New Writing from Gaza: A Portfolio

Over the last few weeks, protest songs for Gaza -- by Michael Heart and Invincible, among others -- have been flying around the blogosphere, giving a voice to the anguish and anger of Gazans, who were almost silenced by Israel's media blockade, and by damage to infrastructure. Journalists, bloggers and ordinary citizens, resilient and determined, posted when they could, via SMS to friends if they had to, and have made known the stories that didn't appear on the news.

These observations from the moment, on the ground, are thrilling, moving and necessary. They counter media bias, alert us to action, and give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in Gaza. How much more so, then, might a poem or story, honed by a brilliant writer until it is dense with image and meaning? As the outpouring of grief at Mahmoud Darwish's death last year showed, literature, and poetry in particular, has a particular place in Palestinian culture -- and has had a particular place in reaching out from Palestine to the rest of the world, from Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza" to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight.

But only a few Palestinian writers are being translated. In Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Centre and the House of Poetry have both fostered new writers and new magazines. In the UK, Banipal and Modern Poetry in Translation have both had special Palestine issues in recent years, which have shown the depth and range of work being produced. Telegram's Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, edited by Jo Glanville, introduced a number of new voices, such as Adania Shibli.

When I interviewed Adania in early December 2008, she spoke passionately about the writers she knew in Gaza, about the intensity of their work and the way that Palestinian poetry was changing in response to the conditions of siege. That was before the invasion. When the news and images of Gaza (not from Gaza) began to appear, I emailed Adania and offered to host a selection of writing on the blog: her choice of writers, immediate and new voices with essential things to say and powerful styles in which to say them.

Over the next month, we'll be publishing the work that she selected on the blog, as it arrives from Gaza. The first group of writers to arrive is diverse in age, background, experience, and style, but I find all of their voices compelling. On Monday, there will be a selection of short pieces by novelist, playwright and political scientist Atef Abu Saif, who lives and teaches in Gaza.

Following Abu Saif, whose stories will appear over three days, the blog will feature work from:

Soumaya Susi
Khaled Jum'a
Nasr Jamil Shaath
Fatena al-Gharra
Yousef Alqedra
Naser Rabah
Najah Awadallah

posted as it arrives from the Arabic translators have very graciously given time and support to this project, excited by its urgency and by discovering new work. Each writer presents translators with a different challenge and promise, and each will be translated differently. Excitingly, translator Isis Nusair is working on Khaled Jumaa's work with Michael Rosen and Shaun Levin, two anti-Zionist Jewish writers, whose acts of translation demonstrate how literature can build community and solidarity.

Abu Saif's pieces have been translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, a sequence of prose poems framed by the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Abu Saif's pieces - microstories, fragments - are dateless, although filled with precise detail of season and place. Minutely focused on a gesture, a piece of graffiti, on the author's own act of seeing, they are both like news stories - in their brevity, their concrete detail - and utterly unlike anything the media can offer.

In a 2008 Guardian article about the Poetry Translation Centre's ambitious tour and chapbook series, Sarah Maguire, who is translating Faten al-Gharra's work for us, wrote:

Poetry in this country is our favourite minority artform, largely greeted with bafflement, often with dismay. And yet we live alongside people for whom poetry is a central, essential passion. My hope is that by attempting to make their poems at home in our language, we can also translate a little of their enthusiasm. Poetry thrives through translation.

With this selection, we hope to show not only that poetry thrives through translation, but that people thrive through poetry, not only being written but being heard. The act of translation -- whether literally between languages, or metaphorically from the page onto a blog -- is a catalyst, a helping hand, to bring readers to the writing, and through that writing to resonant emotions and truths.

As Adania says: we are "trying to make the words of Gaza louder than those of the bullets and the bombings." Please come back to listen over the next month.

Adania Shibli: Q & A

Adania Shibli is one of the most exciting voices in Arabic literature at the moment. She currently lives in London, so I had an opportunity to talk to her how she started writing, what language and literature mean to her, and what it means (and feels like) to write from and about Palestine. Here are her considered answers:

Q: What was the first thing that you wrote?

A: I started to hate school, since the first day I entered school. The only class though I somehow liked was Composition (well, I should confess that I also liked Mathematics). I remember the first time that I had a composition class. It was in fourth grade. I was nine. The teacher gave us a piece of homework, to write a ‘composition’ but I didn’t understand this word means. So I went home and asked one of my elder sisters, who I always asked “What does this mean?”. She told me, they want you to write a story. I’d read stories and heard even more, but I did not know how to go about writing one. That sister took me through it step by step: she asked me what I liked most, and what I wanted to tell others about. I told her I liked watching my father shaving: I was so fascinated by that since I was a child, it’s so soft, the white foam, and how the shaver just in one stroke removes it all, but then, despite all these strokes there remains little tiny stripes of foam which the shaver would leave behind. And I knew that as a girl I could never shave (well, at least my face). So there my father sat down to shave, and my sister and me with a notebook sat down nearby, setting up a sort of case study around him. My sister asked me to look and describe what I could see. The shape of his jaw in fact always seemed to me like the mountain behind our house, and so the foam looked like a cloud. When I read that in class, the teacher and the kids really liked it and praised it, but I felt not so comfortable with that praise given to me, because I did not come to that on my own, it was my sister who led me through it. Until now I believe that that sister is the real writer, not me.

Q: What are your (other) influences?

A: I’m always fascinated by how people use language; when they leave a note to a friend or when they just talk in the street even, especially in Arabic. I can never resist listening to or reading what all other people say or write, whether writers or not. It is fascinating to see how this language which is out there like air, offered to everyone, becomes so personal once is used. In fact it is amazing, it just occurred to me, that there is no existence of language as such; it exists only when used by someone. And then, everyone becomes the author of their own words, even though they are not the ones who created them.

Q: What kinds of new writing are emerging from Palestine at the moment? With the sad loss of Mahmoud Darwish, and the first full-length collection from Mourid Barghouti in English, there’s been some attention to Palestinian poetry in the UK press, and there’s a strong emphasis on how their poetry is bound up with national identity – is that true of younger writers as well?

A: New poets aren’t really discussing or reflecting questions of national identity. Such questions in my view had to do with a time when it was possible for Palestinian to have more or less a common experience; such as the Nakba and then less than two decades later, the Naksa, or the 1967 War, when all of Palestine became under full Israeli occupation . Now, with 450 checkpoints, walls, cutting movement between cities and areas and not only to the outside world, everything is so fragmented, so shattered. So the poems reflect this fragmentation and shattering. I read one poem by poet Anas Al-Aili, that had been written during the long period of curfew in 2002 over Ramallah. The narrator is laying in bed, while bombs are being fired outside; and he is staring at a nude painting that is in front of his bed. As the painting tilts with each explosion, while the narrator awaits for the next bomb to shake up the walls, so the woman in the painting to fall into his bed.

Q: Both “Little Girls of Jenin” and “Out of Time” are full of the kind of observations that you describe. Through very small things, they convey how dislocating and disturbing it is for you to go back to Palestine, and hint at some of the things that you have seen.

A: It’s impossible to describe; I’m not even interested, and when I try I literaly feel pain in my body. It is how the news as well can never convey that. For the news is mainly are able to show something - torture, occupation, horror… name it whatever you like, which at its core is not destined to be shown, represented or talked about it. Rather it is designed to be inflicted on one’s body and self, but not everyone; merely the Palestinians. The Israeli system, from political to social to economic, treats Palestinians as if they were not human beings. You experience this occupation and racism constantly on your body, no matter what you say to yourself. While in Palestine, I often worked with cultural organisations, which attempt to make life less dark and helpless. But things that usually should take five minutes, they would take two weeks. I’ve seen how hard we work to resist, to make more hopeful and more bearable than it is in reality. But now we have been turned also into agents in what has been a long process of dehumanization, with the infighting between Fateh and Hamas. It’s not surprising though, when a society has been fragmented and imprisoned for years over years. I myself if I stay with the man I love most for more than two days, I start to hate him and he also, and we get into these mad and illogical fights. But me living here in London, moving around easily and freely compared to my other writer colleges in Gaza for instance, I also try to keep my eyes wide open, and not to get blind and forgetful. Them and me, it seems we only have writing to keep awake and human.

Lost in Translation Reading Challenge

Looking for a New Year's resolution? What about Nonsuch Books' 2009 "Lost in Translation" reading challenge: read six books in translation, and share your thoughts with other challenge participants on the Nonsuch blog. Email Frances on francesevangelista [at] yahoo [dot] com to be added to the list, and include a link to your blog or site if you'll be posting your thoughts on the book. Chad Post at Three Percent is offering a shipping costs refund to participants who order and read any title from the excellent Open Letter catalog of contemporary fiction in translation.

Nonsuch is also taking suggestions for titles, but mine is more of a wish list -- a desire to be surprised by writers that I don't yet know about (Arabic riot grrrl poetry from Saudi Arabia following in the wake of The Accolade?), and the hope that some of the Arabic books I've come across this year will be translated into English. Like Adania Shibli's novels, Kamal Rohaym's The Muslim Jew, the rest of Magdy Al-Shafei's graphic novelMetro, novels by Abdourahman Waberi, more from the poets featured in Modern Poetry in Translation's Palestine issue, more from the writers included in Farafina 15's focus on North African literature...

If you join the challenge, post a link to your blog or reading journal in the comments.

Adania Shibli, "Out of Time"

"Out of Time" is the PEN Atlas' second selection from the work of Adania Shibli, novelist, playwright, journalist and essayist. Look out for an interview with Adania on the blog later in the week: you can put your questions to her via comments on the blog.

Adania Shibli presented the text “Out of Time” during the workshop “The Politics of Images: Practices and Approaches to Art in the Middle East and North Africa” organized by documenta 12, on November 20th, 2006, in Bruno Kreisky Forum, Vienna. Thanks for their permission to reproduce it here.

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Out of Time

My little watch is the first to sense the change going in to and out of Palestine. On the way there I notice it on my wrist, counting the time down to the second, waiting for the moment when the wheels of the plane touch the airport runway, and I set it to local time so it goes on counting it with an infinite familiarity. And as soon as I go out of Palestine it advances listlessly, taking its time parting with the local time there, which ends once the plane touches down in a foreign land.

It may seem to some I’m slightly exaggerating in what I’m telling about my watch, especially as it is a very little watch. People often are amazed how it can tell me the time at all, being so small. I myself could have yet shared their doubts had I not found out about watches and their secret powers.

It goes back to primary school, during one of the Arabic literature classes. The curriculum back then was, and it still is, subject to the approval of the Israeli Censorship Bureau, which embraced texts from various Arab countries, except for Palestine, fearing that these would contain references or even hints that could raise the pupils’ awareness of the Palestinian question. Hence, Palestinian literature was considered unlawful, if not a taboo, similar to pornography—except for one text, ‘The Time and Man’, a short story by Samira Azzam, which the Censorship Bureau found “harmless.”

The story, published in 1963, tells of a young man preparing himself before he turns in, the night ahead of his very first day of work. He sets his alarm clock for four o’clock in the morning so as to catch the train in time to go to work. No sooner had the alarm clock gone off the next morning than there came a knocking at his front door. When he opens it, he finds before him an old man. He has no clue who this man is and he does not get the chance to ask him, as the latter turns and walks away, disappearing into the darkness. The same is repeated day after day so that the young man no longer sets his alarm clock. It is only after several months that he discovers who that old man is, after a colleague tells him this man goes knocking on the doors of all the employees in the company. He wakes them up on time in order for them not to be late for their train and meet their destiny as his own son did, who had one morning arrived late at the station, while the train was leaving. He held on to its door, but his hand betrayed him and he slipped down, falling underneath its wheels.

At first glance, the story may seem simple and “safe,” especially before the censor’s eyes. Yet it actually contributed towards shaping my consciousness regarding the question of Palestine as no other text I have ever read in my life has done. Were there one day Palestinian employees who commuted to work by train? Was there a train station? Was there a train honking? Was there one day a normal life in Palestine? And where is it now and why has it gone?

The text, in turn, had engraved in my soul a deep sense of yearning for all that was—including the tragic—normal and banal, to a degree that I could no longer accept the marginalized, minor life to which we’ve been exiled since 1948, during which our existence turned into a “problem.”

Against this story and the multiple modes of existence it revealed to me, stands my little watch. And my watch is more similar to that old man in Azzam’s story than it is to a Swiss watch whose primary concern is to count time with precision. Rather, just as that old man turned from a human being into a watch in order for life to become bearable, my watch decided to turn from a watch into a human being.

In Palestine, it often stops moving. It suddenly enters into a coma, with which it becomes unable to count the time. On my last visit there, I set it as usual to local time the minute the plane touched down on the Lydd airport runway. It was ten to two in the afternoon. I headed to passport control. There weren’t many travelers and the line I stood in was proceeding quickly. I handed my passport over to the police officer, and she took her time looking at it. Then more time. Suddenly, two men and a woman appeared, who were a mix of police, security and secret service, and they took me out of the line, so as to begin a long process of interrogation and searches. Everything proceeded as usual in such situations- an exhaustive interrogation into the smallest details of my life and a thorough search of my belongings. Afterwards I was led into a room to run a body search on me. And while a woman walked away with my shoes and belt to examine them by X-ray, another stayed with my watch, which she held inside her palms and went on contemplating with intent and sincerity. A few minutes later she looked at her watch, then back at my watch. Then again at her watch, then at my watch. When the first lady came back with the rest of my belongings, she hurried over to her to tell her that there was something strange about my watch. It was not moving. Five minutes had passed according to her watch, whereas according to mine none had passed. They called the security chief and my heart beat started to bang violently on my chest.

I didn’t know how much time had passed before my watch, and then I were cleared of all suspicions and let go. But I discovered when I reached home that it was nine o‘clock in the evening, while my watch was still pointing to ten to two in the afternoon. Maybe my watch was only trying to comfort me by making me believe that all that search and delay had lasted zero minutes. As if nothing had happened. Or perhaps it simply refuses to count the time that is seized from my life, a time whose only purpose is to humiliate me and send me into despair. A kind of time suspension, so as to obscure the time of pain.

Opposite to this malfunctioning in Palestine, my watch has not once stopped moving outside Palestine. It is never late to count every second of the other timeof the other time. In fact, it many times moves slightly faster than it should, to a point where it seems to lose track of time. So fast it moves as if wanting to shake off this other time from it, one second after the other, so to catch up with the time in Palestine.

Thus, had it been seven hours or zero that distance my little watch from Palestine, it remains the same for it, and only to comfort me; it leads me out of time, no matter where I am.

Introducing Adania Shibli

The PEN Atlas blog is thrilled to be publishing two new pieces by Adania Shibli. Hovering between memoir, essay and meditation, "Little Girls of Jenin" and "Out of Time" are investigations into the unreal realities of Palestine, the strange place of the border and the complex, bruising state of exile. Later in the week, I'll post an interview with Adania -- if you have questions for her, you can leave them in the comments box on the blog.

Adania Shibli is "the most talked-about writer on the West Bank," says Ahdaf Soueif. Her works have been published in literary magazines in the Middle East and Europe and she has been awarded twice the Young Writer’s Award of Palestine by the A. M. Qattan Foundation. She is the author of two novels: Masas and We Are All Equally Far From Love, both published by Al-Adab in Beirut.

Her writing has been translated into many languages (including French), with English translations of her stories appearing in the anthology Qissat, and in the magazines Words Without Borders, Documenta (where "Out of Time" originally appeared), and Banipal. She contributed an essay to a book on Palestinian artist Emily Jacir.

Adania Shibli is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of East London, researching media coverage of the "War on Terror".
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"Little Girls of Jenin"

I feel happiness, like a light, dubious pressure on the bones of my chest, while the rest of my body has vanished into languor. I don’t find it foolish, as happiness usually is, but rather, strong and persistent; a happiness that doesn’t doubt itself, not even for a second.

And the reason for this happiness is that I’m going to give a reading in Jenin refugee camp. My happiness is certain that—and because—its source is the desire to put an end to pain; preventing it from going on like that, monopolizing my soul, for some years now, after my first and last visit to Jenin camp in the spring of 2002, even though Jenin itself is the city of my childhood.

As a little girl, I used to accompany my father on his weekly visit there every Friday. I watch the shops and their colorful items dangling from their ceilings. The scene dearest to my heart was watching a shop-owner bringing down one of those items hanging from the ceiling of his shop. With the light-handedness of a magician, while still engaged in a conversation with a client, he’d bring down the ball or the money box from above with the help of a stick that had a hook at its end. And I, the little person down at the other end, used to think until that moment that birds alone could touch those items dangling from Jenin’s sky.

When I grew up, my cities grew up with me, while Jenin remained little, and I didn’t visit it except in transit, on my way from Jerusalem or Ramallah to my village, near Jenin, traveling to visit my family. However, since the year 2000, as a result of closing and blocking the roads and the spread of checkpoints, it has become impossible for Palestinian cars to use that road, so I no longer could take it. And now, in this spring, seven years later, I will take it as a passenger in a German diplomatic car.

I try to recall the sections of that road that are dearest to my eyes. And the choice is very difficult. As a final compromise I choose a section between Nablus and Jenin, where the road while bending right it slopes down. There some almond trees are hiding, overlooking, in turn, vast fields of wheat. But suddenly I’m struck by a filthy fear which I don’t know how it found its way to me- What if those trees are no longer there? Seven years are a very long time, during which thousands of lives were terminated, and thousands of homes were destroyed, and thousands of acres were confiscated, and thousands of trees were uprooted. A slight pain is back, dismantling the pressure in my chest and denying a measure of my happiness. So I cajole a feeling of indifference into brushing aside the feeling of pain and happiness as well. And, clutching at my indifference, I tell myself that those three or four almond trees might still be there, or might not.

I then turn to thinking about what I should wear. A black shirt I love a great deal, given to me as a gift from my brother, and new pants I bought recently, in light brown. Now the shoes. I try to imagine the ground that I’ll step on. The only time I was in the camp the ground consisted of rubble. I remember the shoes I put on during that visit, in the spring of 2002. I hate those shoes immensely. After that visit I threw them away, along with all the destruction they stepped on. I never talk about that visit. I can’t and I wouldn’t and I don’t care to do so or maybe it tires me or ruins me to talk about that or even to write about how I can’t talk about that. Briefly put, I call the whole matter: “Pain.” But I remind myself one more time that I’m going this time to the camp as a guest writer and not in the company of blood-sucking journalists. I choose a pair of elegant, black shoes. But in no time I become the prey of a new fear. What if the road to Jenin is still flanked by destruction. I imagine myself being forced to climb mountains in order to avoid the checkpoints or roadblocks that will stand in my way. I even imagine the bullet that will puncture my body. I assign its place. It will be either in my leg or in my chest. And though I prefer it to be in my leg, I say that if it hits my chest and I die, there’s nothing to it. There’s nothing to loose in this filthy world, except for entering Jenin camp today. Then, in anticipation of all the perils and hardships I imagine standing in my way, I put in my bag a shoe brush and black shoe polish. I want to stand in front of the audience of Jenin camp, while wearing a clean, shining pair of shoes even over my dead body.

We arrive at the camp. I don’t recognize anything in it or in its alleys. The death that prevailed all over it five years ago to the day, was lifted by a quotidian, languid afternoon. Two men sit outside a poultry shop, while a little kid pushes a pink pram into the street. Suddenly I scream loudly as I imagine the wheels of the car we are riding running over him. Death smell still hits my nose. It’s nested forever in this square.

The reading will start shortly in the “Freedom Theater” that has been opened recently in the camp. Young people fill the yard outside the theater. At the entrance I bump into a group of little girls, arms crossed, fury in their eyes. I ask, “What’s wrong, pretty ones?” And they answer that the man at the door wouldn’t let them in. In their furious eyes I suddenly glimpse my childhood in Jenin. They want to go in and I’m the little girl with them, to where the adults, including me, are. I talk to the director of the theater, begging him to let the girls outside be allowed entrance, and he insists, “No”. He says the event isn’t meant for their age group, and so they would only cause a commotion. The girls and I promise him that we would keep the order and would sit quietly in the back of the theater, but he still declines.

I go back to the little girls and promise them, from the bottom of my heart, that I would come back to Jenin just for them, and that we wouldn’t admit any adults. But they keep looking at me with eyes that have no patience nor belief; for how many promises have been showered on them and at their parents and grandparents before. Before I enter the theater I hear them screaming in the direction of the door keeper from a distance, “We shall enter, means we shall!”

They do not know that they have, instead, entered my weary soul and breathed new life into it, true life.

Jenin, spring 2007

"Out of Time" will appear on the blog tomorrow.

"Give Me the Pavement!" The Bombing and the Brink Part VI

The final part of Guy Mannes-Abbott's conversation with Mourid Barghouti about the "poetry of the pavement," Palestinian writers, and the internationality of literature.

VI. Midnight & Other Poems allows Barghouti to emerge as a “poet of the pavement”; repeatedly banished and permanently looking awry at things. Poems of the Pavement is actually the name of his fifth collection published in 1980. “This is the real start of my voice” he once told me before explaining the context -court poets and political rhetoricians- with figurative argumentation. “So, okay: you occupy the autostrat with your poetry, your bombastic tone, but give me the pavement! Poems of the pavement? I am not in the mainstream -I need the pavement. You take the street -you’ve already taken it, it isn’t mine. I’ll be confined to this. I’m happy with this” -happy enough to produce six further poetry collections, a 700-page Collected Works, the memoir and book-length poem Midnight -published just after his sixtieth birthday.
This selection from those poems, which includes several from the ‘pavement’, also finally allows I Saw Ramallah to be read as the memoir of a great poet. After the jolt of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent death, Mourid wrote of his friend that he “was at the centre of Arab culture in the 20th century because he was a poet, and a Palestinian.” While Darwish was widely considered the greatest living Arab poet, it’s a burdensome mantle that Barghouti will be reluctant to assume.
Once, when talking of his admiration for Darwish, he pointed to a shared creative restlessness. “Do you know what the title of his seventh collection was? - when he was, by now, a legend. Attempt No. 7. Just that,” he chuckled delightedly, “the number 7 not the word. It is the same with me, poetry should be this attempt.”
Meanwhile, nothing should blind us to the depth and range of Palestinian literature, exemplified today in the levity of Randa Jarrar and soul of Adania Shibli. While Jarrar writes in English, Shibli’s work is translated into French and Italian though not yet English -excepting a couple of very fine short stories.
Exactly four years since appearing on the Southbank, Mourid’s first collection of poems in English was published on the day he returned to read at the Poetry International Festival. Finally, readers of his memoir and stunned listeners to his reading were able to pick up his poems too. Each of them knew they were plucking flowers from the brink of being bombed.
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You can read the complete article in a single document here.