Tikitian Imprints
by Hatem Eleishi
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 180
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781597130417
Publisher: Goose River Press
Eleishi was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1967 with an intellectual zeal that was nourished by his family of prominent physicians. He followed in their footsteps and became an assistant professor of rheumatology at Cairo University School of Medicine. Eleishi’s interest in great works of literature influenced by Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Gibran and other great thinkers encouraged him to pursue writing and philosophy with great enthusiasm. He is currently on sabbatical leave travelling with his wife and two children.
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Q: Dr. Hatem, you are a physician, a full-time physician, and apparently you also have your contributions to your field of specialty. You also are a co-editor of the Men's Health Magazine at your hospital and are involved in administrative duties. It really makes me wonder how a dedicated physician manages to find the time to write a novel in the first place and with that big dose of well thought-over issues that, too, would need more and more time than the writing of what we call "easy reads".
HE: I started writing Tikitian Imprints more than 10 years ago. At that time, I didn't know I was writing Tikitian Imprints. I only thought I was writing my own personal notes for personal future reference. They took the form of several individual articles. Each article dealt with a different issue. Some of the issues I wrote about were the nature and origin of human self-esteem, whether a man could do without society or his incorporation in one was integral to his psychological well-being not to mention the physical, about social norms and cultural codes of conduct and how sometimes they didn't make sense yet were so expected by everyone in the society and even mandated, true essence of "falling of love", how chemistry starts and how admiration proceeds to love, origins of envy and jealousy, how man's knowledge that he will inevitably die someday formulated important and very peculiar aspects of his psychology. In spite of the fact that what I wrote in those articles made so much sense to me, I figured out they were too reader-unfriendly to be published. People would rather read something simpler and less brain efforting, I thought at that time.
Being restricted at outdoor activities following a hamstring injury in 2005 and having more time for myself at home, I started to consider doing to my philosophy articles what I did to the immunology books that I taught to postgraduates, turn them into stories and analogies to make them more palatable to the recipient. I embarked on turning each article into a short story. I wrote two short stories and then came up with a frame for one big story that included most of my articles together and that was the Tikitian Imprints.
Q: That's really interesting. So you didn't really intend to become a writer at the start.
HE: I never wrote actually. It was the writing that happened to me.
Q: Now after I read your book, I came to know that "Tikitian" comes from the place called Tikita in Kenya. Is that a true place or is it from the your own imagination?
HE: Kenyans themselves would only know about Tikita from my book. There is no Tikita on the Kenyan maps.
Q: Why did you choose Africa and Kenya for your story and where did Tikita come from?
HE: I first chose Africa as a suitable setting for my story being renowned for wisdom, myths and peculiar cultures. All that seemed homogenous with my themes. The other option I had would have been India by the way. Then I had to select, from Africa, a place with diverse animal and plant life as I needed living non-human company for Habi and Sheeba in the first five chapters of the book. There I chose Kenya. Lastly, I had to invent a place with an easy to pronounce name that would also sound African and that was how I came up with Tikita.
Q: You wrote an "Apology to the Reader" at the end of the book. I really liked it. But did you feel you really needed to write an apology? I mean many readers are grateful to you for having enlightened them with what you wrote about the real reasons for what they say and do and not the good reasons they keep giving to the world and to themselves.
HE: I started my book with primitive humans who were supposedly the first to exist. Me and them, we walked together through the mountains of Tikita and lived through the years till our present day. Every step we took together from that time till our present day was based firstly on a thorough imagination of how things would have been like at that time and secondly on a logical inference of how the next step would have, in turn, been like. That was how I relived with them the scenarios of evolution of human psychology and behavior. So you see every step further we took together was based on pure logic. I left no chance for how I felt about what I wrote to keep me from writing it. The outcome was, though logical and sense-making to many readers, yet, was rather heart-breaking especially for people who think with their feelings more than with their minds. Imagine, in a world filled with so much faith in songs about unconditional loving, giving and sacrificing, that someone writes that all human dealings are about tacit and implied contracts whereby you have to take back some form of price for anything that you give the difference lying only in the types and categories of prices and the timings of deliveries of those prices, be them immediate versus remote. Imagine someone declaring and taking for granted a fact that all humans possess envy traits to other humans stemming from their corporeal narcissism. And imagine him dealing with the problem at a level of how to make people stop denying they have that envy trait and how to make them healthily manage it rather than impractically trying to get rid of that trait when it is so ingrained in their very genes. Imagine someone telling parents that their love to their child is not genuine to that child, to that other person, as much as it is a peak degree of narcissism in a world where you temporarily reside in an inevitably mortal body and t hat had they been immortal, the first thing they would have done was to exterminate their kids. For all those reasons, I felt I should dilute the impact of my message on tender readers with an apology.
Q: So you were a bit skeptical about the reaction of readers to your book?
HE: Oh yes, of course I was. I expected to be attacked or maybe even hated by many readers for what I had written. A "psychopath" was the least that I had expected from reviewers and readers. But I was and still am so convinced with what I wrote to be dissuaded from publishing it. Nevertheless, I believed that with time, not few of those who might not like it would change their minds. And that was what I wrote at the end of the apology. Surprisingly and really most surprisingly, I got nothing but praise till today. Months earlier, I probed one of those who read the book but had kept silent thereafter never commenting on it to me. She told me that she did like it and that the message was clear but she found difficulty in accepting some of what she read in it as it made a damage to the reality she wanted to live.
Q: English is not your mother language but you wrote your first book in English, why?
HE: Well, this is not my first book to write by the way. It's only my first to publish.
I think in both languages, Arabic and English. But apparently, having been to an English school, having studied medicine in English, having traveled and worked in hospitals abroad where I spoke English and having lectured in English for many years, all those things made their English imprint on my writing language. Although I know the Arabic language has a greater wealth of words, I feel the English language served me better when I tried to express my thoughts. I really enjoy reading in Arabic and I hope someday I will be good enough at Arabic writing abilities to write in Arabic too.
Q: Did you think of having your book translated to other languages?
HE: I thought about it only when I had offers for that lately. Before that it never crossed my mind.
Q: Your book is now being read, in addition to the States, by people in other countries including some Eastern countries that have very conservative cultures. Do you think it is easy to express a book with a Western philosophical opinion to an audience with a conservative background?
HE: I believe my book doesn’t have a nationality or a certain geographical origin opinion wise be it Western or Eastern. It's a free thinker's book. I strongly believe that issues of man-woman relationship, death and faith and afterlife for example have been discussed with a lot of common sense and have been traced back to very crude and primitive origins and have not been hued with any cultural beliefs. And if readers, too, put aside their cultural and traditional beliefs while reading that book, I expect there will be a lot for me and the readers to agree about or discuss together than if they judged the book according to rigid cultural railways.
Q: Your book is mainly philosophical. I noticed in the last few chapters of the book, you mentioned religion and religious issues like faith and the contrast of the mighty Creator and the tiny creature. Did you find difficulty merging philosophy and religion together in your book?
HE: Okay, I get what you mean. Yes, we understand there is a false impression especially in some Eastern cultures that philosophy is a field that is incompatible with religion and that leads you to atheism. But to me philosophy and religion can be the same thing. How? Philosophy is about data that you input in your personal computer, your mind, and that you then grind and process to yield inferences, theories, concepts and later facts and generalizations. Where you end up actually depends on the degree of accuracy of the data that you had started with and, equally important, on how your piece of mind processed them. In that sense, philosophy could be your sure way to your atheism or it could be your sure way to your God.
Q: Dr. Hatem, what is or what are the comments that you received from readers and that you loved most?
HE: One reader who is also my friend commented that the author of the book, me, is an honest self-inspector and that when he read the book the first benefit he got was that he, too, became a good self-inspector and started to know the real reasons why he did the good and the bad things that he did. Another comment which is more or less the same was one phrase I received from a reader who works with me at the same hospital when I asked her to comment on the book. She said "It was eye-opening".
© Copyright 2012 by Hatem Eleishi. Reprinted with permission by Goose River Press. All rights reserved.
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