An interview with Ryad Assani-Razaki, author of The Hand of Iman
To set sail on dreams over open waters toward faraway Europe isn’t so idyllic for the characters of the fictional African country which serves as the setting for Ryad Assani-Razaki’s forthcoming novel The Hand of Iman, now receiving an English translation after its original French publication in 2011. The novel’s titular character subscribes to the belief that setting foot on the European coastline would be equivalent to “reaching the El Dorado”; once the journey is complete, prosperity will settle on Iman’s shoulders like a glistening sword blade knighting him into a new order. But, as the novel portrays with unreserved honesty, place doesn’t guarantee power, and the pursuit of one’s desires can lead people to make precarious decisions.
The Hand of Iman is a complex interrogation into the lingering, destructive effects of colonialism in Africa and how they ripple across generations. The novel is rooted in the relationship between friends Toumani and Iman, from when they meet in a life-saving moment as boys to their complicated, tumultuous adult lives. The story is predominantly told from the perspectives of Toumani and his peer Alissa, with one-off chapters narrated by Iman’s grandmother, mother, and younger brother. Across these multiple perspectives, Assani-Razaki crafts vastly different voices and subjectivities to explore themes of desire, faith, and suffering, all while Iman remains an enigma to the reader and to the characters themselves. Set across decades, the novel traces the evolving relationships between the central characters and their conflicting desires, offering a nuanced examination of the kinds of conditions which cause the border between love and cruelty to catastrophically crumble.
Ryad Assani-Razaki is a Beninese-Canadian writer known for his short story collection Deux cercles (2009) and novel La main d’Iman (2011). He has been lauded with awards including the Trillium Book Award for Deux cercles in 2010 and the Prix Robert-Cliche for La main d’Iman in 2011, the novel also being shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction in 2012. Now, fourteen years after its initial publication, The Hand of Iman will be available to English-speaking audiences with the translation done by Assani-Razaki himself. House of Anansi Press has set the novel for release on August 12, 2025.
Payton Knox had the opportunity to interview Ryad Assani-Razaki about translation, identity, and the intersections of love and suffering in The Hand of Iman.
PK: What inspires you to write? Do you have any notable influences, literary or otherwise?
RA: I have a plethora of influences inspiring and driving my writing. They can be literary, such as Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri for their thematic [resonances] or Annie Ernaux for her courage in exploring and experimenting with tones. I also draw a lot from other formats such as John Woo’s cinematography or Ikegami’s manga for character complexity, or at times even music for emotional connection and pace with artists such as 2Pac, Shurik’n, or Lauryn Hill. For this novel I also took a lot from the world of City of God.
PK: How did the idea for The Hand of Iman come about? What made you decide to tell such an evocative story of love, violence, colonialism, immigration, and faith?
RA: I write to understand life. The same way a chemist uses experimentation and mixes chemicals to validate a theory, I put characters in interaction to validate or invalidate a perspective or an idea. The idea of The Hand of Iman started with the violence that unfolds towards the end of the book between Toumani, Alissa, and Iman. How can three friends that are united by love be driven to such brutality? What life experiences or forces can justify such violence? I wanted to write the life that leads to it, and I kept going backward looking for its origin, its inception. I kept retracing their steps, then I realized I had to take it even one generation back. That previous generation also needed an explanation, so I jumped back two generations. Only then did I get a solid answer, and I could start writing the story.
PK: When and why did you decide that you wanted to write an English translation of the novel?
RA: I’ve always wanted to have an English version of the novel. I read English authors as much as I read French ones. I believe the original works in both languages are vastly different in the way that they approach and play with language. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, at a literary level, only fully makes sense in English. In the same way, in Annie Ernaux’s La place, the simplification of the language to match the emotional tone of her relationship with her deceased father only truly hits in a French reading. Languages have notions or concepts that cannot be translated, because they only exist in the original language. I am Beninese and my mother tongue is Yoruba. A lot of nuances of Yoruba simply don’t exist in English or French. I didn’t want just a “translation,” I wanted an English “version” of the story and was curious to know what that would be like.
PK: What was the process of translating the novel like? Were there any difficulties that came with revisiting your own work and adapting it into a different language?
RA: [It] was tedious! Haha. I took a break from my day job and worked on the translation ten to twelve hours a day for a few months, and alternated the work with sleep, or long walks to refresh my mind. I initially wrote the French novel in a similar manner, intensive and very concentrated effort over a period with no breaks. I wanted the same immersive experience with the English version. I wanted to inhabit the world of the story fully, to the point that it became more real to me than my real world. I suppose in the same way that there is method acting, this could be called method writing. The characters have to feel real and their pain true to the writer. I’ve sometimes felt tears welling up as I wrote a particularly emotional part of a story. Writing must be a visceral experience for me.
PK: Do you feel like there are any significant differences between the English and French versions of the novel? Will anglophone readers have a different experience than francophone readers?
RA: I’ve somewhat answered this in the previous question. I’ve tried to rewrite the book, not simply translate it. French wordplays don’t land the same way in English. I wanted the experience rather than the words to be carried over from one version to then next. Being the writer of the original story also means that I didn’t feel like I was betraying the original voice, because both are mine. However, I tried to stay true to the opinions I held when I first wrote it in French, even in the case that the new and older me might hold a different view. That part was interesting, like finding a fountain of youth, haha!
PK: The novel is set in an unnamed fictional African country. Why was it important to keep the setting generalized?
RA: I thought making the context specific could weaken the story in two manners. The first and most obvious one is that a specific setting may incite [people] to believe that the drama and theme is restricted to that specific country or part of Africa. This would limit the universality of the human experience I was trying to describe. I wanted the novel to feel relatable, I wanted every African to be able to claim the story as theirs!
The second reason is that a fictional place allows more creative freedom. This novel is a story with a purpose, a final objective. I wanted to be able to freely create an environment, a history, that could be used as an effective tool to drive the purpose home. I should be able to fabricate it without worrying about the audience being stuck on the veracity of such or such event, and being distracted from the main purpose, which is the human experience in the story.
PK: The novel is told from multiple perspectives, but never from Iman’s. Considering the novel is centred around Iman’s pursuit of happiness and his dream to immigrate to Europe, what inspired the decision to withhold his own narrative voice from the reader?
RA: Iman is everyone. Iman is a projection of their desire, their love, lust or envy. Giving him his own voice would suddenly make him his own person and cancel that multiplicity of projections. The same way we never see the interiority of Tyler Durden in Fight Club, we never see Iman from within. Iman is the parallel to the “What would Tyler Durden do?” question. Which may lead to “Did Iman even exist?” or is he simply us?
PK: Iman is a brave, albeit reckless, character. Despite having people who love him and want him to stay in his home country, his desire to go to Europe is unwavering. What was the process of creating his character like?
RA: It’s simple, Africa needs Africans. However, the western world via a meticulous process of political destabilization, local war instigation, ethnic cleansing, and a painful draining of material and human resources has made it impossible for Africans to stay in Africa. There is the metaphor.
PK: Toumani, Iman, and Alissa are incredibly complex characters who try their best to negotiate their desires within the constraints of difficult living conditions. Despite the love that exists between them, they often end up hurting each other. What was it like exploring this relationship between love, violence, and pain?
RA: That was the whole purpose of the book. It’s a weave of interpersonal relationships, motivations and interactions that lead to the final act of violence. A funny tidbit: I used my training as a computer scientist to build entity relationship diagrams, similar to the ones that capture database relationships, to describe the relationship between the characters. I also drew out logic diagrams to follow their psychological evolution as events in the book were triggering changes in them. I wanted to find the right pace of evolution between all three characters, so that the final event would happen at the moment of worst timing in terms of their outlook on life. Timing is everything. It was the worst time for all three of them, and the violence ensued.
PK: The events of the novel take place over many years. How did you go about plotting these characters’ lives over such a long period of time?
RA: I think the process of designing the story backwards, starting from the last incident, helped a lot with this. It’s akin to the work of a psychoanalyst, retracing memory and discarding anything that is irrelevant and only keeping what is driving to the problem at hand, which is the violence—and you’ve got your story!
PK: Do you have any projects you are currently working on?
RA: I am currently working on a historical fiction. My next novel is taking us to a time previously untold, or little told, which is medieval Africa. It’s about Africa before slavery, meaning before all black people were simply only seen through that lens of our collective history of slavery. What were we before our identities became defined by white people and the horror they inflicted on us? Going back may inform us on how to move forward. We’ll see.