JEDDAH: Saudi-American author Eman Quotah blurs the line between the real and the monstrous in her new novel “The Night Is Not For You,” a feminist horror tale about a string of murders that send shockwaves through a community.
Quotah’s debut novel, “Bride of the Sea,” won the Arab American Book Award in 2022 and established her as a distinctive voice in Arab-American literature.
The author was born and raised in Jeddah, but she draws deeply from a life lived between continents, languages, and traditions. She currently lives in the US, near Washington D.C., with her family.
The landscape of Al-Baha was a source of inspiration for Quotah's new book. (Photo credit: Prof Mortel)
“Saudi Arabia, during the second half of my childhood, was so influential,” Quotah tells Arab News. Indeed, the landscapes of Saudi Arabia were a significant inspiration for her new novel, as are the fears, rumors, and suspicions that circulate when violence strikes too close to home.
“Bride of the Sea,” set in the Kingdom and the US, was about secrets within a family. “The Night is Not For You” expands the frame to an entire community, asking how towns tell stories about themselves and what gets whispered when violence erupts.
“This book seems really different, but, for me, the distance isn’t so far,” she says. “It’s still about family, community, history, and the stories we tell about ourselves and the people around us.”
Eman Quotah receives the Arab American Book Award in 2022. (Photo credit: Andrew Chen)
Quotah resisted rooting the novel too firmly in one geography. Instead, she created a fictional world inspired partly by Al-Baha, Abha and Jeddah, but stitched together with details from other places.
“I wanted it to feel real, but also not so specific that it could only be one place,” she says. “We used to take vacations in Baha, and I was also thinking about the neighborhoods and architecture in Jeddah. (It’s) a fictional world. I could draw my own boundaries. It’s not strictly Saudi society — it could be, but it could also not be. I wanted to bring together these concerns that are universal.”
The antagonist of the novel — based loosely on a female djinn from Khaleeji folklore — becomes the focus of communal fear, a mirror for human violence and paranoia.
The cover of Quotah's latest novel, a feminist horror story. (Supplied)
“Every culture has boogey men and women. Every culture has paranoia,” Quotah says. “I wanted readers not to say, ‘That’s how they act over there,’ but to recognize something universal: Human fears, human struggles around acts of violence.”
Though “The Night Is Not For You” is steeped in gore and horror, Quotah insists the violence serves as more than a shock inducer.
“I wanted it to have the quality of campfire stories, but also to move the plot forward, to make us feel the grief of people whose loved ones were violently murdered, not just see the violence and move on,” she says. “I wanted to show the conversations that happen around it, how communities make sense of it.”
She was able to draw on her own experiences to ground the novel in reality.
“I actually know two people who were murdered,” she says. “It’s something I don’t often bring up in conversation. Having had that experience myself helped me write about violence. Because it happens to real people, and families have to keep living with it. I dedicated the book to those two people.”
For Quotah, horror is not simply escapism; it “helps us make sense of the really violent stuff of real fears.”
Quotah says she was six when she decided she wanted to be a writer. Along the way, her mother kept her shelf filled with books brought from the US, and her father pushed her to study abroad even when few Saudi women were doing so. It was something he had done, making him a part of history that often goes unacknowledged.
“When I won the Arab American Book Award, I went to Dearborn, to the Arab American National Museum (to receive the award),” she recalls. “And there was this one small display about students from the Gulf who came to the US to study, and I thought, ‘There we are! A small part of Arab-American history.’ To see how my father’s story was part of that larger history was really meaningful.”
Having her novels published is not only a personal milestone but, Quotah believes, part of a larger literary shift in the US. “There’s been a history of struggle for Arab-American writers to get published,” she says. “But over the past decade, we’ve really seen wonderful growth.”
She recommends a few books from her two stints as a judge for the Arab American Book Award: “The Stardust Thief” by Chelsea Abdullah; “If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English” by Noor Naga; Deena Mohamed’s graphic novel “Shubeik Lubeik”; and “Dearborn” by Ghassan Zeineddine. “There’s still more to accomplish,” she adds, “but we’re definitely having a moment.”
And she is doing her share to ensure that moment continues. Aside from her own writing, she is also a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers.
“No one writer can represent a culture,” she says. “We need more — more Saudi voices, more Arab-American voices, more translations, more cultural exchange. I want my books to be in conversation with other works by Saudi, or Arabian Peninsula, writers.”
Her advice to aspiring writers in Saudi Arabia reflects that ethos: “Read a lot, write a lot, and find community. If you don’t see it, create it. Publish your friends, publish the people you admire. There’s someone waiting for what you’re writing.”
