Today’s episode started with a suggestion from a listener, and it resulted in one of my favorite interviews on the show, about a book that I might not otherwise have picked up. On this episode of Drafting the Past, I'm joined by Dr. Fahad Bishara.
Fahad is an associate professor at the University of Virginia, but he is currently on leave and teaching at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His first book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950, won multiple awards. His second book, which came out in 2025, is Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History. In it, he follows one year of the voyages of a single dhow, a type of sailing ship, and its captain and crew as it travels around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean. Working at multiple scales, from the details of daily ship life to the circulation of goods and ideas across the Gulf, Fahad gives us a new, ocean-based perspective on Middle Eastern history. It’s also a beautifully written book, and I was eager to talk with Fahad about his inventive structure, how he organized his materials, and more. You’re going to get a lot out of this conversation with Dr. Fahad Bishara.
Mentioned in this episode:
- A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950
- Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History
- OneNote
- DevonThink
- Jack Hart, Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction
- Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
- Greeking Out podcast
- Nicholas Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook
- In Episode 18 of Drafting the Past, Adam Sowards talked about trying to get three senses into a description Whichever episode someone talks about senses
- Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880
- Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account
- Brinkley Messick
- Engseng Ho
- This American Life
- Planet Money and the episode with their formula for storytelling, Episode 1000
- The Indicator
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to drafting the past. Today's episode started with a suggestion from a listener, and it resulted in one of my favorite interviews on the show about a book that I might not otherwise have picked up. I'm Kate Carpenter, and on this episode of Drafting the Past, I'm joined by Dr. Fahad Bishara.
Fahad Bishara 0:18
Thank you, Kate. It's an enormous pleasure being here.
Kate Carpenter 0:21
Fahad is an associate professor at the University of Virginia, but he's currently on leave and teaching at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His first book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780 to 1950/ won multiple awards. His second book, which came out in 2025 is Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History. In it, he follows one year of the voyages of a single dhow, a type of sailing ship, and its captain and crew as it travels around the Persian Gulf and western Indian Ocean. Working at multiple scales, from the details of daily ship life to the circulation of goods and ideas across the Gulf, Fahad gives us a new ocean based perspective on Middle Eastern history. It's also a beautifully written book, and I was eager to talk with Fahad about his inventive structure, how he organized his materials, and more. You're going to get a lot out of this conversation with Dr. Fahad Bishara.
Fahad Bishara 1:22
I've always been interested in writing, but not especially good at it. I which is, which is probably the, you know, not saying much about my writing ability now, but I have a background in journalism. I started off as an as a student of journalism and an undergrad at the University of Southern California, somewhat by chance. I'm from Kuwait, and I was sent on a government scholarship to study in the US, and the government decides ahead of time what what people are going to study. And so they put out a list of majors and that you can apply for, and all of them were in engineering, and at the very bottom of the list was journalism. And I thought, okay, I could probably do that. I knew I wasn't going to be an engineer, and I knew I'd always been interested in writing, but I was never especially good at it, and I struggled with balancing how to sound serious with how to sound interesting. Counterintuitively, journalism school was not especially good at teaching you to be either, actually. There were, there were moments where I took courses, where they they helped you explore your sort of creative voice, a column writing course, and then as I was in my final year of undergrad, I hung out with a bunch of people who are in screenwriting. This was the University of Southern California, after all, and I tried that out as well. I took a course in screenwriting, and I thought it was a lot of fun. I didn't know that I was going to be a historian. I hadn't even taken history courses as an undergrad, and so I didn't really know what the field was about. And so it took me a very long time to figure out what I was doing, who I was as a historian, and even longer, really, I mean, well, after the PhD, to figure out what my sort of writerly voice was going to be and so and in many ways, I'm still working through that and trying to figure it out.
Kate Carpenter 3:26
Let's talk about your writerly life. When and where do you like to write?
Fahad Bishara 3:31
Really, wherever I can. I prefer to write at home. I have two children, like many of the guests on your show, it makes it difficult to write at home. I used to do it when they went to school and I had the place to myself. These days, I don't really have a place to myself, so I come to the office. I prefer not to write in the office, because you end up hanging out with colleagues and chatting and doing all sorts of fun things that are not writing, but I do prefer to write at home, and if I can't, then I'll write in the office. I'm not the sort of person who can write in coffee shops. I can't write in public places. Can't listen to music when I'm writing. I just need everything to be quiet and to have the computer in front of me and and to be able to write. In terms of when, I've gotten into the really good habit, I think, of getting up very early in the morning. I'm usually awake at around 5am if not just a little bit before. The kids wake up for school at 630 that gives me an hour and a half of quiet time, and so I can get the ball rolling. And actually it's when I'm, counterintuitively, like most creative in my writing is when I'm just waking up, and the ideas are, you know, after the first cup of tea or coffee, the ideas are really beginning to percolate. And if I can get something done at that time, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Which is to say that there are a lot of days in which I don't get anything done because that that first hour, hour and a half in the morning was not especially well spent.
Kate Carpenter 5:12
Do you try to set a goal for yourself or just just be present?
Fahad Bishara 5:16
No, I do try to set a goal for myself. If I'm working on a project, I definitely have a goal for myself. I like to set some, I mean, arbitrary word target for the day, if I'm if I'm in the writing phase, otherwise, it's, you know, if I can spend two to three hours of the day just reading documents, taking down notes and beginning to imagine what either the chapter or a project, the project might look like. Then it's a day well spent, I'd say, but the routine does look kind of different when I'm in the thick of writing and the degree of concentration looks different.
Kate Carpenter 5:57
How do you like to organize your research?
Fahad Bishara 5:59
Well, these days I use OneNote, which is not especially great, but it does the job in that I get, I get to organize my thinking, sort of file by file, and I very much do think around particular files and particular sources. So it's helpful for that. It's also helpful for threading the needle through lots of different kinds of material. The search function on on OneNote is it's pretty good as far as these things go. When I was doing my to do my PhD, I used Microsoft Excel, which was, I mean, incredibly poorly thought out at the time. Some combination, it was a combination of Word documents for each document I was looking at, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet where I would keep track of all of these things according to a system that shifted every once in a while. And so I frequently found myself in a situation in which I know I had seen something somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where I saw it. With OneNote with so for Monsoon Voyagers is my second book, I shifted over to OneNote, and it was just much easier for doing that sort of thing. I know people who use DevonThink for Apple computers. It looks great in terms of functionality. It's, it's, it's awesome. But I don't, I don't use Apple products generally. So it's, it's just not accessible to me.
Kate Carpenter 7:33
Where in the research process do you like to start writing?
Fahad Bishara 7:36
There's a point at which I've written enough or taken down enough notes on a file where you start to get this, this feeling that like, Okay, I think I'm ready to say something. So as I'm reading a file and I'm taking down notes, all the while, I have separate documents in which I'm jotting down ideas for the the chapter itself, or another document in which the sort of the shape of the project itself is sort of forming. So at the chapter level, as I'm sort of writing, as I'm reading note, reading documents, taking notes, jotting down different ideas, there comes a point where I begin to feel like, okay, I have a sense of what this chapter is going to be about, and yet I can't let go of the note taking process, I feel like, well, there's still, there's probably still something more to find out. There's still holes to fill. And at some point, that sort of nagging voice inside my head becomes loud enough that I think, you know what? Let me just start, right? And then I start putting down ideas on paper or starting to write. And like many other people, I'll just sort of start to write in the middle of things, and then sort of outline around around it, outline what comes before it, outline what comes after it, and sort of start plugging things in. And then I eventually end up with a somewhat rough draft of something that looks like it could be, it could be a chapter, or I end up with several rough drafts, or bits and pieces of lots of different chapters and a sense of a book that could gradually hang together. It's really, Kate, it's really just a commitment issue, like it's a fear of commitment to the project, because at some point it goes from a project that exists in your mind, and that could be a lot of things, all of which are equally cool, to something that you're committed to writing and no longer all of the other things that it could have been.
Kate Carpenter 9:39
And for me, part of the problem is it's no longer as perfect as it was in my head too.
Fahad Bishara 9:43
Oh, it's invariably far less perfect than you imagined it. But you know, that's what colleagues and friends and readers are for. And eventually you get it to a place where you're least dissatisfied with it, but never fully satisfied.
Kate Carpenter 10:00
What is revision like for you? Do you like to revise as you go? Or do you like to get out a full draft and then go back to it?
Fahad Bishara 10:06
I like to hop between different bits and pieces of the project. Actually, it may be like some ADHD brain going on, but at some point you get, you know, even as you're in a chapter, you get sort of bored of what you're you're writing about, and you want to start writing about something else. And it's in that process about of writing about some other part of writing some other part of the book, that it becomes clearer to me what I was trying to say in the earlier part. And and so then I can go back and add to it. And there are times where I'm reading something completely unrelated, and I have sort of a light bulb moment, moment of inspiration, and I can go and I can fill out a part of a chapter that I'd sort of left open, or start something. Start a new chapter altogether. You get an idea for a new chapter. So revision for me is a sort of ongoing process. At some point I've committed to a full draft of something, and then I just have to set it aside for a month or two, and then come back to it, and I sort of print it out, have a red pen, or blue pen, or whatever, something that's not black. And then I I read through it, and I sort of start rearranging bits and pieces of it, rewording certain parts of it. And then I feel comfortable enough sharing it with with people. So when you when you know, when you can see the the problems in your own writing, I feel like it's not, it's not especially worthwhile sharing it with others, because you want to be respectful of their time as well. You know what the problems are. Why bother having them tell you what, what the problems that you already know about are.
Kate Carpenter 11:52
You have what I would describe as a lyrical writing voice that's really lovely. I know you said it's a work in progress still, but I think you're, you're doing an amazing job capturing the serious and interesting at once. And listeners will hear this when we when we get to the excerpt. But how have you worked to develop that voice? Do you have strategies?
Fahad Bishara 12:13
Thank you. I mean, that means a lot. I don't know if I have, if I have strategies. I spent a lot of time reading about writing, and then actually, I spent a lot of time listening to this podcast. I listened to it frequently, and your your guests are just so lucid when it comes to these sorts of things, or, you know, sympathetic, compassionate, kind to themselves. I seldom walk away from listening to an episode not having learned something, some sort of strategy. You know, part of the problem I constantly face, part of the struggle, is writing about a part of the world that people don't really know very much about. It's not immediately familiar, and I'm always jealous of my colleagues who write on US history, because they don't have to go through all of this process of explaining to people where these places even are and what this word means, to say nothing of what this history is, there's a sort of a common pool of knowledge that you can assume readers to have. Not so much when you're writing about places like the Indian Ocean. And so a lot of the the work comes in translation, sometimes literally translating, right? How do I, there's this phrase in Arabic, and so how do I translate it into English in a way that's that's legible to somebody who doesn't know anything about this? How can I explain this to my colleagues who are intelligent people, but who don't know very much about this part of the world that I'm writing about, and then trying to to write in such a way that that this world becomes more legible and clearer to the reader, is again, a constant challenge. With my first book, A Sea of Debt, I was, I was thoroughly dissatisfied with it. Actually, I was, you know, I wish I could have done it differently. I was, I was happy with the book in some respects, but I didn't feel like I could share it with friends. I didn't feel like I could share it with family members, because it felt like it was, it was still too, you know, too academic. My interest and passion for whatever you call it, for this world, didn't come through in that book. It was very much, I mean, sort of an academic intervention. With Monsoon Voyagers, I really wanted that to be different. There was, there was a personal stake in the book. My grandfather was one of these ship captains that I wrote about. I grew up in part of the world where, where this history was celebrated but not very well understood. And, you know, I grew up also with a lot of myth making surrounding this past. And so I wanted to write in a way that could reach people of my generation in Kuwait, people in the Gulf, but also reach a community of English readers, or English people who are able to read in the English language, who could appreciate a good story, who could be drawn into this world, and the way in which I was drawn into this world, and it took a lot of it took a lot of time to figure out how to tell the story. And there were moments, there were moments in which I had enormous amount of clarity. One book that was especially helpful. There were lots of books that were that were absolutely terrific, and especially in terms of thinking about voyages and voyage stories. But one book was that was really helpful for thinking about writing and how to write, which I'm sure many of your listeners already knew about, is Jack Hart's Story Craft, which is just an outstanding book, I mean, very sort of functional in the way it's presented, but it's one of those books that clarifies to you things that you you long knew, but were never able to quite articulate or put your finger on, let alone operationalize in any way. And so it was in that moment I thought, okay, here, here is I was reading Jack's book that I I thought, Oh, there. There's a way in which I can tell this there. There are strategies that I can employ for for talking about this world, for bringing this world to life. There, there are people here and and this was the thing that that I was, you know, most dissatisfied with, with my first book, was that the people were largely absent from the from the story. And there's a way in which I can and the process of writing Monsoon Voyagers was a process of learning how to toggle between scales of writing and how one could maybe do that effectively. And so it was a process of learning throughout.
Kate Carpenter 17:13
Yeah, I love how you've talked about that, you, you called it micro history on a broad canvas, and I think somewhere else, you said you wanted to write big narratives, but also stay grounded in the micro, which I really love. You kind of answered the question of why it's important to you to work on those two scales. But what does that look like in practice?
Fahad Bishara 17:33
I mean, fundamentally, it's a problem of world making. How do you recreate a world on a large scale while being able to narrate it on a from a much smaller perspective? How do you tell a world, the story of a world as somebody might have experienced it? Though I was always drawn to these sort of large scale histories, and the challenge of writing large scale history is, is always been a very seductive challenge for me, and it's one that I'm I'm still sort of trying out in various ways, figuring out how to, how to tell that from a micro level perspective, was not easy. And there, there are lots of different strategies that people, that people employ to do that. And I think the one that is the most commonly used, and certainly one that I use in the book, is to tell stories that move essentially, right. How do you how do you cover sort of large scale, or large canvas from a micro scale? Well, you figure out what it is that you're following, right. It's to to be mobile like your actors are. And Indian Ocean historians do this frequently. We follow goods, people, texts, these sorts of things, although not often as by way of micro history, but, but usually by way of of mapping out the different kinds of circulations that make up this, this Indian Ocean world. I knew I wanted to write about the world of the dhow trade. And it was actually when I picked up a copy of Robert Harms's book The Diligent, which if, if anybody's listening and hasn't heard of that book, stop listening and just go pick up Robert Harms' book, and read that. It's an it's a terrific, a terrific account of the Atlantic slave trade, told through the voyages of one ship, The Diligent. And when I read The Diligent, I thought, Aha, this is it. Follow, follow a ship, right? Follow a ship and the captain and the captain's journals. Little did I know that there was a whole world of it's like, it's a whole sub genre of history, voyage narrative, stories of ships. The voyage story is supposed to tell you something much broader than the story of the voyage itself. I mean, you can start all the way from like, you know, the Odyssey, if you wanted. And my kids and I are these days, have been listening to a terrific podcast, and there's a mini series on the Odyssey. It's called Greeking Out. It's lovely for children. And then there's, of course, work on the Atlantic. There's Nicholas Thomas's work Discoveries, which is about the voyages of Captain Cook. And there are lots of books on on the voyages of Captain Cook. He's having a bit of a resurgence, for reasons I can't quite understand. And so there, there are all of these books of Europeans, your voyages of European ships in the world at the age of discovery, that I myself discovered over the course of writing and I used as models for for how to think and write about this part of the world. The problem was that the log book that I had was, like, way less interesting than the ones these people had. You know, we think of log books as, like, life on board the ship and all of these really cool things that, or at the very least, you know, telling us what you're carrying. This captain that I write about does none of it. Tells you where he is. He tells you the day, and he'll give you a very brief discussion or description of weather. But beyond that, nothing. And so I, I I was forced to look to other materials, and thankfully, there were lots of merchant records. These sort of trading families have held on to their materials. And for reasons that are not at all clear to me, they all sort of cluster around the same set of years, like the 1920s you have a lot of material from the 1920s and so I thought, okay, there's an opportunity here to write a really sort of thick description of this world of the 1920s. Now, how do you do it? A lot of it was sort of toggling right? So you have the voyage itself, and the voyage itself. If I were to describe this book to anybody, I would say that it's concentric circles. In the middle is the captain and his writings, his voyage. The circle just outside that is this world of of traders, of merchants in the Indian Ocean world, their letters to one another, their accounts, receipts, ledgers, all of these things that we have access to that we can use to sort of thicken this world. Beyond that is the world the sort of the world historical stage, the sort of larger scale world history of sort of trade and empire, the coming and goings of different, essentially European empires, the remakings of these remakes of these worlds, these large scale discourses about sort of politics, capitalism, state craft, all of it. So we move through these, these different concentric circles where I toggle between them at different moments in any particular chapter. And when I write about the sort of the middle level, the level of the merchants, I'm fortunate to have all of these materials. So then it becomes just a sort of a shift in perspective. Captain arrives in a port city. You have somebody who's also there, and then you can sort of shift and tell the story of that port city and its connections to these different parts of the world from the perspectives of these merchants whose arms stretch out in so many different directions, they're never just in a port city. They're always thinking about things that are coming and going to different places and so moving between these different perspectives. And at times, I mean, one thing that I learned from from story craft was just using section breaks effectively, right? Using the section break to sort of switch scale and narrate at a larger scale, to toggle between narrative and explication.
Kate Carpenter 24:07
To look more closely at the book's writing process, and to give you a better sense of Fahad's writing voice, I asked him to read an excerpt. Here's Dr. Fahad Bishara reading from chapter one of Monsoon Voyagers.
Fahad Bishara 24:20
“July and August were always busy in the port of Kuwait, and 1924 was no exception. Virtually everyone in the town was gearing up for the seasonal dhow voyages that would begin in August and set out, wave after wave, until the late autumn. The waterfront buzzed with activity, with mariners readying their dhows and nakhodas watching over the cargoes that were being loaded into their ships’ holds. Further away from the shore, all manner of merchants, brokers, and retailers gathered around reams of paperwork—contracts, receipts, ledger books, and letters—that the anticipation of the voyages generated. The joyful shrieks of children playing on the shore rang above the chorus of clanking hammers and the thuds of timber planks moving from ship to shore. This was the sound of a town getting ready to embrace yet another round of departures. Among those who oversaw the work being done on their dhows was the nakhoda ʿAbdulmajeed bin Al-Mulla Ahmad Al-Failakawi. We don’t know his dhow’s formal name, though it was most likely the Fateh Al-Khair, or the Triumph of Good Fortune. Shipbuilders often tried to give their dhows auspicious names: Al-Tayseer (Path of Ease), Muwafej (Fortunate), and Fateh Al-Rahman (Triumph of the Merciful); of these, Fateh Al-Khair was the most common. Nobody called the dhows by their formal names, though. Instead, they referred to the dhows by nicknames that reflected some aspect of the ship’s character. Al-Failakawi’s dhow was known as Al-Aʿwaj, the Crooked—hardly an auspicious name for any ship but one that captured one of its unique features. The dhow’s builder, Jassim Al-Sbaghah, converted it from a short-distance trading vessel to one outfitted for longer distances and heavier cargoes. To enlarge its capacity to 3,000 mann of dates, or roughly 225 tons, Al-Sbaghah added more planks to its hull, and so the dhow lacked the straight, sleek lines that characterized most other vessels. In a word, it looked crooked. But it was a good dhow and had already proven itself seaworthy. Al-Failakawi had just returned from a six-month voyage that took him and his crew from Kuwait to Gujarat and then to Goa, where he spent two weeks before sailing back up the Arabian Sea and crawling along the Arab shores of the Gulf. There was no time to contemplate the voyage’s success: preparation for the next season virtually always overlapped with the end of the one before.”
Kate Carpenter 26:43
What went into writing this passage?
Fahad Bishara 26:46
Well, there were a couple of things that went into writing that, first, I wanted to give a feel for the place, and this is something I learned from listening to to one of your guests, and I can't remember exactly who it was, but somebody who said something along the lines of, if you can communicate two or three of the five senses, then you've, you know, you're, you could, you're able to sort of pull the reader into this world. So scene setting. Scene setting was important to me. Scene setting for all of these places. The book, I should say, for the listeners' sake, is written around places that the dhow stops at, the sort of ports of call along the along the course of the voyage of the dhow. So you want to give people a sense of what this place looked like, what it might have felt like. And so to invoke sight, to invoke sound, and other places I try to invoke smell. Teak. Teak wood has a very sort of distinct smell to it, saw dust, the smell of sawdust mingling with sort of humid air of late summer Gulf is a very distinctive smell that one might imagine, but at the same time, and this is maybe the more important part of it is I was trying to invoke a sense of a world in motion, right? That these are places that are connected to these much broader worlds. And it's in these moments where we can feel the connection. Things are coming in and going out, people are getting ready to leave again, to give a sense of rhythm, really. And that's the other part of it, I guess. And another part of, you know, a big part of what I was trying to do in the book, and part of narrating one season's voyage and a voyage that is going to be repeated over and over again from one season to the next. It's not this exceptional voyage, like, you know, Magellan or or Captain Cook. It's, it's a very regular, very mundane kind of voyage. So to give it a sense of rhythm, right? They end up in certain places at certain times of the year. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What are people doing at that time of the year? How's it connected to what's happening over here? So again, it's this process of world making through sight, sound, smell, rhythm and motion.
Kate Carpenter 29:20
I have kind of a chicken or the egg question for you for this narrative. Did you find the sources first and realize that this would make a great story? Or did you have kind of a historical question and then find the sources?
Fahad Bishara 29:33
This one, the chicken definitely came after the egg in this one. Or, I don't know, it's what the right order is.
Kate Carpenter 29:42
Terrible metaphor.
Fahad Bishara 29:43
I I knew I wanted to write about a dhow's voyage before I had figured out which dhow I was going to write about. I mean, I knew about these kinds of materials because, as I said, my grandfather was one of these captains, and we, we have his log books. And you know, one of, one of the reasons I was drawn to this world is because there is a personal connection to it. And one of the reasons I was able to get access to any of these materials to begin with is because there is a family connection there. There is a maritime historian of Kuwait, Yacoub al-Hijji Dr who spent a couple of decades transcribing these log books that he'd found and publishing the transcriptions. And so I knew that I could use those, and I always thought I would write using one of those published log books, but, and this is where serendipity comes into the picture. And as historians like I'm 100% a believer in serendipity. It's like more than half of the process is just, I won't call it luck. I don't know what it is, but there are moments where things just align. So I had been reading this ship captain's log book anyway, because his voyage had aligned with a lot of the other material that I had been seeing. And I thought, okay, there's a way in which I can begin to sort of triangulate this stuff and really sort of thicken an account of this world by having people who are contemporary with one another. I was visiting a friend, high school friend and college friend in Kuwait. I was visiting him on one of our sort of winter breaks when I was at UVA. And I visited him just because he and his wife, he had just gotten married the year before. I hadn't been in around the year they just had a kid, and so I wanted to go say hello and meet their infant and just congratulate them and his wife had the same last name as this, this dhow captain. Now the last name is just, it's a place name. It indicates origins in an island off the coast of Kuwait, Failaka island. There are lots of people who have that last name. But then she she had said at some point that her brother was going to come by later in the evening, and she called her brother by his first name, Abdulmajeed, so the same name as this captain, and it's not a very common name, okay? It's like, I don't know if I know, if you're Winston or Jefferson or something, you know, you know that these are names that are that you know, the kinds of names that repeat themselves over the course of generation, sort of always leapfrogging back in time. And so I asked, well, what's your relationship to the ship captain ʿAbdulmajeed Al-Failakawi? And she said, Oh, he's our grandfather. I said, Oh, how interesting. I've been reading his logbook. I wonder. You know, Does your family have the log books? Do they have anything else? And she said, Oh, yeah, my dad has a whole chest full of these things. Oh, really? At this point, I could barely contain my excitement. Really, you don't say, I wonder, might I be introduced to your dad? And she said, Sure. And so she picked up the telephone and said, Hey, there's this guy, and he wants to meet you. And he said, Yeah, sure, have him come by. And so the next day, I went over there, and once I saw the log books, I realized. I realized a couple of things, Kate. First, I realized that the published log book that I had been reading was a very small part of the actual log book. The editor, the maritime historian had stripped out everything that was not the log of the voyage itself. So all of the marginalia, all of the notes, all of just the really cool things that gave this source its personality, were nowhere to be seen in the published version. And the second thing I realized was that this was going to be my guy. He was my he was like, my maritime Menocchio. He was my, you know, he like, there was a moment in which you go through it and you think, Oh, my God, there are these. Like, you get a window into this guy's thinking the ways in which he saw the world around him, the ways in which he excerpted bits and pieces from the world around him. This is it. This is the person that I'm I'm writing about at that moment the project came into being, and I just had to figure out how much of it I was going to be able to write about. And I have to say I like I really had to restrain myself. There were so many things that I wanted to write about. There are so many chapters that I wrote that never made their way into the final product, so many sidebar discussions, so many so much stuff. I was like a whole world, and I was ready to write about all of it, but I had to figure out how I was going to just cut one slice through it, which was like an enormous challenge. But a deeply productive and gratifying one.
Kate Carpenter 35:02
Was there anything you had to leave out that was particularly painful?
Fahad Bishara 35:06
Yes, Zanzibar, East Africa. I had chapters, not just one chapter, three chapters that I had written on East Africa. The book covers a season's voyage from Kuwait to southern India and back. These captains also went to East Africa. They sailed down to Zanzibar and past Zanzibar to the Rufiji Delta all the time. And it was like a completely different world, but very much connected to the world that I was I was writing about. But as as I as the book was taking shape, more and more, I realized that I couldn't do it, because, first, the book would be too long. Second, although this captain did go to East Africa, he didn't go to East Africa on this voyage, right? And so you're confined to writing about the places that he actually went to on that voyage. And I do try to bring in other places at other points in time. In fact, I do have East Africa in the book, but it went from three chapters to roughly five pages. And so, yeah, I tried to cram it all in there. And then I at one point, I tried to console myself by saying, Well, you know, I can write another book that takes on the East Africa voyage, but I'm never gonna write that book. Who am I kidding? Anyway. And as you start writing about this world, and especially, you know, alongside the voyage and around the voyage is a whole, I mean, it's a whole oceanic archive. It's a whole sea of texts about sailing, about navigation. There's stuff on poetry, there's stuff on the unseen. There's all of this great stuff that just never made its way into the into the book. All I can say is, forgive me, I tried.
Kate Carpenter 37:04
Kind of related to that, one of the really interesting structural things you do in this book is that you have chapters and then they're interspersed with these short sections you call inscriptions. You kind of closely read a document and write, sort of in a more historiographic, argumentative tack. You also say in the intro like, you can skip those if you're not interested in that. I don't know that I've ever seen this before in a book. I kind of loved it. What motivated that approach?
Fahad Bishara 37:32
So I'll let me say they were not at first. They were not called inscriptions. They were called up until, like, the final draft of the proofs of the book. Actually, they were called postscripts. So it was a postscript to each chapter. And then one of the editors at UC Press, a very astutely pointed out that, yeah, postscript doesn't really work. Maybe you want to think about something else. And then he suggested inscription. I thought, oh, that's brilliant. I love inscription, because what it does is it does take an inscription from the log book, one of these many sort of marginalia moments in which he sort of breaks genre in as much as we even understand this to be genre of any sort, and writes down something that he sees, writes down a copy of a contractual template, writes down a formula for doing something or measuring something. And at first, I didn't really know what to do with these. I knew that these gave us something of like when I called him sort of a maritime Menocchio, I meant it that this is a person who's like, actively trying to think about this world around him and but thinks in terms of these, sometimes like disconnected utterances that don't often cohere into something like integrated view of the world, but are incredibly telling, nonetheless. Now, of course, if the captain was around, he would tell me I had no idea what I was talking about. And and, you know, all of these things made sense. And of course, he understood this world perfectly, which he probably did, but all I have is what's presented to me. And so I use these to sort of tunnel into particular concepts. And this is part of this process of translation that I was talking about early on this, like, how do you how do you take these moments or these, the yeah, these, these bits and pieces, how do you draw out concepts from them and then translate those concepts into into concepts that are commensurate in in the sort of English historical writing, right? The concept that historians would be able to look at and understand, accounting, commodification, the first nature, second nature, whatever. Right? These. Sorts of things. And so this was my attempt at sort of drilling down into these and actually it was also like my, my space for myself to just sort of geek out. And I, you know, I'm as a historian, I'm like, but there, there are people who, they're historians, who love people. And sure, I love people, but more than people, I love paper. Okay, just give me paper, surround me with paper, and I'll be as happy as can possibly be. When I'm when I'm drawn to storytelling, the stories that I'm drawn to are stories that involve paper. When I'm drawn to materials, I'm actually drawn to the material itself, even more than I am to the story that's in the material. And so on. The first book, my first book, Sea of Debt, was really it was about bits of bits of paper that circulated around the Indian Ocean, and then bits of paper that explained what was happening in those other bits of paper. And so, like the materiality of this world materialized. Materiality of the archive of this world is very much something that I was always drawn to. And so when I saw those, those marginalia, those inscriptions, I thought, Yes, oh my god. How do I like I want to write about all of this now, of course, once you start geeking out, you kind of lose the audience, like the general reader audience, like, with all respect to William Cronon, like, we could, we all wish we could be William Cronon. When I'm writing for people who live in the Indian Ocean world, family, friends, they have no idea. Okay, that they don't. You know, first nature, second nature, third, fourth, fifth. It's all the same to them, right? And so it's a moment in which I could, I could talk sort of inside baseball with with colleagues, and just really like, have fun with this stuff. But I knew that people didn't necessarily want to read that. So I tell the reader early on, look, if you don't want it, then, then don't, don't read it. All you want is the story. The story is there, right? And the story is important, like the story. There is a big storytelling impulse in this book, and I I didn't want to integrate those discussions into the chapters, because I didn't want to clutter the narrative with that kind of thinking. And I wanted it, you know, we write in different voices, and so the voice in which I write for the inscriptions is not the same voice that I use in in the chapters themselves. And so I wanted to separate those out. I should say, for those who are wondering where the idea came from, it's not my own idea. The anthropologist-cum-historian Greg Dening, who writes on the Pacific, is a brilliant writer who was a brilliant writer, I should say, I mean, talk about lyrical I mean, this guy, he, he spun poetry. Okay, this guy was, like, he was really, wrote absolutely beautifully. He wrote a book called Islands and Beaches. And Islands and Beaches was about a particular group of island, the Marquesas, in the Pacific, and the sort of long history, and it's sort of an ethno history of the Marquesas. And he used the islands and beaches also as a metaphor, a metaphor for thinking about encounters, right? Beaches are sites of encounter. Islands are sites of like, more, you know, we might imagine more insular culture, right? And then there was a sort of the metaphor on top of the metaphor. So he had the chapters, and after each chapter, he had a postscript, which was on the encounter between Anthropology and History as disciplines. And so it was like sort of a meta discourse on what we were reading in the chapters. And I remember reading that and thinking, Oh, my God. This is so brilliant. This is amazing. Like how freaking cool that this guy is able to take this metaphor to these heights, but also so easily and sort of pithily present to us such a sort of deep topic, a sort of interdisciplinary encounters and then so I thought to myself, well, what if I did that? I mean, I'm not Greg Dening, and I'm not talking about something as deep as interdisciplinary encounters, but like, what if I limited myself to just a couple of 1000 words? Could I make sense of what was in front of me? Could I tell people what was important to think about? Could I go from the document and then sort of scope out to these big issues, and then go back in and say, Now we might think of this a little bit different and and so it was a sort of a constant challenge to myself, and it was super fun.
Kate Carpenter 44:29
It's a brilliant solution, because when I read, when I read about them in the introduction, I was mentally prepared for them to be very dull. But it turns out they're fascinating, and I loved reading them. I think your enthusiasm for documents really comes through in those passages. But I think you're right that they would have sort of interrupted the narrative within the chapter and felt more like a slog. And so by separating them, you kind of let them shine as their own thing. And I loved it was a great solution.
Fahad Bishara 44:59
Thank you. Thank you. I mean this, like, look fellow historians here, like we can all geek out over paper and it's okay. There's no shame in it, right? And I love moments when I read books. I love the moments in which historians let us sort of peer over their shoulder into the research and writing process, like where the material comes to life and our interpretations of the material are happening in real time, rather than, you know, okay, this is all stuff that happens in notes. And what I'm presenting with you with is the final thing, okay, let's, let's think through it all together.
Kate Carpenter 45:34
In our last time, I want to talk about your inspirations. And you have mentioned several wonderful writers and historians already. Are there other people that you read that you look to for inspiration?
Fahad Bishara 45:46
I do read a lot of fiction. I wouldn't be able to put my finger on anybody specifically. There is one author, Laila Lalami or Lalami, who wrote a book called The Moor's Account, which is just an absolutely stunning, breathtaking account of the sort of the one of these early expeditions in the New World, the Cabeza de Vaca expedition, told through the eyes of a Muslim who was a part of the expedition, and so she big connected history of it. Of course, like Greg Dening, everybody should just stop and read Greg Dening, I don't know why we ever stopped reading Greg Dening, but I'm here to say that we should all read Greg Dening. And then there are people whose writings on sort of the materiality of things has always left an enormous imprint. In my thinking, the late Brinkley Messick, for example, his writings on law and and writing sort of bringing together history and anthropology. I read a lot of anthropology, ethnography, the beauty of the narrative, but also because one of my advisors, Engseng Ho, is sort of an anthro historian who wrote about the Indian Ocean world. And I was always sort of taken by what anthropologists did. The other thing that I I draw inspiration from, or the other medium, I should say, This American Life, the podcast, which is maybe like a very trite answer, but like This American Life is radio perfection. It is, it is like, in terms of storytelling, like Ira Glass just, he just nails it, right? I haven't listened to it in a little while, because with all of the sort of reporting on Gaza and the episodes around that, it just became really heavy to listen to. But, you know, talk about somebody who is able to to take a moment and really sort of unpack it, give you bigger framing for it, and then draw you into sort of the its intimate details. He does it so well and so so beautiful as a storyteller. The other podcasts, the other sort of NPR podcasts, Planet Money, The Indicator. They do really good job with explaining these economic things through storytelling, right? Things like the economy that, you know, we are all invested in, but not necessarily very interested in. They do such a good job of making it come to life. Like, here's this moment, and here's the issue, that's intention here. Let's blow it up and explain it to you, and then let's get back into the story and trace it all the way through. Really, really well done. And once you they had one episode, I can't remember when it was, in which they broke down their own formula for storytelling. And then once you learn that, like, you can't unhear it, it was brilliant. It was brilliant. These moments, these moments where, where it again. It like the the lights just sort of illuminate everywhere, where you listen to these things and you think, like, okay, that, Story Craft, these books that I'm reading, all of it. And there was a moment during Monsoon Voyagers, during the sort of research and writing of Monsoon Voyagers, where I, you know, it was a sort of come to Jesus moment, except I'm Muslim, and so I, you know, respect Jesus, but come to Jesus, maybe not, but come to Mohammed moments, maybe, in which, you know, I realized, and I thoroughly embraced the fact that, look, we are fundamentally storytellers. That's what we do. That is what the historian's job is, to tell stories and to tell stories that are instructive in different ways, that are meant to tell you something about the world that you live in, tell you about the worlds that we lived in, to tell you something about what it means to be human. And I think for a very long time, especially in grad school, I had thought of history as more sort of social scientific, if that makes any sense, like no, we're here to make an argument, and we're here to suss out a concept. And at this point, no, no, no, no, we are storytellers. And in a sense, like we are not just storytellers on our own, we live in a community of storytellers, and we're all telling stories, just from different vantage points. And once I embraced that, I felt like it was simultaneously like both like incredibly liberating, and opened up all of these doors and frontiers and ways of thinking about what it is that we do and what it is that I teach, and why I do it and why I teach it in totally new ways.
Kate Carpenter 50:48
Boy, I love that. What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Speaker 1 50:53
I've never gotten writing advice like personally, directly, direct writing advice. I don't think I've gotten writing advice my my dear friend and peer colleague, Ahmed Almaazmi, he is somebody who is always encouraging me to sort of trust my instinct. I'm the sort of person that really I second guess myself a lot. I get really excited about an idea, and then I get cold feet. And there are many times in writing Monsoon Voyagers that I thought, oh my god, this is a really dumb idea. Why am I doing this? Nobody needs to read this. Nobody will ever read this. I think, the same sorts of anxieties that like literally anybody who's ever written a dissertation or or a book or anything. The good news, Kate, is that it never goes away. And you just, you know, if you're at all successful, you get to have a life in which you you relive those moments over and over again. But he is always there to allow me, to give me the space to sort of to talk about these things, but then sort of to trust my to remind me to trust my own instincts. And this is something I tell my my students as well. Like, if you think there's a story there, there's probably a story there. There's a reason why you thought there was a story there to begin with. Now go back and figure out why, why you thought that there was, there was a story there. But the the best writer, writing advice I've ever gotten is honestly, and this is not just just me complimenting you, but like your podcast and the people that they get, the many guests that you've had on your podcast, is it's like having a writing companion every week, or being in a writing workshop every week, and every every time I listen, I learned something new about the craft, about the discipline and about myself at the same time. And it's like a tremendous resource.
Kate Carpenter 52:53
I'm glad to hear that. I feel the same way at listening to all the amazing guests who tell me about their writing. So before I let you go, I know you're not writing a book about Zanzibar in East Africa, but is there a new project you're, you're digging into?
Fahad Bishara 53:07
Yeah, I mean, I'm still sort of sussing things out right now. The book just came out a few months ago, and I'm, I'm in the sort of in between phase. You know, having small children also means, I mean, they're not really that small anymore. My kids are about 11 and about nine. But you know, archival travel is not what is not as easy as it used to be. What I'll say is that I've been spending a lot of time. I want to change tracks, and I for my last two books I've spent, I spent talking about issues of trade, capitalism, law, things like that. I've not let go of the law issue, but I'm writing about crime, and I've sort of been drawn into this set of materials on crime and society in the Gulf, still trying to figure out what I might say about it, but what I do know is that there are some really, really, really cool stories, and if all I'm able to do is share those stories, then I would have done a good job. This is, as you might tell, like the still the sort of heavy excitement and optimism phase. Checked back in about six months, and I will have second guessed myself, and I might be writing about something else entirely.
Kate Carpenter 54:27
Fair enough. Dr. Fahad Bishara, I loved Monsoon Voyagers. I have loved hearing you talk about your writing process. Thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Fahad Bishara 54:37
Thank you for this opportunity, and thanks for giving me the chance to talk about all of this. It's been super fun.
Kate Carpenter 54:44
Thanks again to Fahad for joining me and to you for listening. Find links to all the books we talked about in the show notes at draftingthepast.com I have another fantastic interview coming up for you next week, and in the meantime, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
