Shani Boianjiu on Her New Novel and Women Soldiers in Israel

September 26, 2012, 12:00 pm

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Shani Boianjiu's first novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” follows three young women friends before, during and after their mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Ms. Boianjiu, 25, spent two years in the IDF and later studied at Harvard. In a recent e-mail interview, she discussed the ways she's reflected in her characters, her sense of humor, whether she feels obligated to speak out about politics and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Your novel features three central characters: Yael, Avishag, and Lea. Is one of them closest to representing your own experiences and reactions? Do all three reflect parts of you? Or are they entirely different from you?

Yael's job in the army most closely resembles my own, although her stories are certainly not my own. She is a joyful person who craves human connections and experiences, sometimes to a fault. I was a bit like her for a time in my life, though not while I was in the army. Avishag is the quietest of the girls and the saddest, and I think during my army days I was a mix between her and Lea - sad and in my own world like Avishag, and at other times cynical and superior like Lea. What was important for me was to create a friendship between the girls that I didn't have when I was in the army. In many ways I was creating each girl for the sake of the other two.   

Yael expresses fear to her mother about going into the army. Were you fearful going in?

I was not at all afraid when I joined the army. I joined the summer after I graduated high school. I had lost touch with all of my friends, and spent the few weeks before training worki ng at a boring manufacturing job. I couldn't wait for my draft date to come up. When the day came I was completely unprepared for the difficulties of boot camp. In retrospect I wish I had been worried. Maybe that would have made those first months easier for me.

There's a series of scenes, excerpted in the New Yorker, where Lea negotiates her treatment of a small group of Palestinian protesters. The moments are essentially comic, despite a very serious undertone. Was there unexpected humor in your own service?

My two years in the IDF were the funniest years of my life, but I have an odd sense of humor. I am always pleasantly surprised when other people say they recognize the humor in my written stories. The whole premise of the army is amusing to me - taking high school kids and dressing them up and giving them titles and responsibilities and regulations to adhere to.  

You're a young writer tackling a big subject with both gravity and humor. Did any pa rticular authors or books inspire or influence your treatment of things?

I initially liked Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried” because I found it so funny. Etgar Keret is almost always funny and serious at the same time. But most of the books and writers I love - I can't say that I write like them. I wish I could, but I just love to read them, and I pick up from them the little bit that I can.

You wrote the book in English, but your first language is Hebrew. How did that affect the prose? How do you think the book might read differently in English if it had been translated from Hebrew?

Writing in English was an accident, but I think it helped me, particularly as a young writer. Writing in English forced me to think carefully about every word I used. The words did not belong to me, so I had to work harder to make them belong in my stories.

You've said elsewhere, “When I write, I spend 90 percent of my time listening to music and jumping a round, and 10 percent of my time writing.” Is listening to music purely inspirational, or does some of the music's style seep into the writing style?

For me, music is not “purely inspirational” - it is in and of itself the motivation for writing. For me, every piece of my writing represents the music it could never quite become.

There are moments of violence in the book, but war is mostly in the background. Yet this is obviously subject matter that can be divisive, and I've seen online where people react to this as politics first rather than literature. Did you want the book to say anything in particular about the larger political situation?

It upsets me, when I see responses to my writing that are simplistic, and refer only to the unshakeable political convictions of the commenters. Strangely, I get responses like that from people who hold polar opposite views on the conflict. I have been accused both of being an IDF spokesperson and a hater of al l Jews. It upsets me whenever I hear empty, hateful language in regards to this conflict, not just when it is said in response to my writing. The proper thing for me to say is that the stories are not political, which they are not. And I did not set out to promote any political agenda when I wrote this book. But the truth is I think my work does inevitably have something to say about the current political situation, and the sad thing is I don't think the people who view my work only through a narrow political prism will get to learn what that is.

As someone who served, do you feel an obligation to speak about the political situation and its ramifications? Is it something you've considered writing about in nonfiction or memoir form?

I do not feel an obligation to speak about the political situation just because I served. My obligation is to the quality of my fiction, because I am trying to become a writer, whatever that means. Fiction writers from my region ofte n become the interpreters of this senseless conflict to the rest of the world. I don't know why that is necessarily so. Some writers take the task upon themselves in all its weightiness, others do so reluctantly. I have my own experiences, observations, and (ever-shifting) opinions, but right now I don't think that just because I write I should share my personal political thoughts outside of the context of my fiction. I don't judge writers who use their status as artists to express political concerns, but I just turned 25. In the future, if there is something I feel I am obligated to say and I know exactly how I want to say it, maybe then I'll say it.