Souhaib
Ayoub

The country where Souhaib Ayoub would like to live is the land of books; his favorite first names, Gloria and Dibeh, are also the names of characters in his first and second novels, respectively; his biggest fear is losing the memory of his native city, Tripoli, the beguiling muse for his fiction.  

Ayoub was born in 1989 in Tripoli, the second-largest city in Lebanon that sits on its northern shore. The youngest of a large family of seven, he was coddled by his mother and her coterie of women. When he was a child, his father had become a sheikh and an atmosphere of austerity reigned in the household. Novels, television, and music were forbidden, only Qur’anic recitals were permitted. Ayoub discovered the Egyptian classics by watching television at a childless neighbor’s house and discovered the music divas of the Arab world—Fairouz, Um Kalthoum, and others—at another neighbor’s home. He began to read the classics of Arab literature, borrowing books from his high school library. It was, however, the close acquaintance with the Qur’anic text that gave him the most solid base for his command of language.  

From the tender age of fifteen, Ayoub began publishing articles in local Tripolitan newspapers, graduating in a few years to country-wide and pan-Arab dailies. The agility of his writing skills, his insatiable curiosity and thirst for learning motivated him to work across different sections of newspapers, in the arts and culture, society and features sections.   

During the first years of his journalistic writing, he pursued features about Tripoli, collecting first-hand testimony—the unwritten oral histories that oscillate between fact and rumor, or myth—as well as the more factual documentary sources. He gathered traces of the city’s transformations, traveling back in time through the country’s uncivil wars to the establishment of the republic, and even to the Ottoman and Mamluk eras. He also had a keen eye for the cultural, ethnic, and communitarian social mosaic that constitutes the fabric of the city, acquainting himself with its squalor and its splendor. The fine detail with which he sculpts the descriptions of the settings of his novels is likely to rely on this informal archive he developed over those years.  

Once he started working for pan-Arab dailies, first al-Hayat (no longer in circulation) and later Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Ayoub moved to Beirut. He started writing his first novel, Rajul min sâtân (The Satin Man), in 2013, moved to France two years later, and released it to wide critical acclaim in 2019. Set against the conflict between gangs of militiamen during the Civil War, the novel tells the story of Nabil, a man whose mother may have been an infamous Jewish Tripolitan singer, Gloria Mizrahi, and whose father was Muslim. Although married and father to three children, Nabil is queer, learns tailoring and sustains the atelier of the seamstress who mentored him, even after business dwindles drastically when the war erupts and insecurity overwhelms the neighborhood. In The Satin Man, Ayoub travels liberally through time, bouncing from stories of Nabil’s father, grandfather, and a host of other characters, threading through the city’s gradual demotion from a central trading and political hub to the republic’s tributary northern center as it succumbs to the absurd, senseless violence of war.  

Ayoub’s second novel, Dhi’b al-‘â’ila (The Wolf of the Family), published in 2024, begins with a young teenager, Hassan, the youngest child in a poor family that the mother abandons one day, never to be heard from again. Chapter after chapter, the novel meanders through time—decades, years—all the way back to the story of Hassan’s grandmother in her native village in Akkar, one of the country’s endemically impoverished provinces. It is a chorus novel with characters from Hassan’s family and the neighbors in the Olabi building where he lived. The stories tell of poor people who manage to survive the cruelty of scraping by, of patriarchy, misogyny, classism, and an absent state where brutality and tenderness, the makeshift schemes and dreamed lives, intermingle. Ayoub twirls genres dexterously; using magic realism, invoking animism and the drawl of local parlance, he not only avenges the dignity of those who have been served ignominy, but also makes a place for them in a historical record that was refused to them.  

Rasha Salti,
a researcher, writer, and curator of art and film based in Marseille, is commissioning editor for La Lucarne, the experimental documentary program at Arte France.