dead. It’s not a living work anymore. But if it’s unfinished, then maybe there could be another version.
AO: Are there other unfinished works that fascinate you in a similar way?
SS: The biggie for me is Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, which is this glorious pile of notes, but I’m also interested in writers who publish their work more than once. In Opacities, I mention Aimé Césaire with his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He published it, and then was like, “No, here’s a different version that I’m also publishing, and a third version,” so there are three different versions out there. I’m fascinated by that approach to writing and publishing, because it seems quite different to me from what we usually see, when a work is nailed down and complete. It’s just really interesting to think, “Is that necessarily so? Maybe not.”
AO: Have you explored anything along these lines in your own publishing journey, as far as multiple versions of a work?
SS: No, I haven’t. By the time I publish a work, I’m so beyond done that I have never felt the attraction of it. But that’s because I hang on to it until I basically can’t stand it anymore. It’s like an illness that I’m now going to recover from by publishing it. So because I’m doing that, I’m not interested. But there is another sort of ongoing publication, which is the series, which is really common in fantasy and science fiction. That’s another way that can happen. Just because a book is published does not mean that the work is finished.
AO: So, what’s your relationship to your previous books now?
SS: Each one is different. Each one is a new sort of adventure or experiment. I’ve now done two collaborative works as well—one with my brother and one with Kate. Those were both fascinating projects. Having published a number of books, I feel, on the one hand, that they were things I needed to do at the time, and so I’m not doing them anymore. They’re in the past, and they belong to a past life. But because there are a bunch of them, they’re also something I can look at and ask, “What are the threads that are going through all the books? In addition to all the things that are changing and the new things that are being tried, what are those things that I’m drawn to over and over?”
AO: I love looking for those recurrences and obsessions as a reader, too. Connecting the threads as you read through an author’s whole oeuvre, even if they’re writing vastly different books. In the end, how do you hope the reader experiences Opacities? What do you wish for them when they read your work?
SS: I just hope that the reader would find themselves immersed, which is pretty much always my hope. That the reading experience would be immersive and intriguing and lively.
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Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist. Her works range from the World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria to Opacities, a meditation on writing, publishing, and friendship. Samatar is Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University, where she teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction.
