Set in Egypt in the 2030s, You Must Believe in Spring follows Shahed – a national swimmer, Sufi institute assistant, and son of Hanan, a revolutionary. Mohamed Tonsy’s novel imagines the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring, exploring identity, resistance, and the profound tension between visibility and invisibility. In sharing my conversation with Tonsy himself, I hope to provide a short taste of the wisdom you will find in reading You Must Believe in Spring. You are invited to read about a writer whose voice is incredibly aware of a ticking noise in the background of space and time, one that tells us anything could happen at any given moment.
Being Seen And Seeing
When you read You Must Believe in Spring it is key to note its publisher, Hajar Press, and the distinct work it does for writers of minority backgrounds. There is immediately a quality to all titles published by them, offering relief to BIPOC readers such as myself; shoulders relax and you can exhale. This isn’t an uncanny, forced smile in the real, raging world: it’s just great literature.
Simran: Writers like us can often be forced into a scope of toxic positivity, but your story defies this. Can you speak to that?
Mohamed: Well that’s where the first-person protagonist idea comes from. I wanted the reader to have a bodily awareness of the story. For instance, there’s a complexity with Shahed; as much as his entanglement with the Federation is suffocating, he also really loves swimming. He is able to feel physically light in this space, even if that space in a very real way can reject him.
Simran: When you have a character like Shahed, with all of these grey areas, it takes a certain eye to appreciate him. I mean, you’re so powerfully present in your narrative, it takes the reader also showing up. Did you feel any pressure of being seen (or being seen correctly) after writing something like this?
Mohamed: With the idea of seeing and being seen, you have this sense where to be made visible is to be made powerful. For those in resistance and underground movements, there is also the want to hide in order to survive. You have to balance knowing when to be seen and how to be seen. You’ll notice that I have parts of the novel written in Arabic without translation – that’s also a point for me to be hidden as the writer. Speaking for Shahed, there’s moments where actually, in hiding so much of himself, he becomes invisible to even himself.
Beautiful Writing And Observation: Dust and Petrol
The novel is full of insightful descriptions, wasting no words or even elements as we read. In Tonsy’s world, we see dust and petrol become two key elements – great symbols of rage that are blind but become sightful in literature. In conversation, the two of us agreed that anger does not always have to be productive, it can be irrational and complex.
Simran: The use of dust and petrol are very prominent in expressing anger. They also take on different meanings throughout. Petrol specifically is almost a passport for Shahed – it becomes a weapon, its scent exposes him, but its scent is also a comfort for him.
Mohamed: Exactly, and then there’s the dust. So, in Shahed’s conversation with Musa he asks Musa why he doesn’t leave Egypt, and Musa says it’s because of the smell of the dust. There’s a bit of humour there: when you’re in Egypt, everywhere is dusty. It’s ever present in the atmosphere, and you can feel equally suspended but also suffocated. It’s there in every breath.
Simran: And in that image of breath, was the ending more of an inhale or an exhale?
Mohamed: Exhale. Because I was like thank god it’s over.
Simran: Haha, that’s a good answer.
The experience of this You Must Believe in Spring was like reading a constellation. I felt many of Tonsy’s descriptions as their own individual points, given their distance and space. Yet, everything is held in one and the same sky, bound by the same spine. Though I cannot share the entirety of our conversation, I hope the provided snippets show the vast ground that Tonsy covers in his novel.
For me, reading the novel was like looking through a set of eyes that have never been closed. Tears are running down his cheeks from a relentless wind, and eyelashes carry seasons. He brings conflict and chaos – heat and debris – close to you, like the smell of blown-out candles, but bigger, much bigger. It is the scent hanging like a curtain in your grandmother’s home – familiar, constant, and persistent, it remains. Anyone knowing the lived impact of persecution and oppression will be given company by Mohamed Tonsy’s storytelling.
Book cover of “You Must Believe in Spring” by Mohamed Tonsy