TMR interviews Anas Tareef about his short story, "Remnants."
In “Remnants,” an unnamed narrator returns to her hometown of Latakia, Syria after a fifteen-year absence. There, she finds herself among people and places that feel familiar, even as her relationship to them has become strange. The story grew out of Tareef’s own return to Syria, also after fifteen years away, following the fall of the Assad regime. Moving from café to café, he began to jot down fragments of overheard conversations: jokes, gossip, stray remarks, and glimpses of the lives unfolding around him. These eventually found their way into “Remnants,” a story he wrote in just three days.
What does it mean to come back to a place that has continued without you, and to the people who remember a version of you that no longer exists? “Remnants” asks questions about the uneasy distance between attachment and estrangement, the ways in which relationships change over time and space, and whether returning “home” is ever possible, while resisting the impulse for clear and easy answers.
– Saleem Haddad, Fiction Editor
Read “Remnants” here.
SALEEM HADDAD for TMR: What were the seedlings of “Remnants”?
ANAS TAREEF : Last year, I went back to Syria for the first time in fifteen years. I spent a lot of time moving from café to café in Latakia, listening. I would talk to café workers and cleaners, and jot down snippets of conversations I overheard, little jokes, things people said. I was fascinated by the world these fragments seemed to reveal: a kind of wreckage everyone was navigating, which at the same time I found eerily beautiful. I remember thinking that I would love to do nothing more than listen. The story itself came together almost accidentally. A friend urged me to try my hand at writing a piece of fiction in English, so I wrote “Remnants” in about three days, drawing on all those notes and fragments I had collected in Latakia. The friendship at its center is entirely fictional, but much of the texture surrounding it grew out of what I had heard and written down while I was there.
TMR: The story doesn’t reveal why the protagonist has returned. In fact, I found it interesting that while we were editing the piece together, you resisted providing answers to some of the open-ended questions in the story. Why was it important to preserve that ambiguity?
AT: I dislike fiction that closes off its own interpretive possibilities, or that psychoanalyzes its characters for the reader. I think exile itself resists the logic of interpretation and analysis. I feel attached to a home that cannot necessarily satisfy that attachment; stuck to an environment that doesn’t necessarily nurture me, but from which I can’t completely separate myself. It’s a little like one’s relationship to a biological family: the attachment precedes any explanation you might give for it. I also felt that the protagonist herself didn’t really know why she’d come back. Nor does she quite understand why she’d let her old friendships fall away during her years abroad. There is a second exile there, one partly of her own making. I’m less interested in explaining it than in showing its traces. Perhaps the reasons belong to another story. In this one, I wanted the questions to remain questions.
TMR: The story moves between two registers: the intimate world of family, friendships, gossip, and old grievances, and the much larger political reality of post-war Syria. How did you think about the relationship between those two scales? Were you conscious of wanting to keep some separation between them rather than allowing one to become a metaphor for the other?
AT: I consciously resist allegory, much as I resist psychologizing. I wanted the political reality to permeate these lives without making the characters or their relationships stand in for Syria. Politics enters the story through gossip, family histories, old grievances, rumors, jokes, and prejudice—ordinary ways people experience and talk about the world around them. In that sense, I don’t really see the intimate and the political as separate scales. I also didn’t want the protagonist and Raghda to become, say, the exile and the one who stayed, with their friendship made to carry the weight of that history. A reader may find those correspondences anyway, and perhaps representation happens inevitably in the act of looking or listening. But I think that, as a writer, when you deliberately go looking for the allegory, the story begins to fail. The characters stop being particular people and start becoming instruments for an idea.
As a writer, when you deliberately go looking for the allegory, the story begins to fail.
TMR: Raghda and the protagonist have been separated for years, and their friendship contains both ease and tension, especially around certain things they seem unable to say to each other. What interested you about their relationship?
AT: I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how friendships survive without resolving themselves—through unspoken resentments, half-meaningful jabs, things neither person quite wants to confront. Raghda is one of the few people capable of recognizing an earlier version of the protagonist, while also puncturing the version of herself she has constructed since. There is discomfort in being known that way, but also intimacy. I’ve always felt that a strong current of love can run underneath these tensions, and that love can sometimes curdle into resentment or even hatred. Indifference is more mysterious to me. How do people who once mattered enormously to each other simply cease to participate in each other’s lives? Exile and distance offer part of an explanation in this story, but only part. Fundamentally, I think it’s a sad mystery, and I wanted their friendship to retain some of that mystery.
TMR: The idea of return is a theme that runs through the story—returning to Syria, returning to family, returning to old friendships. How were you thinking about return while writing this story?
AT: When I returned to Latakia, it felt strangely like going back in time. Fifteen years of isolation had made themselves visible everywhere. The old buildings were still there, only dustier and more run-down; the streets were the same streets, but they looked as though they had witnessed a great deal. There were generators everywhere now, seeping oil onto the sidewalks, and a listlessness in people that I didn’t remember. Stranger still was finding almost none of my old friends or acquaintances there. In this story, I wanted “return” to have something of that temporal dislocation. You recognize the place, but recognition doesn’t quite restore your relationship to it. Return brings you into contact with what has changed, what has remained, and the person you were when you left.
TMR: The final question Raghda asks the protagonist (“Is this what you came back here for?”) is answered with another kind of uncertainty. Without asking you to resolve that ambiguity, what does the protagonist know at the end of the story that she didn’t know when she arrived?
AT: I think what she knows by then is not why she returned, but that returning itself cannot answer that question. Being physically present doesn’t resolve the attachment that brought her there. She has the place in front of her now, and perhaps understands that what she missed was never simply the place. What she has gained, though, is attention. She has spent these weeks listening again, and has come into contact with the ugliness, cruelty, humor, tenderness, poverty, and beauty of life there. By the end, she knows more about what she has returned to, if not what she returned for.
