Books Across Borders: Beirut39 at Hay; the Bubisher in Western Sahara

As well as the Free the Word festival taking place in New York, there's news of a new addition to the summer festival line-up from the innovative folks at the Hay festival, a celebration of Arabic literature at this year's festival to recognise Beirut's status as UNESCO World Capital of the Book 2009. The Tanjara has curated event listings for panels and readings involving Arab writers. And there's still time to enter - or nominate someone for - the beirut39 project to find 39 writers of Arab heritage under 39.

And in Western Sahara, a mobile library is bringing joy and/of literacy to children in refugee camps. The Bubisher, named after a good-luck bird, is a bus carrying books for a reading plan, according to Global Voices. The bus, of course, has a blog written by its originator, Spanish publisher Gonzalo Moure. As for what's on the bus, Global Voices quotes Kalandra blog: I

n addition to books in Castillian Spanish donated by publishing houses like Kalandra, Bubisher has a collection of books for children and youth in the Arabic language strengthening the ties with multiculturalism.

You can become a Bubisher friend and circulate, translate and promote their materials.

Digital Democracy in the Arab World: The Good News

First up, a new project brought to my attention by Body on the Line: R-Shief (Arabic for archive): describes itself as

an initiative in the field of knowledge production that distinguishes a contemporary Arab transnational public as an emerging voice on the world stage deserving serious attention given this community’s role in current geopolitical, international, and transcultural agendas.

Part-library, part-journal, all online, R-Shief offers both speed and accessibility, and includes non-traditional research methods such as "digital video, personal narratives in the form of blogs, collaborative production models and other mixed media." Its current focus is on Gaza; you can contact initiator Laila Shereen to discuss adding or using material.

And revisiting a story from the early days of this blog: the case of Magdy elShafee's graphic novel Metro is coming to trial in Egypt. Global Voices (who published excerpts from Metro in translation) published an open letter from AlShafee asking for support -- and this is what makes it good news, despite the prosecution -- from the global blogosphere, which has taken up the case. AlShafee writes:

Next Saturday April 4th, A court session scheduled for the trial of Magdy El Shafie and Mohammed El Sharkawy (Malameh Publishing House) for distributing, publishing and selling the graphic novel “Metro”,

Your NO for confiscation

Is YES for our freedom

Is YES for our solidarity

Is NOOOOO for the government prelude of harder stringing of freedom of the art and word, in the press, the satellites, the internet and now the independent publishing houses. We invite you to say: NO for metro confiscation and trial, Support freedom of arts and expression

Metro is considered the first graphic novel in Egypt. written and illustrated by Magdy El Shafee who won the UNESCO gratitude for best African comics 2006

Egyptian government officials said the book was “harmful to public manners” due to its alleged political and social commentary.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) - a pan-Arabic network that promotes freedom of speech has rejected the confiscation of the novel and considers it a severe violation against the freedom of expression.

With the coming court session next saturday April 4th, HRinfo and 4 human rights organizations announced a new condemnation in March 30th entitled: [Egypt`s Farouk Hosny goes to UNESCO, and Magdy Elshafee goes to the court!! the auther of Egypt's graphic novel “metro” threatened with 2 years jail sentence.] ([in Arabic])

We look for your solidarity; on your blog. Add a comment here [in Arabic] and here [in Arabic] and on Facebook and here.

We lean on your being there in Abdeen court, down town Cairo 9 am Naguib metro station next saturday April 4th.

best regards.
–

Magdy ElShafee
comics artist

Add your voice -- here as well! -- to the outcry against this trial and the original confiscation.

Updated 3/4/09
Marwa Rakha has a comprehensive update on the online coverage of the trial and ElShafee's campaign in today's Global Voices.

Dubai: A New Age for Translation?

One last post from Dubai, I swear: the festival has inspired a lot of coverage, with some particularly interesting discussions about translation -- both between languages, and between cultures, its rewards and difficulties.

Over at Global Voices, Ayesha Saldanha (who notices our coverage of Dubai on the blog -- thanks Ayesha!) has a great round-up of posts detailing the several cultural festivals happening in the Gulf region, including book fairs in Abu Dhabi and one in Riyadh, which featured what blogger Ruhsa calls

A noteworthy attempt [by] the Commission PR booth at the Riyadh Book Fair. […] It features examples of items that they have confiscated, photos of items found in raids and also the reasons WHY they are banned. There were also several Commission members explaining things at this fairly popular booth!

That's the Commission of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, with whom the Ministry of Culture has to reach a compromise - including female stallholders being required to leave on days when men are allowed into the fair - to allow the fair to go ahead.

Ruhsa feels that the Commission's stall is a move towards a more transparent process of negotiation between tradition and modernity. In The Khaleej Times, there's a cracking interview with Egyptian poet, and president of Nile Culture TV, Gamal Al Shaer that discusses how these issues played out in Dubai. He commented that

Dubai is not another Singapore. It is an ambitious Arab city that builds skyscrapers, yet adheres to the traditional tent, coffee and falcons; a combination of originality and contemporariness,

a combination that also informed the poetry festival, which included classic recitations in a variety of venues (including malls) as well as more contemporary readings.

Al Shaer also shared a particular insight derived from the difficulties of presenting poetry in translation at live events, and connecting Dubai's ventures into literary culture and transcultural literature to a rich Islamic tradition of translation and cultural interchange.

“It is rather a translation of spirit rather than passionless words,” he said, hoping that the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation would adopt a regional translation project in line with the one implemented in the
 Abbasid age.

Cairo Book Fair -- or Cairo Blook Fair?

Marwa Rakha at Global Voices highlights a trend at the Cairo Book Fair, quoting a post from blogger Mohamed Hamdy highlighting the 15+ titles by bloggers available at the Fair, supported by CBF's first-ever seminar to discuss the growing phenomenon of bloggers getting published. The seminar is organized by the renowned writer Youssef Al Ka'eed and bloggers Ghada Abdel Aal, Shady Aslan, and Mayada Medhat. This is definitely a particularly Egyptian phenomenon, of bloggers publishing *novels* based on blogs, as opposed to essayistic or memoiristic texts...

__Updated 28/01/09__

Marwa Rakha posts more news: traditional writers have called these Egyptian blooks "Kleenex" (because they see them as over-intimate and disposable, I guess). Blogger Ahmed Al Sabbagh hits back with a link to Ghada Abdel Aal's video, where she quotes Tawfiq El-Hakim describing the essence of real literature:

It is the open air literature; the literary expression of freedom and passion; words that reach out from one heart to another exposing the depth of the human psyche in freedom, honesty, and sincerity. Tawfiq El-Hakim also said that our share of such kind of literature is minimal just as much as our share of honesty and openness is minimal - This is exactly what we as bloggers do.

“In Gaza, we are subject to news but cannot see TVs.”

That's how Ayesha Saldanha titles her round-up of Palestinian bloggers today on Global Voices (who also have fascinating and necessary round ups from Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, as well as round-ups focused on reactions to the Gaza bombings from Chile and Taiwan). Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman is using her access to technology to gather voices, events and stories from the "other side," documenting protest marches in Israel, calling friends in Gaza and reporting their stories, and linking to blogs and video from across the web. Saldanha's moving pull-quote attests to two ways in which the internet can offer a space for alternative voices: first of all, it allows those who "cannot see TVs" (and are not often invited to speak on them) to see the news, and moreover to make it; second of all, it builds global community, where those who can see the TVs a) get an alternative perspective that may balance media bias; b) can offer support to those blogging (in various ways, for example Saldanha is posting SMS messages from her friend Hasan in Rafah who has no internet access); and c) can shift perspective from seeing certain populations or individuals as "subject to news" to seeing them as agents, and as full members of the human community.

Blogs, of course, extend what literature has been doing for millennia -- through narratives that touch on commonalities (whether it's the sense that "we're all bloggers -- I could be blogging from Rafah, what would that be like?" or details of daily life lived differently) that can encourage us to walk in another's shoes. Social networking, again like literature, can also be used as propaganda -- bloggers are alternately (cynically) impressed by and outraged at the Israeli government's use of Twitter to hold press conferences and dominate news cycles. Whatever the reaction, it's an example of governments recognising the power of the medium: Anthony Lowenstein of The Blogging Revolution has a great story today about the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards Corp setting up 10, 000 blogs to counter the perceived liberalism of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It's a truism but here goes: the internet moves faster than literature. That's its advantage -- for example, this Gaza care package campaign organised through Facebook -- and its disadvantage, as misinformation spreads wildly and the source with the fastest broadband (or any power and phone lines at all) wins. History has always been written by the victors, but now the victors can write it from their mobile phones in the midst of the battle, shaping global response as well as posterity. So blogs that emerge from communities that have less access to technology (and to power in both the political and electrical senses) stand as an important bulwark against the complete eradication of their side of the story. Sites like Global Voices and toot perform a critical function in gathering these voices into a shout, focused and centralised.

In doing so, they act like old-fashioned publishers, selecting and honing the voices that surround us. Novels and poetry, too, are an important bulwark, a record of diverse voices. Some would argue that they are more accessible (to writers) and influential (to readers) than the internet, as a poem can be passed from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, a novel smuggled out in sections if it has to be. Books are seen as custoded, collected, polished: a longer-lasting, more penetrating, and more effective representation of a situation, narrative, identity, image. And yet the gatekeepers are many, not least the gatekeeper of translation which means that many voices who are celebrated in their own linguistic culture don't reach ears beyond it. For English-language readers, that makes the value of books such as I Saw Ramallah, The Butterfly's Burden, and the novels of Elias Khoury invaluable, along with the promotion and support offered by PEN's Writers in Translation programme and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

I Saw Ramallah, with its announcement of witnessing as direct action and reclaiming the narrative voice, directly addresses the panic and powerlessness captured in Saldanha's quotation from Professor Said Abdelwahed, as reported in the Moments in Gaza blog. But its author Mourid Barghouti has also recently joined Facebook, posting poems old and new (in Arabic) as well as more diary-like entries that amplify his poetry's connection to, and influence on, his readers.

Digital technology offers dizzying possibilities to move from subject to storyteller, for those who can access them. The waves of rage, love, hate, anguish, activism and emotion pouring forth in the blogosphere can't, and don't aim to, replace poetry, but they uphold the spirit of art: "KEEP MAKING THINGS WITH WHATEVER YOU HAVE."

Gaza: Voices from the Arab Blogosphere (and beyond)

It's undeniable that the internet has changed the face of global politics. Not only does it allow rapid mobilisation of protests and fundraising, but it provides a source of alternative, informed perspectives and on-the-ground accounts by citizen journalists, photojournalists and bloggers. The Arab blogosphere, as aggregated everyday on toot reads and Global Voices, and as charted in The Blogging Revolution, has responded to the attacks on Gaza with not only opinion and emotion, but by using blogging technology to share and aggregate information, and to organise the online community. We are now not only spectators, as John Berger writes in a letter to today's Guardian, but correspondents.

Updated 30/12/08:

Saying, "I haven't used this blog for activism before, and I may not again. But for now, there is information below on how to demonstrate, donate, and write letters," Qunfuz posts a list of London-based demonstrations, charities and NGOs accepting donations, and details of political actions and contacts for politicians. He also reproduces a letter from today's Guardian, written by the critic, novelist and humanitarian John Berger:

"We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so."

John Berger
27 December 2008

William Bowen's Creative-I Palestine page offers an excellent, and constantly updated, digest of non-mainstream online sources on the attacks on Gaza, including casualty reports, humanitarian and protest appeals, articles, photoblogs, and more.

Blogger Sameh Habeeb -- interviewed on CNN yesterday -- is using crowd-powered news site Now Public to flag articles as and when he has internet access.

Palestine Blogs feed aggregator gathers posts from enrolled blogs around the world, including Mounadil al-Djazaïri and Umkahlil.

Human Rights Tools gathers posts from nasrawi, From Gaza With Love, and Live From Palestine.

Ayesha Saldanha at Global Voices has a round-up of vivid and moving accounts by Palestinian bloggers, while the site also collects messages of solidarity from Lebanese bloggers and Egyptian bloggers.

---

29/12/08:

Global Voices has a round-up of Syrian posts (and of Israeli posts), as well as posts from Palestinian bloggers in Gaza and elsewhere. GV also has a fascinating Twitter round-up.

Meanwhile the BBC gathers op-ed from Middle East newspapers. Kabobfest has Al-Jazeera videos and solidarity from the Zapatistas. Jordanian blogger Jad Madi has suggestions and links on fundraising for Gaza. Body on the Line and The Other Side, Westerners currently on the ground, both offer eye-witness reports, as does photojournalist and peace activist Sameh Habeeb. Robin Yassin-Kassab (qunfuz) entitles his post "Besieged", and links to Sara Roy's essay "If Gaza Falls..." (London Review of Books). And the Guardian post that, Ramzy, a young teacher in Gaza, has made a podcast on an independent student website, MideastYouth.com

Arabic as a Sacred Language

From BBC News:

The highest authority of Sunni Islam, al-Azhar University in Cairo, says it has approved the first interpretation of the Koran by a woman. Sheikh Ali Abdelbaqi Mitwali told the daily al-Masri al-Youm that al-Azhar has approved the interpretation (tafseer) submitted by Kariman Hamza, a former broadcaster. Books in Egypt dealing with the Koran or Islamic tradition have to secure the approval of al-Azhar before publication,

which is a pretty big publishing hurdle. Hamza, a religious broadcaster, has been subject to criticism from religious conservatives for her previous work Rifqan bil-Qawarir, a religious guide for women, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas discusses in "Female Body, Male Gaze" in her book Medicines of the Soul: Female Bodies and Sacred Geographies in a Transnational Islam. But she is also famous as one of the few -- and possibly the first -- veiled woman television presenter. Refreshingly (given the Pope's view of the fixity of binary gender)

Sheikh Mitwali said there was no such thing as a "male" or "female" reading of the holy book and that "what mattered for us was that the interpretation was in line with the text of the sacred Koran and that it did not contradict the rulings of Sharia".

Blogger Bint Battuta in Bahrain picks up a Pakistani blog from Global Voices that has an entertaining take on how Arabic's sacred status as the language of the Quran informs behaviour in Muslim communities outside the Arabic world. As S

ub Corollary of 4-II: Everything has an ‘Al’ behind it. It is ‘Al-Mc Donalds’ and ‘Al Basmati Rice’. If you want, you can call your children ‘Al-Children’ and you would be a better person for it.

demonstrates, this doesn't necessarily relate to fluency in Arabic or a deeper religious or cultural understanding...

So happy al-holidays (and good reading) to all PEN Atlas readers!

Speaking Freely: 60th Anniversary of the UNHCR

It's the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this week, which is being marked by many celebrations -- and, in the blogosphere and media, a number of astute calls to recognise that the Declaration's work is far from done.

As ever, there are also stories that mark the challenges to, and successes of, one of Roosevelt's "four freedoms" enshrined in the UDHR, that of "freedom of speech." Rex Bloomstein's documentary "True Stories: An Independent Mind" screens on More4 on Tuesday 9, the eve of the anniversary (you can watch it online on a PC from Wednesday morning onwards). Bloomstein's interviewees include Burmese comedians the Moustache Brothers, Chinese sex blogger Mu Zimei and Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar, all of whom have been persecuted for expressing their opinions and who engage with Bloomstein in a lively and inspiring conversation about what we are permitted to say, how, and by whom.

In the Egyptian blogosphere, an equally lively conversation tackles the topic from a different angle, as Wikipedia have just launched a version of the site in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic. The site has raised both hopes and hackles: Global Voices has a translation of the debate about local and national identity vs. the region's mutual linguistic heritage, about what counts as 'correct' usage, and how languages evolve despite, rather than because of, imposed rules. As it often does, the blogosphere provides space for a debate about the freedom of speech -- and for realisations as to how that space is limited by technology, access, censorship and political will.

Freedom to Blog?

Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian Readers' Editor, had a comment piece in the paper on Monday about the Free Speech and the Internet conference that took place at Cumberland Lodge last week. English PEN director Jonathan Heawood summed up his experience of the conference as part of the Guardian's multi-authored blog on on the issue. Heawood concludes that he:

came away from the conference convinced that we need to strengthen the international human rights framework if we are to realise the internet's capacity for freedom of speech. For this reason I believe we need an international treaty on the internet – not to encourage censorship, but to underwrite freedom of speech. One contributor to the conference suggested that the internet has "globalised the First Amendment".

Unfortunately, this simply isn't true for bloggers in Iran, Egypt, China and elsewhere who have been imprisoned for expressing their views or transmitting information online. Nor is it true for those of us whose searches are blocked, whose downloads are monitored, and whose postings are subject to "take-down" notices without any right of reply.

He points out that even in the UK and US, where democracy and freedom of speech are supposedly universal rights,

National legislators are struggling to keep up. Where they do create laws on the internet, they often do so badly, or without regard to the consequences. Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 creates an offence out of downloading material which might be useful to a terrorist. It led to the detention of a junior academic at Nottingham University who was legitimately researching terrorism.

The case brought home to (perhaps complacent) UK internet users the extent to which their web use (even on a personal computer, from home) is monitored, for political as well as commercial reasons.

It's a reality that bloggers in the Middle East and China face far more explicitly -- but the internet also gives them a way not only to speak out against censorship, blocking, take-downs, and arrests, but to be heard globally. Global Voices today has statistics on internet use in Egypt from Bloggers Times [Ar], showing (unbelievably) that

the number of internet users in Egypt increased from 650,000 users in 2000 to 9,170,000 users in 2008.

Marwa Rakha, who translates the blog, notes that

One in every three people in the sample [of 1,338 Egyptians 18-35] has a blog.

and that 89% of them are in favour of an internet censorship law, details unspecified.

There's a contrasting view from blogger Khalid in Bahrain, who writes (in Amira Al-Husseini's translation) hopefully that in the blogosphere:

Writing has become without limits, or outside the scope of being limited

. Like Heawood, he believes that

writing today needs a code of conduct, and what is this code? Who will write it? Who will approve it? The government, or the people, or the writers, or the intellectuals, or the clergymen? There will continue to be writings, and these writings will remain outside the restrictions.

We Are All Laila Day: October 19

Amira al Husseini at Global Voices reports on the development of a unique blogging community in Egypt. We Are All Laila [Ar] started in September 2006 as an online conversation between a few women who identified themselves as (and with) Laila, the protagonist of Latifa al-Zayyat's groundbreaking novel The Open Door. al-Zayyat, a leftwing campaigner and distinguished professor of literary studies at Ain-Shams University, wrote The Open Door (al-Bab al-Maftuh) in 1960. As Amal Amireh at al-Jadid notes, like the author's,

Layla’s psychological, social, and political growth takes place in the context of the years from 1946 to 1956 — years that witnessed the revolt against the British and the Palace, the Free Officer’s Revolution of 1952, Jamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and the Israeli-British-French attack that followed.

Amireh continues:

The same novel is now “an impossibility,” al-Zayyat said a few years ago [in the mid 1990s]. When she wrote it she shared with her audience a common language and a common vision. But things have changed. According to her, “roads to salvation are blocked; the common ground of shared values seem to break down into multiple different sets of values according to the varied social strata; the common sensibility and its language is no more; people lacking national unity are divided and subdivided until each is turned into an insular island.” One Egyptian critic recently wrote that his female students don’t see themselves in the heroine of The Open Door. They no longer believe that what Layla achieves by the end of the book is possible for them.

Yet We Are All Laila demonstrates that, ten years later, Laila is once again a role model who offers shared values to a group of Egyptian women connected by the internet, which offers the opportunity for the reclamation and mobilisation of a "common language and a common vision."

On October 19 2008, the bloggers at We Are All Laila will be:

asking specific questions, carefully selected by a few friends, which concern the status of Egyptian girls and women, in particular, and Egyptians, in general. The objective is to develop a dialogue stemming from the responses to better understand ourselves and those around us.

Laila was the writer's dream: a character larger than her novel, who embodies the hopes and thoughts of a generation -- and now she is taking life and shape again from a new generation.

We're Here, We're Queer, We're Writing Proud

Nash Suleiman at Global Voices Online has a great round-up of voices on homosexuality in Lebanon and the Arabic-speaking world. Suleiman draws attention to the Lebanese organisation Helem, but there are other groups, such as ASWAT, the organisation for Palestinian gay women, which has just published its first book -- you can read some the poems by members here. There have been a number of interesting books addressing this question, including Mai Ghoussoub's Imagined Masculinities, Brian Whitaker's Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, and Jarrod Hayes' Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Lebanese-Jordanian novelist and artist, Rabih Alameddine, now resident in the US, has written sensitively and sharply about the travails of being a gay man in the Arabic world, and an Arabic gay man in the US. Palestinian-Canadian poet Trish Salah has re-invented the ghazal form to explore her trans identity.

But, as Peter Cole and Maria Menocal among others have pointed out, there is a long heritage of male-identified love poetry by male writers in the Arabic lyric tradition. In an article on Arabic writers for the Guardian by Ahdaf Soueif, Alaa al-Aswany cites

Abu Nuwas, a gay poet who lived 1,000 years ago, is one of our greatest poets, yet he hasn't been translated, which adds to the assumption that Arab culture is homophobic

. Hala Halim of NYU mentions

Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif's 2006 Awdat al-Almani ila Rushdihi (The German Comes to His Senses) is a fictionalised memoir about the author's collaboration with a gay German writer, Joachim Helfer, through the East-West Divan exchange programme. Setting aside the controversy over the strategy adopted by the German writer in his published response, Al-Daif's memoir is to be lauded for the candour with which it reflects critically on homophobia in the Arab world.

Dar al Saqi published The Others, a novel by Siba Harez (a pseudonym to protect the author) that explores the life of a young lesbian in Saudi Arabia, which will be published in English by Telegram this year. As Suleiman points out while

the presence of homosexuality can be spotted in every country in the region, governments and societies are still intolerant to such life style.

Fiction and poetry have a substantial role to play in changing both grassroots and government opinions -- after all, only ten years ago it was illegal for teachers to talk about queer issues in schools in the UK.

Welcome to the Blogging Revolution

Following the publication of a number of influential blooks from the Middle East, including those by Salam Pax and Riverbend, Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has collected together interviews with bloggers based in repressive regimes in his book The Blogging Revolution, which he's been talking about on SBS Radio Arabic and in today's Guardian. He asserts that citizen journalism and new media publishing can literally change the world, by providing freedom of information from within countries where media is closely state-controlled, and can allow internet users around the world to make connections with one another.

With the Online World Atlas, PEN hopes to become part of that revolution -- not least because good-news stories like Loewenstein's are balanced by increasingly frequent site closures and arrests of bloggers such as Moroccan Mohammed Erraji. The blogging revolution - like all change - needs _you_: send us links to news stories, new publications, great blogs, good books and interesting discussions.

As Loewenstein points out, "Allowing people to speak and write for themselves without a western filter is one of the triumphs of blogging. The online culture, disorganised and disjointed in its aims, is unlike that of any previous social movement." Like international blog collector sites Global Voices and The Literary Saloon, or Syrian aggregator al-mudawen, the World Atlas blog collects some of the new voices being heard in this fertile landscape -- and we want you to add yours.