Established in 2020 by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, both London-based editors, Hajar Press is an independent publishing house that prioritises people of color. After crowdsourcing initial funds in late 2020, Hajar Press launched in early 2021 with an innovative subscription scheme including six books, the first of which was Fovea / Ages Ago, by Sarah Lasoye, followed by works by Jamal Mehmood and Heba Hayek. 2021 will continue to see Hajar publish Lola Olufemi, Cradle Community and Yara Hawari. Publishing across genres, Hajar is very specifically political, not only in its aims to de-centre whiteness but also for its stances on abolition, Palestine, capitalism, and racism, as well as its attempts to push back against Amazon’s domination of the book market. In Hazine’s interview with Aftab and Arefin, they tell us more about what makes Hajar so unique, how they differ from the mainstream publishing industry, and how they seek, as women of colour, to generate community through their books.
How well do you think the contemporary English-language publishing scene accommodates peoples of color and the literature of communities of color?
While there are some fellow indies doing brilliant work, generally the English-publishing scene is incredibly weird and warped when it comes to supporting the literature of communities of colour. When we set up Hajar, it wasn’t very difficult to articulate what we wanted it to be because there was so clearly a need for it; it wasn’t hard to identify what was sorely lacking in the industry, not only because we’d experienced this lack ourselves but because people have been talking about it for a very long time. From its inception, we’ve had such heartwarming support for the project, without which we wouldn’t be here. But in the beginning, we did have some quite nasty backlash from within the industry. And that made us realise that the existence of Hajar was also a provocation.
People of colour are constantly measured against a certain paradigm that serves to lock us in a dynamic of imitation. The literary canon is, in many ways, limited in a very similar way—because of how the publishing industry, book reviewers and university English departments have approached writers of colour, the literary world is locked in awe of itself while constantly reproducing a constrained and often, racist imagination. Hiring more diverse editors is a necessary but insufficient fix to that problem, because the problem seeps into every part of the industry. From commissioning books based on previous success stories, to marketing or designing books in certain ‘exotic’ ways, to the many issues with book review culture in the UK (where ‘high-brow’ means white and elitist), people of colour face deeply embedded barriers at every stage of the publishing process.
Hajar’s writers, in one way or another, are all testing and challenging that constrained imagination. What that leads to is stunning experiments—whether Sarah Lasoye’s and Lola Olufemi’s meditations on time, Yara Hawari’s and Jamal Mehmood’s evocation of intergenerational memory, or Heba Hayek’s and Cradle Community’s powerful case for changing everything. Hajar isn’t about telling white people ‘our truth’. It’s about creating for ourselves and for our communities, with a view to imagining a new world. We invite others to engage with our books on these terms, de-centring whiteness and giving people of colour the space to explore. Perhaps others could take lessons on literature, on reimagining our world, from those whose imaginations are not as bound up with and invested in the status quo.
Tell us what motivated the creation of Hajar Press. How did the idea come about, how did you come to collaborate together, how did you decide on the name, and how did you begin to set up the press?
We had both worked in publishing for several years and had become frustrated by structural problems inherent in the industry—institutional racism and exclusion; profit-seeking and trend-following; Amazon’s market domination; and the atomisation of readers. Around the time that we started speaking to each other about creating something new to tackle these issues, the pandemic hit, soon followed by a wave of Black Lives Matter protests around the world. In response, we saw corporate publishers begin to question their publishing models, when in fact, these problems had been around for decades. And with racism in particular, it seemed like publishers had become stuck chasing their own tail—there are cyclical reports, exposés, freakouts and hand-wringing sessions about ‘diversity’, and then once the buzz has died, it’s back to business as usual.
At the same time, we were witnessing the implosion of the electoral left in the UK after the 2019 general election, which returned the Conservatives to power with an overwhelming majority. We wanted to try to build a kind of political community for people of colour, who are too often excluded from both the mainstream publishing industry and progressive movements—tokenised for diversity optics, and then thrown under the bus when we become inconvenient. By setting up Hajar, we wanted to build something for ourselves, so that people of colour can write on our own terms, for our own audiences. We’re trying to build a space that encourages authors to experiment in their writing in a literary paradigm where the dreaded ‘white gaze’ is completely irrelevant.
We decided to name ourselves after Hajar, the Egyptian handmaiden of Abraham’s wife Sarah from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions. Abraham married Hajar so that she might bear him children, but when Sarah gave birth to her own son, Hajar and her baby were banished into the desert. To us, Hajar represents the racialised people who are called upon to perform the hidden labour that maintains society but who are then disposed of. The root h-j-r in Arabic also means to migrate, which resonates with the histories of many communities of colour in the UK and other diasporas.
What genres does Hajar publish?
It’s hard to answer, because on the one hand, we publish everything from fiction to nonfiction to poetry to essays; and on the other, most of our books can’t be classified by genre at all. We approach every author by asking them what they would write if they could write anything at all, and often, this has led to works that are somewhat fragmentary in form or that sit in liminal genres like autofiction. It’s really thrilling to see what happens when you don’t place limits on the imagination, particularly in writing that fuses deeply personal experiences with an awareness of the tectonic structures that construct the world on a macro level—or, of course, in work that conjures whole new worlds altogether. The six books in our 2021 series span a range of genres and forms, each one combining the beautiful and the revolutionary.
Sarah Lasoye’s collection Fovea/ Ages Ago takes primary school as its landscape, showing how those formative first experiences, with their patterns and emotional contours, are often very impactful and can stay with us in later life. We love the energy in her poetry—it’s full of sharp movement and acute insight—as well as how the work is full of reverence, for childhood, for friends, for the world around us, for artistic predecessors.
Bittersweetness makes up the very fabric of Jamal Mehmood’s The Leaf of the Neem Tree—tales of migration and heritage weave into a tapestry that is soulful and quietly spiritual. There is a slow unravelling of grief and vulnerability in a work that otherwise feels quiet and still, a sort of grief that becomes magnified through time and across different continents. Yet, meditations on the mundane aspects of life give the reader gentle reassurance, and the sea is an ever-present source of catharsis.
Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies by Heba Hayek is a beautiful collection of flash fiction stories, or short vignettes, reflecting on the narrator’s childhood in Gaza, Palestine, and on the echoes of these memories in adulthood, lived painfully far away from home. Heba’s writing is sensory, full, honest and brilliantly deft—traces of the past subtly mirror or layer over the present, and behind the longing and chaotic devastation is an overarching, comforting sense that everything fits together.
Yara Hawari’s The Stone House has a distinctive style of writing that is quite striking: thoroughly measured, almost laconic, darkly humorous and deeply chilling. This novel not only tells the story of a family surviving trauma, but it also provides a careful and rigorous history of Palestine. The perspectives of three characters—a grandmother, a mother and a son—piece together the dystopian horror of settler-colonialism and the risks people will take to reclaim their homes.
Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons by Cradle Community is an accessible introduction to prison abolition, written for anyone impacted by state violence and capitalism—not just seasoned activists. It’s hugely collaborative, drawing on the collective knowledge and experiences of many people organising across different movements for justice, like housing, climate change, feminism and migration. Cradle honours and shares examples of abolitionist work being done in the UK context, as well as in the Global South, demonstrating very powerfully how all of our struggles for liberation are interconnected.
For Lola Olufemi, every turn against this world towards another is also a turning back to face the histories that precede us. People call books groundbreaking all the time, but when we read Lola’s proposal for Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, we sensed the radical potentiality in every line. Lola builds upon the collective work of Black feminists and community organising to present radical literature as a living body of work. Formally ambitious and politically arousing, this is a book that invites us to experiment with the possibility of imagining otherwise.
The subscription model you use is meant to foster community: how have you designed it to serve that purpose?
In our early conversations we both lamented that readers rarely have a connection to publishers, writers, or each other, and we wanted to change that. One of the ways we’re trying to do this is through our subscription scheme. The primary way to read our books is to buy a subscription, which gets you a year’s list of books and grants you free access to Hajar events. Rather than focusing on achieving a few big successes each year, like most publishers do, we rely on subscriptions to help all our authors get their work out to readers, which is especially important for first-time authors. It also means that people are reading our books around a similar time and can contribute their impressions to conversations happening around publication, and that subscribers look forward to receiving their next Hajar book in the post!
The subscription model kind of puts writers in community with each other too, since each year’s list of books is presented as a curated bundle. Thinking about our books as a list, rather than each one as a standalone project, is important to us, because each writer is building upon the ideas of another. We’re always so excited when we recognise a trace in one of our books from the work of another of our writers! ‘Why be a star when you can make a constellation?’ as Naomi Murakawa reflects on the work of Mariame Kaba.
What do you hope for Hajar Press as you expand? What do growth and expansion mean to you, beyond producing more books and expanding an audience?
Our aim is to create a list of books that archive our stories, experiment with possibilities of changing our world and build a generative and healing community in the process—a sort of gift to our ancestors and children so that our stories are never erased again. That’s how we would measure our success, rather than how many books we produce or how much money we manage to make.
Hajar is a political press and we are absolutely not neutral. We take a very clear position on racism, on capitalism, on Palestine, on abolition. We won’t shy away from that. When there are certain histories and experiences being actively erased or wilfully neglected, archiving them becomes absolutely urgent and politically essential. For this reason, it was important to us that our books reflected social memory, histories passed through spoken word, and the multitudes of lived experiences in the context of political upheavals.
Obviously, we want to build a press that eventually becomes self-sustaining. But beyond the funds we need to keep going and to get a Hajar book in the hands of every person who’d like it, no matter where they are in the world, we have no mighty financial aspirations. We want each of our books to embody Hajar’s vision, while complementing each other to create this gorgeous body of literature. That would be success for us!
Brekhna Aftab is an editor, publicist and writer based in London. She is co-founder and co-publisher of Hajar Press. Brekhna also works for Haymarket Books, a radical publisher of politics, culture and current events. She tweets @breshna_aft.
Farhaana Arefin is an editor and organiser based in London. She is co-founder and co-publisher of Hajar Press. She tweets @fararefin.