Comrade Sinan

"“Life for a displaced Arab writer, if you want to, if you’re willing to exoticise yourself and self-orientalise, life is very good and very profitable,” he says. “I jokingly say I can be famous for nine months in America. I write a novel about being a little Christian boy growing up in Iraq.” But he isn’t about to do that. “I don’t want to be the native informant,” he says. “There is increased interest in the Arab world. But I call it forensic interest. For the most part it’s bad, because it’s assumed that novels and poems are going to explain September 11 to you."